Video strategy fundamentals
Don’t let strategy be an afterthought.
In order to give your content the audience it deserves, it’s important to decide on your video strategy BEFORE you develop content ideas and approaches.
By properly incorporating all of the strategy considerations involved in a successful campaign, you’ll ensure increased engagement and a stronger return on investment. After all, thousands of views from your target audience are always worth more than millions from those that are inconsequential.
Video strategy has the same fundamental core considerations as any marketing strategy, it’s all about the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE and WHY.
Who?
Understanding the target audience for your campaign will shape the entire creative process so it’s important to get as much detail on the audience as possible. During this stage we use data to develop an audience profile which builds a picture of the target audience based on characteristics like age, gender, geographical location, etc. It’s really easy to dive straight into the creative process without properly thinking about defining the audience of the campaign, but it’s vital that it’s not missed as you will need to base the design and marketing plan both on what you know will appeal to your audience, and where they consume their content.
What?
As well as knowing the who, we also need to know the what. What is the overall aim of the campaign and what are you trying to achieve with it. The call to action and intended behaviour may have an impact on where we place the ads to achieve the best results.
When?
Do you have a set timeline in place for the campaign and are there other campaign elements that will be running in conjunction with the digital campaign?
General guide: It usually takes at least a month for a campaign to properly embed online so you should always plan to run for a minimum of a month.
Where?
It’s important to consider where the content you’re creating will sit as it will have a huge impact on the design choices you make. When we create campaigns, we use datasets to research the media consumption of the target audience to ensure we choose the most appropriate ad locations. Every platform has it’s own design specifications so it’s important to consider these when developing your content to ensure content is optimised for your chosen channel(s). It’s important to properly consider which channels will help you achieve your target and that might mean splitting your budget across fewer channels rather than being across them all. When we’re considering the channel mix we look at available budget, campaign length and audience characteristics.
Why?
Why are you embarking on the campaign and how will success be measured? There are lots of different ways to measure success of a digital marketing campaign but the industry has seen a move away from the traditional measures of reach to more engagement focused measures such as engagement rate, video completions, accounts reached, click through rate, etc. It’s important to establish early on how you will measure success and what success looks like to you.
