How to do video at scale.

This Ad-hoc approach to online video is out of control, it’s not only burning holes in the pockets of marketers and business owners alike, but it’s also contributing to sub par performance and ROI resulting in a negative overall experience for both brands and businesses investing in video.  Like kids at a fair ground sideshow attraction popping ping pong balls down the laughing clowns mouth hoping their score adds up to a giant fluffy toy, so many of us are throwing money away producing videos that have little strategic value, or reasoning behind them, other than a solid hunch that video is a better way to tell your businesses story.  Video has literally become every ones favourite marketing side order of choice, “I’ll take one campaign burger please and can I get a side of video to go with that”.  You’ve probably heard this saying more often than you care to recall, but it’s definitely very relevant to the current state of online video, “if you fail to plan then you plan to fail”.  Done well video can be an incredible medium to engage your customers and drive growth, but executed in isolation, on a whim, or in an ad-hoc manner it’s flat out a waste of money????.

The truth is, as much as you think you want that shiny new video, I’m telling you right now, that what you actually need (before anyones finger goes anywhere near that little red record button) is a video strategy.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen businesses and brands alike make this fundamental mistake. They produce a piece, or a few pieces of content with little idea beyond the very basic fundamentals of how they’re going to fully leverage that content all while maintaining completely unrealistic expectations around how it will perform and the types of results it will deliver.   I’m sorry folks but it’s very unlikely that your ad-hoc video initiative in isolation is going to move the needle for your business, the fact of the matter is “one video does not a video strategy make”. But hey, I understand, you're different and you know better, so go ahead, do your thing, launch that viral sensation you've been toiling over for the last three months, and when it all goes pear shaped this article will still be here to help you pick up the pieces and start (the right way) all over again??.

At about this point many content production companies reading this post will be licking their lips at the prospect of their clients putting together a comprehensive video strategy, that amongst other things will result in several videos falling out the bottom??. However, the best amongst them will already be recommending a strategy first approach to their clients not from a desire to see them produce more stuff, but from a genuine desire to see them succeed.  And the very best amongst that select group, will already have someone committed to helping their clients design, implement, measure and improve their strategy to maximise their return on investment at every stage of the customer journey… Is that what your agency is doing?  

To my mind the brands that win with video will be the ones that get strategic from the outset, and the content creators that come out on top will be the ones that enable their clients to do so most effectively.

Again, please don’t get me wrong I understand that video is a massive opportunity, creating massive demand, and as a result content agencies are popping up on every street corner to service that demand (I used to earn a crust doing that exact thing). However as much as marketers and business owners need to take stock, and look more strategically at their investment in video content, so too (in my completely idealistic opinion) should content agencies and production companies be looking beyond the quick single unit/ campaign video sell (and the associated short term opportunity cost) and move as a first point of engagement to direct their clients into a video strategy.  To my mind the brands that win with video will be the ones that get strategic from the outset, and the content creators that come out on top will be the ones that enable their clients to do so most effectively.  

Strategy is a win-win purposeful first step, that sets everyone up for success. As a marketer or business owner it increases your likelihood of a positive return on investment and at the very least provides you with a framework to execute and measure against.  As a creative/agency/ production company it allows you to leverage your expertise in a subject matter you live and breath everyday, repositioning your service as strategic growth partner as opposed to production and creative capability sitting on the end of a brief you know you could positively influence given the opportunity.  

Right now you’re probably either thinking I’m a pretentious idealistic dick in a cushy nine to five that doesn’t know jack about hustling OR you might hear a modicum of sense and sniff the smallest hint of an opportunity to get the edge on your competitors, increase brand awareness, drive new customer growth, decrease churn and increase profitability.  Regardless of which group you fall into (but hopefully most of you are in the latter ??) your video efforts will benefit greatly from a well planned, well executed strategy, the problem is…. Where on earth do you start?    

So, what follows is the video strategy framework I’ve broken into a 10 modules that brands, marketers, businesses, production companies and agencies alike can to utilise to develop a comprehensive video strategy for themselves and/or their clients.  You’ll need to do a bit of homework off the back of each module so I’m breaking the strategy up across three articles.

Article one (this article) will cover:

• Setting your objectives.
• Understanding the current state state of play - The dreaded content audit.
• Your customer & the customer journey - Getting dialled in your customer and their journey. 

Article two will cover:

• Content - Creating content that’s truly unique and truly ownable for you brand
• Channels - Which channels are right for your brand and best practice for content amplification.
• Briefing and production processes - From how to write a great brief to rapid development and iteration of content in social world.
• Platforms - Integrating video platforms and performance data across your organisation.

Article three will cover:

• Community - Using video to build a community of customer evangelists  
• Metrics & ROI - How to measure performance and return on investment
• Your Content Plan - A comprehensive content plan consisting of what you’ll produce, how, where, when and why.

I’ll provide greater detail into each element in a future video based online learning programme but for now if you take the simple step of leveraging your own information, processes and experiences into this framework and start executing you should begin to see immediate value across a range of fronts in your content efforts, from improved ROI to decreased cost of production, and greater content cut through and alignment of effort. Okay let’s get started.

Stage 1 - Objectives:

This isn’t rocket science, there are some simple and very fundamental points we need to cover off first to ensure we’re putting the right foundations in place.  This is going to involve you doing a bit of homework and getting your own ducks in a row so you’re then able to move confidently through the later steps in the process.  So let’s begin with the most basic, yet critical aspect of your strategy, your objectives.

In the grand scheme of things your video strategy is actually a subset of content strategy, your content strategy is a subset of your marketing strategy, and your marketing strategy aligns to your strategic business objectives, sooooo, to my mind, your video strategy must fundamentally align to business objectives.  Therefore like any other strategic business objective your video strategy should not only provide a framework for how you create, distribute and measure performance of your content but also identify and prioritise the projects toward which you will allocate budget and resources.  Setting your objectives up front also provides the context for how you’ll assess ROI at each stage of your customer journey.

How-to get started:

So as a very first step let’s get down on paper right now the top three objectives you want your video strategy to achieve.  At this point try to be as specific as possible, if you’re looking at video as a means to increase website conversions then be specific, draw a line in the sand and attach a specific metric to it e.g. “I want to increase conversion of website visits to trial by 12%”. In doing this you also begin to set the parameters for what the the rest of your customer journey will need to look like to achieve this outcome and surface other critical areas in your organisation that need to be aligned in order for you to achieve your objectives.  Which leads me to stage 2.

Stage 2 - Understanding the current state of play:

Uh-oh here it comes, there’s no way around it… To get a clear view on where you currently stand, who the critical stakeholders are, what’s worked, what hasn’t, where the gaps are, and where the wastage resides there’s no way around it, you’re going to have to conduct a content audit (cue muttering swear words under your breath).  

Although content audits can be a lot of work they are invaluable in providing absolute clarity on who’s creating content, who owns that content, and why they’re producing it.  The “who own’s it” part is particularly important as you lock in the long term business objectives for your video strategy.  To be successful you’re not just going to have to create beautiful content that works, you’re also going to need to bring colleagues and stakeholders along on the journey, paying particular note to the people in your organisation that own the budget centre’s that are essentially going to fund the creation and amplification of the content you produce.

How-to get started

I’ve found the simplest way to begin this process is to start at a department level (based on own your org structure) and note down every department or function that’s involved in the creation and/or distribution/ amplification of content. I’m also not just talking about video content, I’m talking about every piece of content that’s generated in your business, from the copy and photography on your website to the content that goes into your EDM’s. From there, drill down into the department org structure and identify what specifically is being created, who the content owner is, and the people involved in its production and distribution.

Now here’s the payoff for all your hard work, because you’ve just set out your objectives in stage 1, once completed, your audit is immediately going to surface any areas in the business where the content being produced is not completely aligned to your business objectives and you can immediately pivot or kill off that content to make better use of your resources or save money that you can direct toward more effectively aligned content efforts.

Step 3 - Your customer and the customer journey:

This is the last piece of ground work we need to put in place before we move into the actual creative and content production phase.  It also signals that it’s time to shift gear from navel gazing, to focusing on the most important people in this equation, your customer. As a first step to achieving this we need to get everyone involved in the content marketing and creation process (which you just identified in the previous stage whoop whoop) dialled into your customer, get a lock on who they are, how they segment, their persona’s (if available) the problem you’re solving for them, and your customers current attitudes and beliefs about your product or service. It’s also important to surface any insight you have on your audience from research or previous performance metrics.  That insight is a critical component to generating a highly contextual, high quality creative response to the briefs you’ll eventually begin to tackle.

Once you’ve dialled into your customer the next critical action is to break down the customer journey through the lens of the content that’s used to engage them at each stage.  This isn’t about top of funnel vs in-funnel etc (IMO that’s a very rudimentary view that doesn’t acknowledge the nuance of the customer’s pain/ problem they’re trying to solve specific to where they are in their customer journey) this is about engaging your customer with the right piece of content, at the right place and the right time to move them with as little friction as possible through the customer journey. If you're unfamiliar with mapping out a customer journey simply Google it and you'll find plenty of free customer journey templates that you can customise to fit your business, or you can utilise apps like UXPRESSIA to develop more comprehensive customer journey and persona models.

Once we’ve mapped the customers journey (which in all honesty should be a piece of work most brands have completed prior to reading this article) and understand the content they’re engaging with at each stage in that journey, we can get really specific about how well aligned and effective our content creation efforts are to our strategic business objectives. This also enables to put in place the right metrics model specific to each stage in the journey that we’ll use to determine performance and ROI. I’ll go into greater detail on this in the Metrics and ROI module.   

How-to get started:

The output of all the data you’ve put together on your customer should result in you now having a very specific profile of who they, their current attitudes and beliefs toward your products or service, and the very specific problems they face that your business is going to help them solve.  So as a first step let’s lock that profile in and agree with your respective stakeholders that this is the customer profile that we’re going to be targeting.

Having done that it’s time to outline your customer journey. Get started by breaking down the specific component parts in that journey from the customers first touch or experience of your brand, through to the point where they're a long-term and fully committed paying customer. Once you've broken their journey down into those component parts insert the specific types of content they're engaging with, the channels they're engaging with that content through, and metrics we’ll be using specific to that stage in the customer journey to measure performance e.g. Your customer journey may begin with Brand Awareness therefore your breakdown of that stage in the journey may look something like this:

Stage in customer journey - Brand Awareness

Content Type - Hero Video Brand Campaign

Channels - TV/ Digital/ Social

Metrics - Aided and Unaided brand awareness

Or for the Nurture stage of your customer journey your breakdown may look something like this:

Stage in customer journey - Nurture

Content Type - Video testimonials

Channels - Owned website/ digital/ social/ EDM

Metrics - Conversion of leads to trials, or leads to newsletter sign-ups, or leads to paying customers etc.

I’ll get into the specifics of best practice for channels and the formats within them in part two of this series. For now get to work on putting together this basic customer journey framework as once you’ve completed this stage you’ll now know the exact types of content you’re going to be producing, and the specific points in the customer journey that they'll be delivered into ??.

Once you've nailed all of the above it’ll be time to get into the fun stuff and start looking at how you’re going to create content that’s truly unique, truly ownable and that delivers the kind of results that will delight your customers and turn your competitors green with envy.  Stay tuned for part 2 in the series and I’ll catch you back real soon.

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Cheers

Pat ??.

Opinions expressed are my own and are in no way intended to reflect the views of my employer, or individuals quoted or referenced in this article.