Creating a video campaign from scratch takes more effort than many businesses realize. There’s a lot of planning and forethought behind every great video marketing project. Even then, production hurdles, budgets, and capabilities can complicate a campaign and undermine the final product.
While there’s no cookie-cutter approach to producing the perfect video marketing campaign, there is a general process you can follow to create your ideal campaign.
In this blog, we overview each step of that process, provide helpful tips, and share video marketing ideas to help you make the most of your next successful video campaign.
The first step in creating a new video campaign is determining your end-goal. What kind of message do you want your campaign to convey, and more importantly, what kind of actions or next steps do you want viewers to take after watching your videos?
Your goal should have a clear purpose, and be supported with measurable results that aligns with your growth marketing efforts. “Our campaign goal is to increase email engagement” doesn’t cut it. A more concrete example of this goal is: “Our campaign goal is to increase email clickthrough rates by 8% next quarter.” This sets expectations and a specific benchmark for success.
Your goals should help you identify your audience, message, and positioning, not the other way around.
With your campaign goals established, you can research ways to reach those goals by engaging your target audiences.
The overall messaging and content of your video campaign depends on who you’re targeting. With your established goal in mind, you can determine what stage in the buyer's journey your ideal audience is in (top-of-funnel first-time visitors, middle-of-funnel viewers that have made initial contact, or bottom-of-funnel visitors that are at the buying stage).
This will change how you plan your campaign and the types of videos you decide to shoot. The following are some pointers on video content types for specific buying stages:
One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make when creating a video campaign is simple: who’s going to make it?
There are pros and cons to creating the campaign in-house and hiring a professional agency to help turn your ideas into reality. The main factors that should ultimately drive your decision are quality, cost, and time.
Producing your video campaign in-house with existing equipment, team members, and online tools is certainly a feasible option for tighter budgets (even if your video is shot on an iPhone with a clip-on mic or you use subscription-based animation software). However, you may sacrifice overall quality and time—time your staff could spend elsewhere on more critical tasks.
In-house production is also quite limiting, depending on the editing capabilities and the video editor softwares you use.
On the other hand, collaborating with a professional marketing or video agency is a smart idea if you have the budget available. It’s more expensive than tackling the campaign on your own, but the quality of your final product is always worth the investment.
This is particularly true if you aim to use and repurpose your campaign for numerous outlets or future efforts, as a lasting appeal is important. In these arrangements, you can have as much or as little creative control as you desire. Additionally, going this route won’t eat away at your team’s time or get in the way of your other priorities.
With the production side of your campaign completed, you’re ready to focus on distribution. What outlets should take top priority, and do any of those outlets require special formatting or limitations?
For instance, Instagram video content is limited to 60 seconds. If Instagram is a main channel for your campaign (such as a top-of-funnel video) and your video exceeds that limit, you’ll have to cut as needed or remove certain portions of the video to meet that timecode.
In addition to this, a 1:1 aspect ratio (square video) performs best on Instagram, since it takes up the most real estate on smartphone screens. These are just two examples of platform-specific best practices you should consider when promoting your campaign.
There are a lot of ways to squeeze video content into Instagram’s 60-second limit.
The biggest challenge often occurs when, after rounds of edits and cutting segments, you realize you’re still 8 seconds over the limit.
Trim out that remaining time by:
This tip applies to other social media/hosting platforms, as well, since 60 seconds is a benchmark for top-of-funnel video content.
Support the campaign with CTAs and other conversion elements on related pages/content. The strongest video marketing campaigns are those that utilize cross-promotion. Simply putting a video together and hosting it on a Resources page isn’t going to drive audiences further down the funnel.
If your campaign or a campaign promo is going on YouTube, increase engagement with end screens, cards, and channel actions to encourage next steps.
If your video or a CTA to the campaign is going to be hosted on your website or blog, make sure it’s supported by the content on the page.
Once the video hosting platforms and your video placements are out of the way, it’s time to optimize for those platforms.
Research hashtags related to your industry, your type of product, and most importantly, audience pain points, and use these in your social media posts or as keywords in your text.
Finally, video captioning is an important component for most video content. This is particularly true for social media videos, since most platforms play videos on scroll, but are automatically muted.
Now that your video marketing campaign is out there for the world, it’s time to reflect and improve. Stay on top of analytics for your campaign across its various hosting platforms (website CRM, social media video channels, etc.), whether that’s within individual platforms or management software, such as Hootsuite for social media.
The video analytics you focus on should depend on your campaign goals. These typically include:
Video “drop-off” points, or any spot in the video where engagement drops significantly – this often occurs with video logo outros.
It’s better to end with an actionable element (text, speaking, or otherwise) than to end with another screen of your logo and website.
Need help with your video marketing campaign? Contact us today!