We all know that video is king. Consumers demand more video content every year, and marketers are heeding their call: more than 87% of them are already including this medium in their marketing strategy, according to Wyzowl. If you’re not part of this statistic, you’re definitely losing out — but you’ve also come to the right place. Below, we’ve got you covered with the essentials of video content strategy and why it’s vital to your brand today.
Already got some videos lined up in your marketing calendar? We’ve also divulged some important pointers to ensure that they make the biggest impact when they’re live, rather than getting lost in the sea of endless noise online.
What exactly is video content strategy?
By itself, video content (not to be confused with video marketing strategy) sounds pretty straightforward: it’s what you put into your videos. It’s the strategy part that often makes most marketers' heads spin which is why many businesses prefer to hire Singapore video production companies if they have sufficient budget. In its simplest form, video content strategy is how brands create, curate, and make use of video content towards marketing their products, services, or overall brand to their target audience. Objectives can vary from creating brand awareness to generating more leads.
Do I really need it?
A well-thought out video content strategy is crucial. You’d want your objectives, timelines and brand principles to be well-drawn out for several reasons.
Brand identity
Tone, voice, and mood does not only apply to prose. The videos your brand creates will also reflect on your business’ personality. For instance, a more feminine brand might make use of pastel colour schemes in their videos. Ensuring that your brand’s core values and design principles are explicit will ensure a consistent brand image throughout the content posted, regardless of whether they are prose, static images, or text.
Organisation
Keeping track and mapping out your videos in advance will enable you to see the bigger picture. To begin with, a clear-cut video content strategy translates to clearer briefs for video production companies (assuming you outsource video production), since they will be able to understand your goals and progress which will help them to plan your video content.
Strategising also helps you prevent your brand from repeating video content and can even organise follow-up videos and series for your audience to look forward to. This also means you can keep track of trends you can bandwagon on and plan in advance of special events and holidays.
How do I build a good video content strategy?
Define your objectives
All plans are made to achieve a specific goal. As simple as it sounds, this is the first and most fundamental step towards building your video content strategy. After all, every step after this will be to work towards achieving them, from content creation to metrics set for measuring performance. Some more common objectives include brand awareness, increasing conversion rates and improving user engagement. Different objectives could mean could mean producing different types of videos (ex: corporate videos or marketing videos). Without a clear-cut objective, it would be difficult to create a streamlined strategy, let alone judge whether it is a success or failure.
Know your audience
Once you know ‘what’ it is you want to achieve, here begins the ‘who’ and ‘how’. To create content your audience wants to watch, you need to conduct in-depth audience research to develop insightful user personas. Remember: these people are who you are creating content for. Your research must go beyond their habits and preferences — you need to know how they live their lives. What time of day are they most likely to watch videos more attentively? Which social media channels would they prefer viewing video content on? What makes them tick? Knowing their preferences and pain points would be an invaluable tool in creating your content and strategy. Most social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok also provide analytics for you to understand your followers better.
Understand your brand
Once you get to know your users, it’s time to face inwards and really get to know your own brand. Some questions to ask would be: What message does your brand want to send? What makes your brand stand out from competitors? What is your brand’s personality? This will help to establish a clearly defined brand identity and principles for you to apply consistently across all channels of communication. You want your business to be recognisable and reliable, which is best achieved through a single, resounding message and identity.
Put the pieces together
At this point, you’ve got everything you need to put together your video content strategy. You should use both your objectives and audience research to advise you on the content you should create. For instance, if your audience prefers educational content, you may want to look at producing more how-to videos and tutorials. The channels you will be posting on also depends on which platforms most of your consumers frequent often. Following this, the format of your video would be more or less confirmed as well. Instagram and TikTok means shorter videos, while you can get away with longer on YouTube and Facebook. What’s most important is to consider where your videos will fit into your brand’s user journey or marketing funnel, as this also affects your content and planning.
Is there anything I should keep in mind?
Defining your strategy is an iterative process. There will be videos that work and videos that won’t. Especially when you’re first starting out with video, don’t worry too much about setting your strategy in stone and rather experiment with the medium first and foremost. Focus on pivoting your content when something falls short, and analyse what went right when it does well for you to apply to your next project.
What does have to be set in stone however, are the steps mentioned above such as objectives, user personas, and brand guidelines. Of course, these too can evolve — but they first have to be put down in writing. It’s easy for a brand to go by intuition and neglect such steps, but this often creates both messy videos and an inconsistent online presence.
Conclusion
Creating a video content strategy is no walk in the park, but it’s not something you should be afraid of, either. With these building blocks, you should be able to start thinking about your own video content planning — and if you’ve got a video in mind for your next project, hit En3 up to bring it to life!
