How To Execute Your Video Content Strategy

Here at Station Break we understand what a difficult process video advertising is! We want to share with you a few steps to help execute your video content strategy from The Content Marketing Institute, from choosing the right distribution channels to helping your video go viral and analyzing the results. 

1. Execution. After you've planned your video content campaign, including defining the objectives, target market, video style, length, and tone, you're ready to begin production! First, break your overall campaign down into single messages and create one video per message. Craft a storyboard around your key message, and don't forget to include an introduction, a problem, a resolution, and a call to action! Then, call in the professionals- us! 

2. Choose the right distribution channels. Consider your options- of course your video should at least be on YouTube and your own website. These platforms do have limitations, and therefore you need to look for a more focused, business-centric distribution channel that gives you more control over how you capture leads, encourage direct sales, and represent your brand around the video. Ideally, what you should be looking for is a hub where executives go to specifically educate themselves about new developments in their industry, watch business videos, and build connections in their market. Some cross-industry platforms that may work for you include BrightTalk, SlideShare, and Xavy.

3. Encourage people to watch your videos. You can do this in several ways. 

1. Use SEO (search engine optimization) to help people find you on your chosen channels: your video needs to have some core components: title with key buzzwords, tag your video with key buzzwords, etc.  
2. Tell them why they should watch it. You need to give people enough information to realize to help them decide its relevance to them. 
3. Offer social proof to overcome their skepticism

A big problem with video is that people skim-read headlines, but you cannot skim-read a video. This is why a good synopsis is important! You can bullet-point or summarize the plot points of the video. It's important to be accurate with your synopsis as well- people will stop watching your video if it is not about what they thought it was! 

Utilizing social proof is another way to get people to view your video. You can use “likes,” number of views, vote rankings, comments, etc. to show them that others found it useful. As they see support for the content, they will be more likely to trust it as a useful source of information. 

4. Help it spread virally. After someone watches your video, the next stage is to encourage them to send it around their network, creating a viral effect that could reduce your own marketing costs and increase the number of views. Ask your viewers to share at the end of the video- make it a call to action! Equally important is to make it as easy for them to share as possible. You need to provide quick share buttons to a variety of social networks as well as email. There are 5 main themes that are most effective in getting a viewer to share a video:

• Controversy: Controversy can simply be going against the established wisdom of your industry by making bold statements, but controversy always courts interest and spreads fast. 
• Humor: People love to share funny videos with friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, genuinely funny is perhaps the hardest of all these suggestions to do well, so make sure you test it quite widely before doing a “general release,” otherwise you’ll end up with people laughing at you, not with you. 
• Novelty: Anything out of the ordinary or remarkable will always get people sharing, just so they can be the ones who helped everyone else “discover” it. 
• Utility: If your videos help executives with a specific problem, give advice, or explore future trends, they are likely to be shared with their colleagues who face similar challenges. 
• Ego: People love to share videos that feature themselves. Interviews, talking heads and montages are all good ways to capture third parties, who are then more likely to share them with their friends and colleagues. Be somewhat wary of this approach, though, because if the content isn’t very good, then it won’t spread much beyond that first degree of separation.  

5. Maximize your video's impact. Consider 3 main ways to enhance your video's impact on your overall marketing strategy:

• Make it part of a multichannel campaign with white papers, research, blogging, etc., so that there are multiple touch points and media that executives can engage with. 
• Try to time your campaigns around your events calendar. Release your videos in the month leading up to the event, so they help create buzz and build awareness before you get there. 
• Don’t rely on YouTube as your only distribution channel. Get it up on your own website, and definitely consider business-specific content portals, where executives go to watch professional content, and it will be easier to get your content discovered by the right people. 

6. Analyze your results. Of course your campaign's success depends on what your goals are. 

• Sales and revenue: In theory, this should be the number 1 outcome for any commercial company. So how do you analyze the performance of a video when your outcome is to generate more sales and revenue? You can do something like this: Let’s say the video cost you $1,000 and you got 20,000 views. That cost you 5 cents a view. If you converted 5 percent into a lead, then it cost you $1 per lead. Let’s say 70 percent of those leads are time wasters or gave you bad data; so you’re left with a cost of $3.33 per lead. Then maybe your sales team converts 10 percent of those leads into a sale, so each sale cost you $33.33. Let’s say each sale is worth $500 to you over a customer lifetime (which is a very small amount in B2B sales). Then the ROI of the campaign is 1,400 percent. Not a bad return on investment at all!
• Leads: Perhaps you’re judging your marketing team based on the effectiveness of your videos in generating them in the first place. To measure the success of this, there are a number of options. You could look at the total number of leads a video generates vs. some other form of marketing. You could look at quality of leads, man-hours to leads generated to see how time-efficient they are, or you could measure what types of leads they generate vs.other channels. 
• Market engagement: Perhaps your purpose was not to generate leads, but to create a conversation around your products and brand, and get engaged with your market. There are three reasonably simple ways to measure this. The first is to take the total number of views and find out the average length of a view, so that you have some measure of viewers’ engagement in the content. The second is to compare how many mentions your brand gets before, and then after, the video has been released, across the media channels you watch. Finally, you might look at how many comments it has generated on your site to gauge whether it has been successful at generating a conversational response.
• Brand awareness: You may care most about brand awareness, in which case you’ll have four main metrics to measure: total number of views, number of shares, number of mentions, and brand recollection (how many people are familiar with your brand before, and then after, your campaign? 

7. Repeat! You can read more at The Content Marketing Institute site, and good luck!