Video marketing can change the game. We’ve all been told this. We all know it. Film can change people’s minds, it can get them to act when they were previously idle, it can make you the topic of conversation among people who had previously never heard of you. In short it can put a brand on a completely new trajectory.
But the inconvenient truth of video marketing is far less talked about:
- Marketeers struggle to measure return on investment, often relying on dubious metrics like ‘impressions’ and ‘views’
- Less than half of all video campaign messages fail to reach the target audience
- 65% of people are developing ‘skip’ as an automatic behaviour
- Despite this video marketing budgets are increasing at record speeds
With that in mind cutting through the noise and making a real impact with the content you produce is absolutely critical. Without that you will become lost in a giant sea of mundane, middle of the road video content.
“You need to make content with ‘cut through’”. I’m sure you heard that many time before. But what does it actually mean to be creating content that’s cuts through? What does that process look like? How do you do it consistently? How to you achieve this beyond an interesting creative idea. Marketeers that consistently achieve cut through (for brands big and small) all know the following:
WHAT TO CREATE
Anyone can create a good video but the promised land is about creating the right videos for your brand, meeting your specific customer needs that drive ROI. This is so much more than variants on a creative. It’s about knowing what videos to produce to favourably position your brand, answer your audience’s questions, meet their needs and align with their passions at every stage of the customer journey to drive your commercial objectives.
WHEN TO RELEASE
From a tactical point of view we know there’ll be key sales peaks and events in your marketing calendar that are strategically important to your business. The promised land is ensuring you don’t fall into the trap of releasing ‘content islands’ – a peak of activity followed by a space of non activity, losing audience attention via inconsistency of release. Launching relevant, frequent video content across key calendar dates, ensures you stay front of mind.
WHERE TO DISTRIBUTE
With so many platforms and channels hungry for video content it can be tempting to upload your brilliant videos to them all. However the promised land is about knowing which channels are most relevant to your audience, for example is Instagram really the channel where your B2B customers are searching for answers? Equally, is LinkedIn the channel for teenagers looking for a cool new trend? The promised land is knowing where your audience are online and then tailoring your video assets for the specific channel specs, for example; 30 sec non-audio version for Facebook or 15second teaser on Instagram.
HOW TO LAUNCH
Bearing in mind the importance of the first 7 days in YouTube ranking, it’s best not to upload your video series in batches with each video competing with the next for importance. The promised land is about knowing how to launch your video content extending it’s campaign lifecycle whilst maximising your owned, bought and earned audiences. With robust tracking and attribution using Google Adwords and Google Analytics (or equivalent if you use an alternative analytics package) allows you to track and optimise campaign performance, particularly on a view attribution basis. View attribution allows for the tracking of people who viewed the video, but may not have immediately taken action and clicked through onto the website. It’s best to determine an attribution windows (e.g. the length of time between viewing and making a purchase action) that are most applicable to your category and buyer behaviour.
AND FINALLY…
We’ve never met a marketing department with a blank check so all of this needs to be achieved within an affordable budget, prioritising the needs based on greatest return on investment and understanding the value you’re driving from it.