| Image by Chris Doelle |
Videos are crucial components of any kind of marketing campaign—from TV commercials fighting for spots between TV shows, to those short videos virally spreading online. All these footages are especially crafted to communicate with the targeted demographic for various purposes. While a large portion of ads are created to introduce and/or promote the brand and its products or services, videos can also be created for a wide variety of purposes. For online consumption, brands are always producing videos as part of their content marketing strategies, as a more engaging way to deliver content to people. And if you’ve yet to include video production to your social media marketing plans, here are a few things you should keep in mind.
Determine How It Fits Into Your Campaign
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It’s fairly easy to identify where videos fit, and how it can be optimized to boost the brand’s marketing campaigns. However, that’s not always a case. Because a lot of companies have already created a well structured marketing ecosystem where they can interact with their followers, introducing new components like videos can be challenging.
Here, you can either integrate videos, or create a separate initiative for video content creation and distribution. But all that effort will be worth it once you’ve found that sweet spot where video production can ideally be leveraged on to elevate branding and user engagements.
Plan Your Video Integration
Like just about anything, you can’t go rushing into video production without a battle plan. You’ll need to map out the entire video-geared strategy, which will then guide you and your team throughout the production process. Here, you will need to decide on the overall look, and feel of the videos, and standardize certain production and creative components like fonts, music, concepts, opening sequence, the on-cam personalities, voice-over talents, etc. A fully developed plan will enable a smooth production cycle for your team, while allowing you to make changes along the way.
Create an Outline or Script for Your Videos
 Image by Jorge Macri |
At the onset, you’ll need to decide whether to simply rely on an outline, or create a full-on script for your videos. In a nutshell, a script contains everything that will be seen and heard on the video, where lines are mouthed by the onscreen personalities or voice-over talents verbatim. Outlines, on the other hand, usually just contain a gist of what’ll happen onscreen, allowing more legroom for improvisation. You may favor one over the other depending on the type of video you’re shooting and the abilities of the onscreen talents. Some people can sound awkward and mechanical when reading a script, which is why using open outlines is more common among videos and podcasts.
Choose the Stage for Your Videos
Naturally, you’d have different goals to accomplish, and to be able to succeed in each of them, you’ll need to decide on the video platform to use to distribute your content. It’s common to publish your videos on your own Web site or blog, but to ensure of a wider distribution and exposure, it’ll be better to publish them on social video sharing sites like YouTube, Bip.tv, Vimeo, or Viddler. These sites are platforms where video content can get better impressions and views from people online, and they are equipped to be shared to other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Tags: content creation, Content Marketing, social media marketing, Social Media Marketing tips, Videos
