If you’re like most business owners, you don’t need anyone to tell you that you should be using video to market your business.
You get it.
It’s 2021.
But with all the different information out there about video marketing, knowing how and where to start can feel overwhelming.
That’s why we put together this blog post, to guide you through the process of creating a corporate video strategy for your business in just five easy steps.
Get clear about your purpose
Before you put together a corporate video strategy for your business, you need to get clear about your purpose. Ask yourself what and who – “What do we want to achieve from our video marketing efforts, and who do we want to target?”
In answering these questions, it’s important to be very specific. “Get more customers” is too broad for your video marketing purpose. Instead, drill down further. For example, do you want to show how your products or service work so people understand the benefits of what you have to offer? Do you want to showcase your free offer so more people sign up to your email list? Do you want to build awareness around an upcoming event? Do you want to attract more (or better) recruits for open job positions? Do you want to improve your staff training?
Of course, you can choose more than one purpose. But any purpose you choose must be specific.
Once you know what you want to achieve, figure out who you want to target. This should be fairly straightforward. If you’re showcasing your products or services, for example, you probably already know your specific target market. Or if you’re recruiting, you should have a clear idea of who your ideal candidates are. And if you want to train your staff, your audience couldn’t be more obvious.
Knowing this information will help you with all the following steps as you create your corporate video strategy.
Write a list
With your video marketing purpose (or purposes) in mind, it’s time to write a list of videos that can help you achieve your goals and arrange them on a content calendar.
Some of your marketing goals may be short-term, such as creating hype around a product. A goal like this may only require one or two videos over a short period of time. Other marketing goals may be longer-term, requiring a series of videos over 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months.
Whatever your timelines look like, plot them out on your calendar. By doing this, you’ll quickly be able to see whether your strategy is viable in terms of your available time and resources, or whether you need to space things out or cull some ideas so you can concentrate on your most compelling priorities.
By planning ahead in this way, you’ll get a realistic idea of how your timeline will affect your business and you’ll also be able to get more accurate quotes from videographers.
In addition to this, you may benefit from reduced rates for pre-purchasing or bulk-purchasing production hours. At Starlight Media, for example, we offer discounted rates when businesses pre-purchase production hours from us.
Choose your distribution method
With your purpose and timeline taken care of, it’s important to consider the right distribution method for your videos. How will you get your videos in front of the target audience (or audiences) you identified in step one?
For external videos with a marketing or recruitment angle, you may choose to upload the content to YouTube or other social media platforms. You may also choose to embed the videos on your website. For internal videos, will you upload your content to your staff intranet, or send staff a private video link to YouTube?
Your chosen distribution method will determine the format and necessary quality of your videos and whether you require any “extra” items such as QR codes that lead directly to your videos.
For example, if you want to distribute your videos on social media, you may want to shoot them in vertical format, which is ideal for viewing on a phone. You may also want to edit your videos into “stories”. On the other hand, if you’re using YouTube for distributing your videos, you may want to take advantage of the easy opportunity to upload your videos in full HD. And if you sell products, you may want to create QR codes for your packaging that allow people to directly access product demo or installation videos.
Once you’ve chosen your distribution method, you’ll have all the information you need to move to step four for creating your 2021 corporate video strategy.
Create a brief
Now you’ve made the most important decisions for planning your corporate video strategy, it’s time to create a brief for each of your videos, so you can get quotes and start production.
Your brief should cover all the information from steps one to three, as well as a few other details about your video content, who will participate, and any other requirements you have.
Make notes about whether you want to add background music, voiceovers, or subtitles (in English or another language) to your videos. Make it clear whether the people appearing in your videos will be staff members, paid actors and presenters, or both. If your timeline includes important dates and deadlines, emphasise them. Make it clear if there will there be NDAs or talent/location release forms.
Armed with your brief, you can get accurate and precise quotes from different videographers for producing your video content, as well as agreements around timelines and other necessary details.
Equally importantly, your brief will help you feel in control as you execute your corporate video strategy according to your planned timeline.
Prepare to measure results
One of the many advantages video content offers over traditional marketing is the depth of the data about each video that’s available to you, and the ease with which this data can be gathered, analysed, and interpreted.
With this in mind, you’d be crazy not to plan ahead to measure the results of your 2021 corporate video strategy!
As you prepare to measure results, it’s important to consider what you want to measure, and how you’ll judge your success (or lack thereof). There are plenty of facts, figures, data points, and other metrics you can obtain after your video content has been released “into the wild”. This includes view counts, comments, engagement, conversions, audience statistics, and more.
Deciding which metrics make the most sense for measuring your success will depend on the purpose or purposes you identified in step one. If your goal was to get more recruits for open positions in your company, for example, then the number of people who clicked a link on your video to visit your job ad would be a key metric for measuring the success of that video. If your goal is to raise awareness about your brand, then view counts and engagement would be key metrics to consider.
By measuring your results, you can determine which videos resonate with your audience and use this information to guide future corporate video strategies, or even pivot your 2021 strategy to capitalise on, or improve upon, your success.
Your video strategy
How will you be incorporating video into your marketing strategy for 2021? What will your purpose be, and how will you measure your success?
Let us know in the comments below!