How do you formulate a video marketing strategy?

 A key consideration for any modern business, visual content can be a fantastic way to raise the profile and public awareness of your service or product. Whether you are planning for a one-off promotion or a sustained campaign, properly formulating your marketing approach is essential when it comes to enjoying sustainable, attainable success. 

So, how do you create a video marketing strategy and what value can a professional team add to your planning?

What is video marketing?

An essential part of promotion, video marketing uses visual imagery in a range of formats to tell a story or market your product or service. This can include short-form advertisements, tutorials, interviews, or long-form pieces designed to consolidate your brand identity and achieve your promotional goals.

As much of an art as a science, carrying out the right marketing and capturing the right content for your brand requires extensive technical and creative skill. Working with an experienced, effective team can allow you to achieve your strategic objectives and ensure that any material produced is not only fit-for-purpose, but elevates the identity of your product, business, or service to another level.

What is a video marketing strategy?

A roadmap to success, your overall video marketing strategy takes you all the way from generating your original idea or concept for your visual materials to following up on a successfully deployed campaign. Like any management approach, this requires significant, expertise and oversight to pull off successfully – with a well-designed plan allowing you to envision, critique, and carry out a step-by-step plan to produce and deliver your visual materials.

However, while there are many templates and walkthroughs for creating one available online – things can often go awry when the rubber hits the road. Finding a provider can help reduce the stress, resource expenditures, and time involved with creating a plan and executing your vision.

This makes it essential to understand what is required and source the right team for your project. 

What steps are involved?

While it’s always advisable to seek out professional help, it’s essential that you have a firm understanding of just what is involved in the creation of a video marketing strategy. This includes how to apply techniques and tricks that can help ensure that complications are minimised, and unavoidable problems are quickly resolved. 

Though an approach to video marketing strategy will change from provider to provider, all plans will step through and include the following elements. Starting with-

1. Goal Setting: If you want to execute your plan successfully, it is important that all parties involved agree on a key strategy and set clear, definable, and measurable goals.

This should involve all parties settling on quantifiable goals for brand identity, income, and outreach – allowing you to track your success and capture metrics that can help guide future engagements. When it comes to revenue, priority should be given to consumption of the product or service in question – either through an increase in enquiries or sales of your product. Income goals should include validated, attainable targets and outreach can involve capturing key metrics about site engagement from respondents.

These can then be broken down into specific, timebound segments, but emphasis should always be placed on long-term value. The power of the internet allows video content to be repurposed and act as a constant presence through your social media channels and platforms. This can help position you for future successes, capture insight from your audience, and a wealth of other ‘soft’ goals. 

Some key goals can include raising awareness of your business brand, converting viewers in your sales funnel, or prompting other kinds of engagement that are right for your product. These should all be based around knowing more about your audience and validating your understanding of them, with research taking place to understand-

- Who your proposed audience are

- What motivates them to engage with your product or service

- How these drivers can be folded into your approach and inform your overall marketing strategy

2. Content Management: Once you have a grasp of your overall goals and how they relate to your audience, it is time to agree what kind of content will best achieve these goals. While many individuals may think that all promotional or marketing videos are the same – this could not be further from the truth.

During this step, you work to determine the format of your material – whether this is through instructional ‘how to’ content, short vignettes that capture the essence of your brand,or snappy adverts that get to the point and are eminently sharable. 

In addition, it’s important to detail key points that need to be discussed or featured in the project – whether these are directly related to your brand, focus on utility for the viewer, or – ideally – act as a combination of both. Carrying out this research will help you get a better sense of what your competitors are doing, which elements of their approach are so effective, and how to build these elements into your approach.

Once this research is complete, you should better understand-

- Which format suits your project best

- What material you want to cover and the best way of doing so for your brand

- What your audience responds to and how to engage with them most effectively.

3. Production Co-Ordination: With your project planned and critiqued, the next step is determining how you will go about producing your material. This should involve balancing three key considerations – cost, time, and quality. As a general rule of thumb, an insufficiently funded or planned project will only be able to provide two of the three, making it vital to ensure that you properly assess your project timeframe, your available budget, and the final quality of your finished video. 

This makes it essential to understand how the video will be created and who will be producing it. If you plan to create the material yourself, this allows you full control over the process and potentially helps cut through some of the red tape involved with video production. However, it is important to understand your genuine internal capacity to create content – do you have the equipment, expertise, and staff on hand to produce materials of consistent quality?

If this is too much for your internal teams, it’s potentially worth outsourcing your work to external providers to ensure that your vision is captured. While this may be more expensive than carrying out production tasks yourself, this can allow you to deal with key decisions – preventing you from being bogged down in a range of technical and administrative issues. While this can be more costly than producing material internally, the degree of insight and expertise provided by a reliable team will allow you to greatly improve the quality of your end product and help provide expert guidance when it is truly needed most.

By the time you have finished, it is important that you have decided-

- Whether you will be producing the content internally or externally

- Key obstacles in your path that will need to be addressed

- A baseline for the time spent, level of quality, and budget for the work.

4. Hook Generation: With the major technical decisions locked down, it is important to take a more detailed look at the creative and mechanical aspects of your production. This should include specific elements to add to your video content that encourage viewers to engage with your material and how it will be distributed when you have finished producing the content. 

In simple terms, your content should be considered ‘moreish’ and your ideas condensed into the clearest, most engaging frame possible; leaving audiences wanting to learn or see more about your specific product. This can take the form of tutorials, include amusing clips and skits, and leave viewers wanting to share or show your content to friends and family. Determining what this factor is in your product is a key to success and, while there is no one size fits all solution, taking the time to review other examples can help you isolate the elements you want to add to your own work.

Once this is decided on, this can be reviewed in the light of your work to date and allow you to kick-start ideas for your eventual designing process, enabling you to reach out to your audience and engage with ease.

Once you have identified your process, you should have-

- A solid ‘hook’ that can keep viewers engaged

- An understanding of how this can be deployed in your campaign in the short and long-term

- Ideas about how this can be practically shown in your project

5. Deployment: At this point, your strategy should have agreed on your format, provider, and approach. All that is left is determining how you would like to publish and release your content. 

These can range from social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and more. Or you can choose more conventional channels such as YouTube, PPC advertising, or other options. No matter the decisions that you make, it is vitally important to ensure that the platform you choose allows for metricisation and extensive data capture. This allows you to better understand the needs of your audience and determine how successful your overall project was.

This can also include reaching out to key influencers or striking up a partnership with known celebrities – allowing them to showcase their skillset or identity in a way that aligns with your work. As with most creative elements in this process, there is no hard and fast rule that dictates who you should approach. However, each person should be chosen with care to ensure that their background and audience fully matches with your unique brand.

Once you have settled on your deployment approach, you should be able to-

- Know which platform will host your content

- What partnerships or creative approaches are appropriate

- Ensure that your decisions will not reflect negatively on your brand and business

What else should I know?

Of course, any project will require extensive oversight and project management – something that becomes essential if you choose to carry out your work in-house. However, some common speedbumps do pop up time and time again.

So, if you are planning your video and marketing strategy, make sure that you ask the following questions-

Q: Which team members are responsible for the creative approach and how are changes and suggestions captured?

Q: Who creates scripts and what standardised format do they follow?

Q: Who is in charge of budgeting and what degree of overspend is validated in case of emergency or complications?

Q: Who carries the ‘rubber stamp’ for approvals and in what way can they be contacted?

Q: How are stakeholders contacted and what degree of say do they have when it comes to practical content production?

Q: What is the timeframe for the project and how has that estimate been provided?

Q: If an outside partner is used to produce the video, what does their current portfolio involve and what avenues are in place for feedback and validation?

Q: What is the core message that the content needs to get across? 

What next?

If you want to learn more about how deploying a video marketing strategy can help add value to your outreach, our team at Eight Engines are here to help. With many years’ experience, we work with your in-house teams to ensure the deployment of a quality, fit-for-purpose video marketing strategy that suits your professional needs.