Are you still thinking about making a video of your CEO so you can put it on YouTube? Even if you think you’re making content for your audience, take a long hard look in the mirror and be answerable to yourself for why they need it. Ask a marketer why a customer really needs the video they’re planning and they’ll probably say something like “because they need to understand the features and benefits of the product”. This is not what people need; it’s what the marketing person wants. Making this the focus of your content simply won’t work.
Put your customer at the center of your world and produce something that’s compellingly interesting, indispensably useful or so entertaining you can’t miss it. That way people might genuinely enjoy your content and share it around the web. The following Online Video Strategy Setting tool will help you define the real-world outcomes you’re trying to achieve so every decision you take from then on is informed by and directed towards your main objective.
Online video strategy setting tool
- What do you want to do?
- Who is it for?
- How are you going to reach them?
- What technologies do you need?
- What channels are you going to use?
- What are you trying to achieve?
- How much do you have to spend?
- How are you going to measure its success?
- Who else needs to be involved?
- What does really good look like?
- What does really bad look like?
What should be your Video Budget
“How much does online video cost” is top of the list of FAQs. In truth you can spend as much as an entire feature film on one three-minute wonder, and on the other hand a $100 video recorder will let you produce more hours of content than you’ve had hot dinners.
There is no easy answer to the question of online video budgets. But here are some tips:
1. Make the budget reflect your needs by sizing up the value of the opportunity. Think about how much money your strategy could make for the business through sales or brand awareness if it goes really well. How about in the worst-case scenario: will it still be able to do anything useful? If so, how much? The same applies if your strategy is designed to save money by doing something better. What about if you don’t fund your strategy effectively – what’s the risk cost to your organization?
2. Just like TV ads need producing as well as airtime buying, online video campaigns that are intended to reach people you don’t know already by name need budget spending on distribution, including audience research, especially if your strategy is about exposure.
3. Understand what you’re buying. Saying something is broadcast quality is meaningless in an age where mobile phones contain multi-megapixel cameras, but making things look good still takes skill. Most the suppliers are only selling ‘technology’ or in other words ‘time on the tools’. As you move away from this corner of the triangle you should expect to pay more even if it looks like you’re buying the same thing. There are very few companies whose offering is a solid combination of all three.
What about Video and Mobile
Mobile in online video is about the context, not the technology.
Solving the technical problem of how to make video work across devices is a basic requirement of online video. Then the role of “mobile” in your strategy can be replaced by considering the environments in which mobile video consumption takes place.
Mobile is having an unprecedented impact on the way we use the web. In the old world, consumers were either “online” or “offline” and we had to fight for a share of the former. Today’s digitally connected consumers are online all the time thanks to mobile.
What, therefore, are the considerations you should make for your online video strategy given that your consumers are now online all the time? Here’s a starter for 10:
- Usability – what is the user experience of your channel like on touch screens?
- Optimization – what are customers looking for on mobile and is the user journey different compared to online?
- Constraints – what is the potential impact of connection issues, screen size, battery life and audio playback?
If you’ve built your online video strategy around your audience – where they are, what they do, and what they want, then your journey will lead you into understanding the impact of mobile.
Great article! I agree that they company must first figure out and understand the strategy behind their videos before posting anything online or on television. The concept of the video must come across clear to the individual within the first few minutes. If it doesn’t, people are less likely to watch, which makes that video a waste of time and money. Thanks for sharing!