Video Strategy? You’ve surely heard this combination of words before. Probably in the context of a “video marketing strategy.” But what really is it and – better yet – how do you build one?
You might have a vague idea that “video strategy” involves research and marketing. Meticulous planning to pitch a given video directly to your ideal consumer. Although these things do come in to play when developing a video’s strategy, here’s a simple definition:
Video Strategy: Determining the optimal way to create & publish a video in order to push it to your preferred audience.
Successful video strategies involve many things, often great video content. However, content is only a small piece of the pie. This article will focus on how your video is received (and how to plan it well).
Know Your Audience
A cliché line, it’s crucial to “know your audience.” In other words, understand who you’re marketing to – who you’re creating a video for. Why and how does your product or service solve a problem for your ideal buyer? How does it assist them? Who is your ideal buyer?
Not only will drilling into this help you effectively communicate through your video, but it will also help you speak directly to the people that need to hear you.
Determine Your End Goal
Next, before you can start building out your plan, you must understand the overall strategy of your business. How do you plan to connect with consumers? YouTube ads? TV Commercials? Articles? Seriously consider this.
Is your goal to inspire potential consumers? To intrigue them? Simply to inform them? Are you looking to build a long-term product with a loyal consumer base? Are you hoping to fix a problem for a select few buyers? Figure out what your mission is and how video will help you achieve that. Feel free to browse some of our other blogs for inspiration!
Craft Your Customer Journey
At what point in a potential buyer’s life are you hoping to bump into them? Do you envision your customer running across your video while browsing Facebook? Do you expect them to be watching cat videos when your ad pops up? Really imagine this. This is where you’re beginning to develop your entrance into the customer journey.
Business involves planning – designing tactics that will help you achieve your end goals. In the same way, you must craft a careful outline of your ideal customer’s journey. You need to determine what your customer will experience and how. Once you start thinking about this, you’ll get a clearer idea of how you’re going to push your video to your preferred audience.
Determine what “state” you expect to encounter your buyer in. Are they disillusioned with another product? Are they indifferent or unaware of how your service could help them? Are you marketing to them for the first time or have they already bought your product? Answer these questions to understand where and how you fit in.
Social Trends
Depending on your ideal buyer, there may be information that you can get as to their typical habits or interests. Once you have an idea of your customer journey, you’ll know that your video will play during a golf tournament, for example. The point: use social analytics to capitalize on trends or interests, depending on your crowd. There’s plenty of other articles that you can find detailing something like this, so I won’t go into it further.
Extend An Invitation
Finally, once your ideal customer has run across your product or service, what do you want them to do? What’s the ultimate goal of your video? After watching, should your buyer simply be more informed or should they immediately want to learn more? Whatever it is, you should create a way to help your customer do that thing. Oftentimes, this is called a “call to action.” Look that up if you don’t know where to start.
Developing a video strategy is very important to bringing your service or product to your ideal consumer. If you want them to engage with you, you’ll need to think through this. When you’re researching and constructing your plan, keep in mind that you are offering something that will help someone – something that will improve their living in some way. With that, we wish you luck as you continue to build and expand your usage of video!