How to Create a Video Marketing Strategy

Don't "wing it" with your video marketing. Create a strategy that will get you real results.

 You don't need to just make videos. What you really need for your B2B business is a video marketing strategy. You need the game plan that'll help you make the right videos, that'll speak to your target customers and draw them in to work with you.

In this edition, we breakdown the 6 steps to creating a strategy for your video marketing so you can start seeing better results with your videos, and stop throwing spaghetti at the wall hoping something sticks (your wall will thank you).

STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR ICP

Before you do anything else, you want to define who your ICP is, your ideal client profile. You probably already have something related to this developed for your business. You have an idea of who you're trying to reach, who you want to work with, and who will best benefit from your product or service.

You don't necessarily have to get super specific in terms of details, but you at least need to know who are you trying to talk to. The biggest thing you want to know here for your ICP is what problem are they struggling with?

You got to define that first because once you get to the stage of developing video ideas, you're going to be really thinking about crafting your videos in a way that is speaking to that problem.

STEP 2: LOOK AT YOUR OVERALL MARKETING GOALS

Next, take a look at your overall marketing goals. Think about your KPIs. What are you focusing on? Are you looking to increase conversions? Are you looking to build more of an online presence on social media?

You want your video marketing to plug into your existing marketing strategy so that your videos are serving and helping you fulfill your already established marketing goals.

For a lot of businesses, this is where they fail. They don't have much of a strategy put together and they don't really understand how the videos they're creating are going to help them achieve their marketing goals. This will inevitably lead to just throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks. So to prevent that, know beforehand your goals and how video is going to help you meet those goals.

STEP 3: DISTRIBUTION

The next stage is going to be looking at distribution. Where are your videos going to go? Where are they going to live? Think about your website. You may not have video on there currently. But what videos will need to be on there?

If you're thinking in terms of social media, you want to identify the specific platforms you'll be focusing on. Don't try to be everywhere. A lot of businesses make that mistake and feel the pressure of, “I've got to be all over the place.” You want to really dial in on the exact platforms where your ICP that you identified in the first step, that's where they're hanging out.

STEP 4: MAP OUT 3 MONTHS’ WORTH OF VIDEOS

Yes—if you can try to map out the next three months. Get a publishing schedule together and think about how many videos you'll need to create. And then once you've got a list developed of how many you're going to do, start thinking through ideas.

Ideally, like in step one, you're thinking about your customers’ problems, and how you want to tackle talking about that on video and talking about your product, how it solves that problem. Once you got a big list put together, start prioritizing. You'll need to prioritize which ones are the most important and which ones contribute the most to your marketing goals.

STEP 5: PLAN OUT PRODUCTION

Who's going to do it? Is it you? If you're the founder of the company, are you going to get on camera? Do you have the equipment to produce this in-house? Or will you need to buy some new equipment? Or perhaps outsource to somebody else? Bring in a production crew to help film?

And with that, will it be a production agency, like a local production company? Or will it be individual contractors brought on for specific roles? Map all this stuff out beforehand so you can get an idea of scope, and what this is going to take.

STEP 6: ANALYZE & REVIEW

This is one of the steps that businesses often neglect—they don't actually check on how their videos are performing, mainly because they don't know they need to, or maybe they just don't know what to look for. This is really dependent on your marketing goals. If you know those, then you'll know what to look for in terms of metrics.

You want to look at things like views and view duration. Are people even watching them? And if they are, are they converting after watching them? How long are they watching it for? Just a quick couple of seconds? Knowing these stats and how they're doing will give you a lot of information on knowing how they're performing.

Don't get too obsessed with the vanity metrics (likes, comments, etc.) Yes, it can be helpful and it can be good for building an audience and getting some attention online. But if you're investing in video marketing for your business, you likely want to see a return, which means you want to see growth in revenue from your videos.

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TAKE ACTION

Now that you know the steps, you can start building out your video marketing strategy.

1. If you haven’t already, define who your ICP is.

2. Review your current marketing goals. How can video help achieve those?

3. Pick 2-3 social media platforms to focus on. Depending on what videos you’re creating, you may want to focus on your website as well.

4. Make a list of ideas for videos that deal with your customers’ pain points. Then prioritize which ones you want to create first. Try to map out 3 months’ worth of video content. (1 per week is 12 videos a quarter, 2 a week is 24)

5. Determine whether you’ll be producing these yourself, or hiring a production company, or a freelancer.

6. Once you’ve posted your videos, don’t forget to periodically review them to see how they’re performing.