According to Crunchtime Media, your audience goes through over 50% of their decision making process on their own. So, if you want someone to buy (into) your brand or your product, you need to do everything possible to help make their experience with you a positive one. Part of that strategy nowadays includes video content, it’s a given in today’s world. However, video can be expensive and is usually accompanied by scary expectations you need to nail to keep your boss happy.
The good news is you don’t need to panic. That promotion, pay rise or personal goal is within reach, it simply boils down to a solid plan and in the below article, I run through how to create one:
1. What are your objectives with video in the first place?
Co-Schedule's research found that marketers who set goals are 429% more likely to report success than those who don’t and guess what, with video, it should be no different. It might be because you want to raise awareness about your brand, turn prospects into leads or actually convert more people into customers. Whatever your business needs are with video, get them down because these are the metrics you should be referring back to when planning and then measuring the success of your content.
2. Who are you speaking to?
As the world-famous marketer Seth Godin says, “everyone is not your customer!”. So can you clearly define whom you’re trying to talk to? It may be your investors, customers, staff, even your postman (weird, but true). Whoever it is though, try to work out what their challenges and desires are and ultimately why they are going to want to watch your videos.
Top tip from us: Collecting digital data is always useful (we like to use Google keywords and trends for our video strategies), however if you want to get a feel for what people want, why don't you ask them? I'm talking about face to face conversations or phone calls, not just surveys. We did this to amazing effect recently with the Mayor Of London's office as part of their community engagement project for the "City Of The West". Talking to over 30 local community members as part of our research, our chats formed the foundation of a three part content series that created a much more inclusive dialogue. Extremely powerful stuff:
3. What content should you actually be producing?
Typically it takes 6-8 pieces of content to generate a sales lead (Salesforce), let alone a sale. So just making a 30" TV spot or “viral” won’t cut the mustard (shock horror). Our advice- consider every stage of your audience’s journey when planning your video content. We call them:
The “catch my attention” stage: What will you do to grab my attention? Well, the good news is, they don’t have to be out of this world virals, they can be fun personal stories, educational documentaries or even how to videos. The key is to make me feel you care about my needs and get me to want to learn more about your business. Basically don't make it feel “salesy”. Kinda like this article ;)
The “convince me to care” stage: So, you’ve grabbed my attention, I want to learn more about you. But how can I trust you’re right for me? This is where more specific product explainers or stories about your team come into play. You can absolutely put a strong call to action at the end to drive that purchase decision forward but the trick at this stage is to still create an educational or entertaining feel to the film.
The “make me stay” stage: You’ve got the viewer a click away from getting the action you initially wanted, but to see it over the line think about video content that could help resolve any final niggles or questions that person has. It could be a case study, client testimonial, FAQ videos or even videos that literally explain what to expect next. The great thing here is you’re creating content that pre-empts doubts and queries going through the viewers' mind AND drives further positive intent for clients you already have who may think of these questions after purchase.
4. When should you be releasing it?
The CMI came out with a crazy stat recently: Two-thirds of B2B Marketers without a content marketing strategy are creating more content now than they did in the previous year. You don’t need to be that person! Get a Flipchart or whiteboard and plot out the months of the year. Then, underneath it map out the following:
⁃ Big company announcements
⁃ New product launch dates
⁃ Important retail calendar events
⁃ Industry calendar events
Call me a geek, but at this stage I get all giddy because you can start seeing all your work and planning fall into place.
5. What should you spend?
OK, this is always the elephant in the room and unfortunately, there's no magic number I can tell you as no two budgets are alike and it’s dangerous for me to claim you need £X,000 to do things properly. BUT what I would say is broadly speaking, you should be looking at splitting your production budget as follows*:
“Convince me to care”- 60% of the budget
“OK I’m interested”- 25% of the budget
“How do I know you’re right?”- 15% of the budget
*this doesn’t include media spend…soz.
And although there are many variables to consider when putting budgets together, to get max value out of your partners, remember the following:
Shoot days - Can you shoot multiple pieces of content at the same time? This means you can maximise time on set, bulk buy kit and crew and save yourself money in the process.
Licenses - Do you know where the content needs to go? Ads that will be used as pre-roll or content with paid media spend or for broadcast/VOD will usually command pricier licenses for talent, music and other elements so make sure you’ve thought about this.
Additional content - What else can you shoot on set? Maybe behind the scenes content, cutdowns for social, stills. Nowadays it’s easy to organise and means you get more bang for your buck so if your content partner isn’t offering it, they should.
Ok, so in summary. Please don’t panic about how you are going to map out this year with video. When you break it down, the tools above are common sense and anyone who claims to be a marketer should be able to use them. That all said, it's a big process so if you figure you need help, a two-hour workshop with myself and the Mattr team is only a phone call or email away!
Make it matter this year.