Video marketing. It's like going to the doctor. We all know we should do it, but it's scary and hard, so we put it off.
More often than not, no one on your team actually wants to be in front of a camera. Second, where do you even start? The struggle is real.
While I can't help you with the first problem, I do have a 10-step solution to the second!
Video marketing is the future of both inbound marketing and content marketing. There's simply no way around it, and these stats prove it:
- 88% of people would like to see more videos from brands.
- Almost 93% of brands say they got new customers due to the videos posted on their social media accounts.
- 74% of marketers say that videos have better numbers regarding ROI than simple static images video.
- 66% of people said they’d prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service.
Video stats courtesy of Explain Ninja
In fact, YouTube is second only to Google as a search engine. People love video, and they consume it with a voracious appetite. If you want your company to stand out in today's marketing world, video needs to be in your marketing and sales plans.
Now that we've covered why video marketing is so important, let's talk about how you go about starting that video marketing strategy.
10 Steps to Starting A Video Content Strategy for Marketing:
- Establish your goals
- Identify your audience
- Settle on a budget
- Decide how you'll make videos
- Develop a video marketing content calendar
- Determine your promotion platform(s)
- Identify key metrics to measure success
- Develop a video launch checklist
- Launch your first video!
- Analyze & optimize
04. Decide how you'll make your videos
As I was saying — your budget will dictate how you make those videos. Whether you're filming on your phone or coordinating with a video production company, it's important to make a decision.
This decision helps determine your process.
For example:
If you go with a video production company
- You'll need to coordinate with them to determine a schedule.
- You're probably best off batch-producing a few videos at a time when you have the professional crew you need on-site.
- You'll need to establish a timeline for production, editing, and promotion.
- You'll need to determine a location.
- And you'll have to work with the production company to work through your topics, storyboarding, and more.
If you go with in-house video production
- You'll have less upfront planning to do, but you'll still have to decide who will be in your videos, or if you're planning to do animated videos that feature a voiceover or music background rather than live-action.
- You can take a more relaxed approach to schedule and batch production, but you will still have to identify which videos you want to film, and who will be responsible for them.
- You'll need to determine who on your team can handle the editing.
Either way you go is great! Some teams even pick both, choosing a video production company for high-value videos like case studies and client testimonials, and then having the internal team handle more natural, short-form videos made for social media.
05. Develop a video content strategy calendar
At this point, you've done all of the setting up. Now it's time to get down to the strategy part of your video marketing strategy.
Why a content calendar?
Because one of the easiest, most common traps for any company to fall into is the one-and-done trap.
You decide you're going to prioritize video marketing, you get your team together, make one video, and then it never sees the light of day. Or, you get that one video out, but never have anything to follow it up with.
A video marketing strategy content calendar helps you get all of the hard work out of the way first, and it puts your team on a clear, defined schedule for both production and promotion.
If you're new to video marketing, check out this example of a video marketing strategy content calendar.
This is what the Evenbound team uses to build out our strategy and keep ourselves accountable to a timeline.
We focus on identifying:
- The keyword the video will be focused on
- Key details associated with each video
- An outline that details the general points we want to include
- Who will be in or responsible for the video
- Which persona the video will be targeted towards
- And maybe most importantly, when we plan to get that video done
Of course, no content calendar is 100% set in stone. We change ours often. But, having the content calendar means we have a bank of video strategy topics that are already vetted, prioritized, and ready to go.
Having a content calendar is a really helpful tool that keeps your company out of the "paralysis by analysis" state where nothing actually gets done.
We recommend you build your video marketing strategy content calendar out for at least a quarter. You can build it out further, but remember that the longer your content calendar gets, the less relevant some of your later topics could be by the time you get to them.
08. Develop a video launch checklist
Just like business blogging, your content is only as good as your promotion. If a video is published in the YouTube forest, how do you make people see it?
Promotion.
Video promotion includes everything from the minute you hit the publish button to sharing it on your social platforms and beyond. I include key steps like optimizing your video title and description, creating a custom thumbnail, writing a transcript, and even developing an ad campaign around that new video in the promotion step.
All of that is a lot to keep track of.
That's why the Evenbound team uses a video launch checklist.
This handy little checklist helps us keep track of every key action we need to take once a video is launched. It helps us get the right eyes on our videos as soon as possible, and it also helps ensure we're maximizing the potential of every single video we produce.
Your video launch checklist doesn't have to look like ours, but you should develop one that helps your team keep track of the essential actions to take once you publish a video.
