Creating a video marketing strategy for a business, shouldn’t be complicated, but it should be necessary. You see, without a video strategy, you could be investing time, effort, and budget into creating the wrong videos for the wrong audience and using them in the wrong way. And that’s not good for any. So, let’s make this simple with my 7-minute video marketing plan, which should take you about 7-minutes to complete give or take.
There’s that saying that if you plan to fail, you fail to plan, but what if the way you’re doing your planning is a failure. You see, my best advice as a video strategist, working with businesses of all sizes over the last 10 years is to simply start simple. Don’t overcomplicate things, and that’s what I’ll be sharing with you in this article as I break down my 7-minute video marketing plan.
Who you are trying to reach?
The 7-minute marketing plan is based around seven key decisions that you need to make. And the first decision is who are you trying to reach? In marketing, it’s all about moving people to take action. The key factor, there is people. Who are the people that you’re trying to reach with your marketing so that you can move them to take an action? If you don’t know who your ideal target audience is, then how are you ever going to create content that reaches them in the right way to move them towards making a decision with your business? Whatever that decision may be. I recommend that you get to know your target audience in a deeper way than just demographic understanding. So more than just understanding a rough age range and where they might live and, you know, rough ideas, demographically about your target audience, but instead, get to know them on a psychographic level.
So, ask yourself questions around:
- What is their pain that they’re feeling in their life that our business or our brand or product can solve?
- What’s going through their minds?
- What’s keeping them up at night?
- What motivates or excites them?
When you ask these deeper questions and you get that down into your 7-minute marketing plan, you can get much more specific about who it is that you’re trying to reach.
What are you trying to achieve?
The next decision is what are you actually trying to achieve with your video marketing? And again, I’ll remind you, marketing is about moving people to take action. And here we’re focusing on the action. What is the action that you want someone to do when they’ve engaged with your video marketing? And I want you to think around three different things here. I want you to think about what do you want your ideal audience to feel, to think or to do?
One of those answers is going to get you the result that you want here. So maybe you want someone to feel something differently about an idea or your brand or your business or their desire to buy your product or service. Maybe you want them to think about something, to learn something new, to gather new information, that’s going to better provide them with exactly what they need in order to take the next steps with your brand or your business, or maybe the purpose of the video marketing is to get them to take a specific action, add a product to cart, join your email list, go into your bricks and mortar store, attend your event. Whatever that action may be. You need to be clear on what do you want your video marketing to achieve here. And what do you want someone to feel, think, or do now, importantly, these need to be aligned to your business goals.
So you need to think, what do we need to achieve in our business? Do we need increased brand awareness, more people to understand who we are and what we do then that’s what you’re trying to achieve. Do you need to engage more people in conversation and build better relationships with your prospects so that they’re more likely to trust you and your people to make it easier to buy from you, then that’s what you’re trying to achieve. Or do you need to actually convert more of your prospects into clients and increase your conversion rate, for example, then that’s what you’re trying to achieve. What you’re trying to achieve to the goals of your business.
What do they need from you to take the desired action?
Decision number 3 then is what do they need from you in order to take the desired action? This is where we’re starting to really get a sense of what do you want to communicate through your video marketing strategy, to your ideal audience, in order to get them to take the act that you want them to take.
So really what we’re talking about here is your content plan. What is the information or the ideas or the knowledge that you want to share through your video marketing strategy and impart into the brains of your target audience? I don’t want you to focus too much on what format that video is going to take, but instead, what is the information that you need to communicate, what do you need your audience to understand, to learn, to think about, to do?
How and where will you reach them with your videos?
And from there, the next decision is how and where will you reach them with your videos? And the opportunities here are really endless. And so, the decision-making process here can really weigh a business down. But what I don’t want you to do is to get bogged down, into focusing on a specific video platform. See the key way to think about it here is fish where the fish are.
Release or distribute your content on the platforms or in the places where your ideal target audience is hanging out at the point where you want them to engage with that piece of content. So that might be social media. That might be YouTube. That might actually be within your email campaigns. That may be within your sales funnel or your sales conversations, in a face to face process, or it may be in store, whatever it may be. You need to be clear here in your video marketing strategy, where do you want to be showing up for people and how are we going to be showing up on those platforms? But the thing is simply publishing your video somewhere is not enough.
What steps will you take to maximise the success of your videos when published?
So, decision number five in your 7-minute video marketing plan is to decide what steps you will take to ensure the success of your videos once they are published.
Now, depending on the platform that you’re distributing the content on, that could be things like optimising thumbnails, that could be titles and descriptions, or it could be about how you are utilising or tapping into existing networks. So, to drive initial traffic to your videos, or it could be just taking some time here to think about how you’re going to best implement your videos into your email campaigns, into your sales funnels, into your web pages.
What are your measures of success for this plan?
Decision number six in this 7-minute video marketing plan is what are your measures of success? You see if you don’t know where the goal post is, how will you know if you’ve scored a goal?
So, I want you to look back at what you were trying to achieve, which we talked about in decision number two in the 7-minute video marketing plan and decide how you can best measure how successful you were at achieving that result. Are you going to be looking at certain pieces of hard data or video analytics? Are you going to be focused on sales data coming from your CRM or your shopping cart software, or are you going to be focused more on soft data? Things like, brand perception or how people are building stronger relationships with your brand, harder to measure, but often equally important.
Based on the above, what videos will you make and how?
And the final decision to make here is based on the previous decisions you’ve made, what videos will you actually make and how? Now, this is specifically where we’re talking about what you’re going to do to get the videos made? What format will they take? What style of videos? What sort of budget you’re going to allocate? There is an important reason why this decision is the last one to make in your 7-minute video marketing plan, because the decision you make about how to actually get the videos made, what these videos actually look like and what sort of budget you’re going to spend needs to be a result of the decisions that you’ve made in those previous six things that we’ve talked about in the 7-minute video marketing plan.
So, that’s the 7-minute video marketing plan. And it’s based around the key 7 elements for an effective online video strategy, which is:
- Audience
- Goals
- Content
- Distribution
- Optimization
- Metrics, and
- Production
