“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
Plato
Creating a successful brand video strategy is the first step in ensuring your video content will resonate with your audience. Creating a brand video strategy means not taking the “winning the lottery approach” to your marketing. You want to take a methodical, well thought out approach to your video content creation.
The best way to start your brand video strategy is by asking yourself these 3 questions.
1. Who is my audience?
The key to creating a successful video is to understand your audience. The only way to know your audience is to research them from as many sources as you can. The time spent getting to know your audience is the most important part of creating a video strategy. Without this research your video projects will have “feet of clay”.
Every choice you make for your video projects needs to be based on accurate audience research. This will help you create video content that your audience wants. It will be tailored to their life style choices using language they can relate to.
2. Where is my audience?
The key to understanding the type of video content you will create depends on what social platform or website your audience will be consuming it on. Using Facebook and Instagram for example audiences will expect their video to complement their casual browsing, where as the Youtube audience are often trying to find out how to complete tasks or get product reviews. Naturally these are not absolute guidelines and you need to look at how your audience consumes videos from different sources.
The platform used will also give you indications on the length of your video. However when people ask me what the optimum duration of a video is I always say tell your story as concisely as possible and avoid unnecessary padding of your story. The golden rule is always value your audiences time.
3. What can I do for them?
The mistake many brands make in creating a video strategy is thinking that they have all the answers. The real question brands should ask themselves is what could I do for my audience? It is only by taking an “audience first” approach that you can plan a successful strategy.
Once you know your audience it should be easy “to walk in their shoes” and see what problems they want you to solve. Use this knowledge to create video content that will resonate with them.
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”
Jonathan Swift
When you ask these 3 questions before creating your brand video strategy you will see new possibilities and opportunities. This will mean you are able to create video content that will give your audience an unique angle on a common problem. The feedback you have gotten in your audience research, combined with your new insights to their problems and where they reside online will help you create video content that is more relevant to the way your audience lives their lives.