4 Pillars of a Successful Video Marketing Strategy

4 Pillars of a Successful Video Marketing Strategy

Video content is the key to getting your messages heard. It doesn’t matter whether you’re raising funds, recruiting volunteers, or marketing products. The numbers don’t lie. Site pages, social media posts, and other digital content gets more views and more responses when you make visual content part of the plan. To get the best results from your video content you need to follow a solid strategy.

What does it take to get a video marketing strategy that leads to success? Great video content takes clear planning and creative thinking. But it also takes time and money. A video marketing strategy that identifies SMART goals, establishes a budget, and commits to a timeline can be the difference between mediocre results and moving the needle.

Nonprofit organizations and mission-driven businesses need video content to compete in the digital marketplace. Getting great video content takes an investment—so, it’s important to make sure you do all that you can to get positive returns. Solid video marketing strategies lay the foundation of your video marketing program from long-term campaigns to individual production projects.

You Need Video Content In Your Marketing Program

Over the past three or four years, video content has shifted from being a tactic in the marketing toolkit (something nice to have in the mix)—to the core of marketing efforts that get results. Video is better at getting an audience’s attention and sparking their interest. Video is more entertaining. Video is better at converting desire into action.

Video Has Become The Standard Because It Gets Results

According to Hubspot, studies show that having video on a landing page will increase conversion rates by more than 80%. The same study reveals that just a mention of the word “video” in an email subject line will boost open rates by almost 20%. On the other side of things, consumer research shows that 90% of customers said videos had helped them make a buying decision.

Video Is The Gold Standard for Marketing ROI

Video Helps You Connect With Audiences, Convert Calls To Action, and Care For Supporters

The folks at Vidyard believe that video content can be an effective way to pursue both revenue-based goals and brand-building goals.

They outline the following big-picture goals to show how video content can make a big impact on your organization’s marketing results.

• Brand Awareness: This is usually tracked by measuring brand recall and recognition. It can also include data on the frequency and quality of mentions or the number of times a video is viewed.

• Demand Generation and Conversion: This can be measured by monitoring your sales force’s lead count, movement in conversion rates, or other influences on sales opportunities and pipeline generation.

• Viewer Engagement: Viewer engagement is an important indicator of both lead generation and customer retention. When viewer engagement is high for qualified leads and existing customers, your video content is helping to nurture relationships.

Set Goals Based On What Video Content Does Well

Video content is exceptionally effective at informing, educating, and entertaining audiences. Something else video does better than any other type of content is making audiences feel included even when they can’t attend an event or activity.

Sumo.com has shown that audiences remember 65% of the information when relevant visual images are part of the message. That’s a big improvement over the 10% that audiences remember when there are no visuals present.

If a year of quarantine has taught us anything about event planning, it is that virtual events can get the job done. On the Guidebook blog, Jackie Lynch has argued that virtual events are effective because:

1.      They meet people where they are

2.      They offer flexible attendance

3.      They lower financial commitments

4.      They offer higher sponsorship benefits

5.      They are less expensive to host

Live-streaming and using scripted videos as part of the programming for a virtual event are just a couple of the ways that your video marketing strategy can help you include audiences in what you do.

How To Build A Strategy That Can Guide Your Organization’s Video Marketing Program

It doesn’t matter whether you’re planning for a few videos each year or a few videos each week. It doesn’t matter whether your budget is in the hundreds or the hundreds-of-thousands. It doesn’t matter what type of videos you need, the audiences you hope to reach, or what you want to see happen as a result. You need a video strategy to align all of your efforts and focus them on the goals you’re pursuing.

A video marketing strategy is the best way to identify opportunities to deploy video content in support of your organization’s marketing funnel. It’s essential to outlining, clarifying, and managing the workflow processes that go into getting things done. It’s a great tool for identifying the types of video messaging you need and discovering opportunities that you’ve been missing.

It all starts with a solid foundation. That foundation should include S.M.A.R.T. Goals, a budget to fund video content production, a calendar to keep projects on track, and an approach to marketing analytics that will measure, test, and optimize your video marketing campaigns.

The 4 Pillars Of Your Video Marketing Strategy

Whether you’re just thinking about dipping your toes into the water or you’ve been using video content in your marketing campaigns for a while, it’s always a good idea to re-evaluate the basics before you start building something new. Goals, Budget, Timeline, and Analytics form the solid foundation that will support your future video marketing success.

Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals For Your Video Marketing Strategy

Strategic thinking is the precursor to successful work. A documented marketing strategy is the foundation to achieving the goals that you’ve set for your organization. Having a specific strategy for your video marketing programs is a good way to make sure the work you do with video content aligns with the big-picture goals that you’ve set.

A strategy that sets S.M.A.R.T. goals is a practical and actionable pathway to follow as you progress toward your goals. A strategy that lacks clarity, accountability, and relevance isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on.

So, what are S.M.A.R.T. Goals?

• Specific: Be specific about what you want to accomplish. You want “more views”? Okay, how many more?

• Measurable: You need to identify how you will measure and track the progress you make toward your goals.

• Attainable: A goal that is too easy to achieve isn’t worth pursuing as a long-term strategic goal. One that can’t be accomplished with the resources you’re able to allocate will undermine the whole strategy.

• Relevant: The goals you set should align with your overall objectives. If you’re running a fundraising campaign, the goals should measure progress toward a fully-funded program.

• Time-Bound: “We’ll get there someday” doesn’t motivate consistent progress the same way that a 30-, 60-, or 90-day window of opportunity will.

When you set S.M.A.R.T. goals for your video marketing strategy, remember to include elements that reflect the steps in your marketing funnel, appeal to different segments of your audience, and optimize content for all of the different platforms and channels you use for marketing.

Set A Budget That Makes Your Goals Attainable

It’s hardly fair that well-known brands like Apple and Facebook have billions to spend on video content when they already enjoy massive brand awareness. Your organization should be spending more on video this year than it did last year. Maybe you didn’t spend anything and a couple hundred dollars would technically be more than last year.

When you’re setting a budget for video content, it’s important to think of it as an investment in your broader goals and objectives. You shouldn’t spend thousands of dollars on videos just because everybody is doing it. You should spend what you need to spend to get content of the quality and quantity you require to make your marketing programs work.

There are a lot of factors that will influence your video marketing budget. That means that you’ll have to make decisions about what you’re going to do and how you’re going to get it done. Will you produce video content in-house or work with an agency? How much content will you need and how much post-production and promotion work will it take to achieve optimal returns on your investment?

Timelines Matter Because Quality Content Takes Time But It Shouldn’t Take Forever

If you haven’t done much video marketing work in the past, you might not realize how important it is to get started early. Trying to create effective video content overnight sets your organization up for failure. Plan ahead to give everyone involved in the project the time they need to do their best work without sleepless nights spent racing to meet a deadline.

The folks at Lemonlight recommend breaking your video projects down into three phases and building out the schedule in each phase to reflect the work that needs to get done.

·        Phase One: Strategy

In this phase you set the goals for the project and establish a budget and a timeline. It’s also a good time to begin the creative process that will result in the core messaging of the video. In most instances, you should allow up to a month for this phase of the project.

·        Phase Two: Production

In the second phase of the project, you’ll transition into creative planning and pursue a storyboard for the video project. This part of the production phase can require up to two weeks to produce what you need. Pre-production includes technical, physical, and creative aspects of the project. It involves selecting locations and making sure you have the equipment needed to shoot there and creative ideas for making the most of them. Pre-Production can take 2-3 weeks. Production and post-production take time too and it’s a good idea to plan for another 2-3 weeks.

·        Phase Three: Distribution

The work doesn’t end when you post the video to your site or social media profile. Distribution and promotion of your video should work owned, earned, and paid media to ensure the video has the support it needs to do the work you expect from it. It’s a good idea to plan on providing distribution and promotion support for 3 weeks to a month after you approve the final product.

Marketing Analytics Make Sure You’re Getting The Most of Each Video and Get Better Over Time

Measure the impact of your organization’s videos across a variety of performance indicators. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all provide users with the ability to analyze the performance of specific video posts. Google Analytics can help you track the boost video marketing gives to your site’s SEO scores. Customer or donor data tell you whether video performance translates to real impact.

Social Media has been a boon to small businesses and growing nonprofits because it gives them owned media platforms—where connecting with audiences doesn’t have to cost anything more than sweat equity. At the same time, free marketing can’t be effective if you treat it like it’s cheap.

Factor in the staff hours and organizational resources that go into making and managing video marketing and you quickly realize that video marketing on social media isn’t free. That’s okay as long as you continue to treat the marketing work you do there as an investment and use data to ensure that you’re doing what you need to do to get a return on your investment.

20 Questions To Get You Started On Your Video Marketing Strategy

If you’re having trouble turning the idea of a video marketing strategy into something specific to your organization’s needs, resources, brand, and audience—ask yourself the following questions and use your answers to start filling in the blanks.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

1.      What are your organization’s marketing goals?

2.      How can you use video to help achieve those goals?

3.      What do you want videos to do?

a.      Inform

b.      Educate

c.      Entertain

d.      Include

4.      Who is the audience for your videos?

a.      People who are unaware of the problem you’re working to solve

b.      People who know the problem exists but don’t know how to solve it

c.      People who know the solution but don’t know your organization

d.      People who know your organization and have supported your mission in the past

5.      What types of videos will you make?

a.      Educational

b.      Behind-the-Scenes

c.      Interviews

d.      Entertainment

e.      Testimonials

f.       Demonstrations

g.      Brand Stories

h.      Events

i.       How-To or Explainer

Setting A Budget

1.      How much can/should/will you spend on video production this Fiscal Year?

2.      Will you purchase equipment?

3.      Will you use a video production company?

4.      Does internal staff have the skills and resources to do the work you have planned?

5.      Will you pay to boost videos on social media platforms?

Establishing A Timeline

1.      Do you have a content calendar?

2.      Does your content calendar include all of your social media platforms and other channels?

3.      What dates on your content calendar call for video content?

4.      When should you start a video project to have it ready by the date when you’ll need it?

5.      How can you use post-production to reuse and recycle quality content to fill your calendar?

Measuring Your Progress

1.      How did you plan to measure your S.M.A.R.T. Goals?

2.      How often will you analyze and review the data?

3.      Who will be responsible for analyzing the performance of your video marketing plan?

4.      Are you tracking all of your social media platforms?

5.      Do you have a process for correcting things that aren’t working?

Argonaut Productions Helps Build and Execute Successful Video Marketing Strategies

Video strategy and video creation are the core of what Argonaut Productions does to help new customers create a marketing campaign that will Amplify Their Mission.

Our Discovery Process is a proven approach to identifying your organization’s core values, developing a customized video marketing strategy, and road mapping your next video project.

Our Design Phase guides your organization through pre-production and production to arrive at finished videos that are ready to get you the attention you deserve.

Our Delivery Phase helps to ensure that promotion and distribution go off without a hitch. We can even help you track and measure data and rework videos to build improved performance for your marketing plan.