Last week, our Partner & VP Chris Vaglio, presented a video marketing seminar on Video Marketing: How to Create an Effective and Engaging Video Content Strategy, in partnership with the NJ Ad Club.
In this video marketing seminar, Chris discussed how to create an effective and efficient video content strategy, by reviewing three key parts of the process: Strategy, Production and Distribution. These three components helps us create video, but also create the right video for businesses and brands.
Our audience – comprised of advertising and marketing specialists, business owners, creatives and more – became quite engaged in the seminar, bringing a great amount insight to the topic. Some shared their experiences in how they developed strategies, while others asked some great questions.
Table of Contents
ToggleRead on below to see 5 key takeaways, observations or questions from our video marketing seminar:
1. Helping clients understand the importance of video is always needed. How do we continue to educate?
Using video as a sales, communication, marketing or advertising tool is nothing new, but there are still pockets of the population that still have not used it or have not found a video production or creative agency to help create video in an effective or efficient way. Couple this with the fact that digital and mobile technology and trends change rapidly, and it can be difficult to keep up.
Sharing knowledge is an effective way for us to help people grow and expand their own personal power and the power of their business. Knowledge is power, and nothing keeps a person (or business) down like being overwhelmed by so much information, and so many sources for information!
To help empower businesses and marketers we regularly research, gather or create content that will be relevant and valuable to our clients, helping them receive valuable information via a simple monthly email list or visit to our blog, not to mention seminars such as this recent one!
2. Creating a single video can be a challenge for some people, let alone several videos. How can we help people feel comfortable in doing this?
A great analogy for this idea is to compare it to preparing to cook a meal (or meals).
Would you drive to your grocery store five times to cook five separate meals? Or, would you go to the grocery store once, and get everything you need to cook for the week? Think about how much gas, mileage, and time is saved by preparing one big list and making one trip.
Better yet, if you select ingredients to use in multiple meals (veggies for a taco or stir fry dinner, a lunch salad, and for snacks) you are being very efficient with what you’ve bought, making your items apply to various times and needs.
“Video” can be strategically multi-purposed and applied in a similar way, and experienced specialists can guide your way.
3. Relating to the meal-prep example above, how can we help marketers understand how video can be used more efficiently?
I’d like to address a commonly confusing thing that happens when talking about video. All of us tend to use the word “video” in a couple different ways:
First, we often say “video” meaning one specific video. One tangible file that can be played and viewed. One deliverable asset or item, as in: we made a testimonial video. But, we also say “video” to mean “footage”. You filmed for 6 hours and you have a ton of video (footage). Now, you can take that and make any number of final video files.
Grey Sky Films’ efficient approach identifies goals throughout the organization, in the four main pillars that contribute to company success: Brand Image, Marketing, Sales and Operations.
By going through a discovery process with our clients, and looking at their business-wide goals as well as methods of distribution, we create the strategy that helps us decide what types of videos to create, how we’re going to create them and how they’ll be used.
4. How are companies these days using their video footage? How many ways are there to use it?
There are so many ways to utilize footage, it all just depends on what goals you’re trying to achieve, and in what ways you plan to share your videos with potential viewers: on your website, social media pages, via video ads or some other method of distribution.
Consider these three different examples of videos:
- A video to introduce your brand and attract new customers,
- A video to educate interested consumers on a specific product or service, and
- A video to recruit or train new employees.
Each of these videos has its own goal, intended target audience and likely a different method of distribution (how it gets seen by that target audience).
If you’d like to learn about more types of video, contact us and we’ll send you the Grey Sky Films Guide To The Many Types of Video.
5. Once videos are produced and distributed how do we know they’re working as intended?
This is a great question for a couple of different reasons:
- It’s important to be able to monitor and measure the performance of your video so that you can continue to tweak, update and optimize it, but also so that you can show some idea of how your investment is working for you.
- It’s also important to know which specific stats to be looking at in order to evaluate performance specific to your intended goal. More on this below…
There are many options for distribution, ranging from personally emailing a link to the video to someone to purchasing video ad placement on various website or social media platforms. There are also many options for video hosting (where your video file is held, being watched from, where stats and analytics can be seen by you).
It’s important to decide up front which analytics and KPI’s (key performance indicators) will be monitored for your specific video. For a video designed for expanding brand awareness you’ll want to evaluate KPI’s such as “view count”. However, for a video designed to explain a service or process you’ll want to actually see how much of a video is being viewed, and what parts are of most interest to the viewers.
Here is a chart* that helps break down intended goals and KPI’s related to those goals:
There’s so much additional information we covered in the seminar that these tips only touch on what it takes to create an effective and efficient video marketing strategy.
If you’d like to attend a future seminar or learning event, join our email list or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn!
And, if you want to know more about strategically partnering with us to maximize your company’s or client’s video production and video marketing efforts, Contact us here!
*Chart re-interpreted from this Google Think article.