How to create your video strategy?

Why video strategy matters?

Video strategy matters for the same reason business strategy matters. If your business model has business goals that are supported by strategies to achieve them, then building a video strategy into your overall business and marketing strategy is necessary.

If you don’t believe in business strategies but are making it big time anyway then a) I don’t believe you b) you might not need a video strategy.

Why your video strategy matters?

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” — Michael Porter

Customer is king and customer wants more content. Customer wants personalized content. Customer wants entertaining content. Customer wants the right content at the right time. And the customer wants her content in video.

At the same time you want your content to be unique to your brand. Your content should present your value proposition clearly but in a manner that connects with your customer. You should be trustworthy but not too pushy. You want your content to talk to your ideal and existing customers, and organically drop non interesting customers out.

This is why your video strategy matters. Based on all the things listed above - what your customer wants, what your brand is and what your strategic goals are - you should only create the video content your business goals require.

To create the exact best content for you - you need a video strategy to know what, when and how to create and distribute your videos.

Especially in these days it’s tempting to create as much video for video’s sake, but do not be mistaken, bad video content is not only badly spent marketing money but also bad branding. You gotta choose and build your videos carefully based on your strategy.

Video strategy framework

As for any proper strategy, we shall go with a framework to build the ideal video strategy for our unique dreams and challenges.

Google has developed a programming strategy for marketers to optimise their YouTube channels, but this strategy can easily be implemented across not only other digital channels but physical channels such as events and meetings as well. The name of this framework is “Hero, Hub, Help”.

As the name implies, the idea behind is to leverage your videos into three different types based on your business goal - and where your customer is in their customer journey.

Hero - Go big but niche

Purpose

• Get massive awareness
• Set brand tone

Frequency

• Once or twice a year

Content types

• Brand films
• Major product launches

How to get it right

• This is where you broadcast to the world what your brand is and what value you bring to your customers. Hero video contents should be planned out with extra care, and crafted with attention to smallest details to make it unique to your brand.
• Here’s your chance to be bold and create value to your customers - entertain but help them at the same time. Please no matter how conservative your industry might be, stand out and be yourself. That’s the way to win with hero content.
• Larger production and advertising budgets for hero content are advised since this is often the first thing your customers see when entering their journey with your brand - first impression kind of thing you know.

Protip

• Hero content can be longer (push the limits here) but can also be used to create shorter, 30 or 6 second video ads that make it easier for everyone to jump aboard with your brand through paid advertising campaigns.

New YouTube Music service uses the power of music to put together a powerful video about their new service.

Hub - Make your brand a series

Purpose

• Influence and convert
• Keep your customers attached to your brand
• Offer closer perspectives to your brand, products and services

Frequency

• Throughout the year - from weekly to quarterly content drops

Content types

• Reference cases
• Product and service videos
• Recruitment and employer branding videos

How to get it right

• Branded entertainment video series. That’s what you want. Interesting and unique ideas that can be transformed into video series. This will support brand consistency and will leave your customers coming back for the new episodes.

Protip

• Depending on your customer segments, go as entertainment forward as you dare. Tie an entertaining concept with your value proposition together to get your customers talking about your content and this way create brand advocates.

Cycling clothing and lifestyle brand Rapha has a branded entertainment series called Riding is the answer that is an aesthetic and cinematographic video series on different bicycle riding stories in Rapha clothing.

Help - From in-depth to micro-moments

Purpose

• Create loyalty
• Being there for your customer’s Micro-Moments
• Generate awareness through organic Google search

Frequency

• From hourly to daily to weekly, depending on how much relevant communication your brand can have

Content types

• How-to videos
• Unboxing
• Webinars
• Events
• FAQ
• Support videos
• Culture videos (e.g. office life)

How to get it right

• Create as much relevant content as your customers need in their customer journeys. Be there for them for what they want and need.

Protip

• Help video content is about releasing pain and maximising gain, not about style. Don’t be afraid to pick up your mobile phones to shoot your Help content in your office or on the go. But remember that quality matters - there’s no excuses for poor audio!
• Your customers can be a great asset for creating your Help content - and a trustworthy one too

Lego is famous for using its fans in creating their Help video content

How to measure your video strategy?

This article won’t go deep into video specific metrics and KPI’s. We shall talk about it a lot later on in the coming articles. Later on because, those video specific metrics will get determined based on your strategic goals.

That’s right. What is the business goal that the video content plan has been created for determines how and what we’re going to measure. It’s more or less semantics from there on.

For example if your goal is to get 100 new leads from a given grograhical market to your sales team, then that is what we’re going to measure.

Does the Hero content reach your ideal customers in channels where you know they are? Do they see the Hero content, do they watch it and then do they take action you want? Once the sales team has reached out to them, do these potential customers watch your Hub content to help their decision making? Once they have become your customers are they being given access to your Help content to be with them in their micro-moments?

Your video strategy is easy to follow, when it has been implemented into your business strategy - into your marketing and communications strategy, into your customer journey strategy.

The only thing I feel like gets overlooked these days is simple views. The good old view count. I feel like this is because marketing automations and data in general are supposed to be so super taken advantage of, that simpler, more general metrics get easily overlooked.

But the great fact is though, that we might watch a video about a brand and service now, but will act on it a year later from completely different path. This won’t be easy to track with any tools, but the power of your customer base simply seeing your video shouldn’t be overlooked.

Do it while plan it

“You've got to eat while you dream. You've got to deliver on short-range commitments, while you develop a long-range strategy and vision and implement it.” - Jack Welch

Start working on your video strategy now. Based on how long your company plans the future, that long it should have video strategy for.

But meanwhile all this innovative and dreamy strategic work, don’t forget to put your video content into action. Your framework gets built quick, so start adding content to it and start testing it out. Shoot and show, then work from there based on the results.