Video can be a powerful marketing tool. But it isn’t a marketing strategy.
That distinction matters.
Before deciding that your business needs a video, it’s worth stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. Who are you trying to reach? What are you trying to achieve? Which channels are already working? Where are the gaps? And how are you going to know whether any of it is successful?
Once you’ve answered those questions, you can decide whether video is the right tool for the job.
Get the basics right first
For a small business, I’d generally want the foundations of the marketing in place before investing significantly in video.
That means understanding your market and your audience, having a reasonably clear proposition and knowing which channels you’re going to use to reach people.
It also means having the practical pieces in place.
If you’re planning to run a paid campaign using video but the landing page you’re sending people to doesn’t work particularly well, fixing the landing page might be the better investment.
If you haven’t set up any way of tracking what happens when people arrive there, we’re also going to struggle to establish whether the campaign worked.
Good marketing is rarely about doing something once and hoping for the best. You develop a strategy, try things, measure what happens and make adjustments based on what you learn.
Video needs to sit within that process.
Strategy first. Tactics second.
I tend to think of video as a tactic.
Your marketing strategy sits above it.
The strategy establishes who you’re trying to reach, what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re going to position the business. From there, you can decide which tactics are most likely to help.
That might include video, but it could also include email marketing, paid advertising, social media, print, networking, partnerships or something else entirely.
For some businesses, building a good email list and communicating with it regularly might be considerably more valuable than commissioning a film. Email is relatively inexpensive and gives you a direct way of staying in touch with an audience that has already chosen to hear from you.
Likewise, before investing heavily in video for social media, it might make sense to test some of your ideas with simpler static content first. If particular messages consistently attract attention, that’s useful information when you start investing in more expensive content.
The important thing is not to decide on the tactic before you’ve understood the problem.
Where video is particularly useful
There are some things video does exceptionally well.
People are one of them.
For relationship-based businesses, video gives potential customers an opportunity to see and hear the people they may eventually be working with. That’s difficult to reproduce with a paragraph of website copy and a headshot.
It can also be very good at making complicated subjects easier to understand. Several pages of information about a professional service might be much easier to digest when somebody explains it clearly in a two or three-minute film, supported by useful visuals.
And then there’s the more emotional end of marketing.
Food and drink, tourism, events and other aspirational products are naturally visual. If you’re trying to inspire, entertain or give somebody a sense of an experience, moving images and sound give you a lot to work with.
But none of that means video is automatically the right answer.
Video can work at different stages of the customer journey
There’s no single point in the marketing funnel where video belongs.
At one end, I’ve seen short, fast-moving video work extremely well in Meta feeds. Someone might know nothing about the business, so the film has perhaps ten seconds to interrupt what they’re doing and earn some attention.
Further through the journey, the job can be completely different.
Someone researching a professional service might happily spend several minutes watching an explainer or customer case study because they’re already considering their options. At that point, detail and reassurance become much more important than grabbing attention.
This is why understanding where somebody is in the buying journey matters when planning video. Pasted text
Put those films the wrong way round and neither works particularly well.
A five-minute explainer is a big ask for somebody who has never heard of you. A 20-second advert probably isn’t much use to somebody who is close to making a significant purchasing decision and needs detailed information.
The content needs to match the moment.
How do you know whether the video worked?
Again, there isn’t a universal answer.
Views might matter for one campaign and be almost irrelevant for another.
If the objective is broad awareness, reach and viewing figures might tell us something useful. If you’re driving people to a landing page, we might be more interested in clicks, enquiries or conversions.
For a B2B business with a long sales cycle, it can become more complicated.
Someone might see a film, visit the website several times, speak to somebody from the business and eventually become a customer months later. No single statistic necessarily tells the whole story.
Sometimes the simplest solution is to ask.
A question during the sales process or a short questionnaire for new customers asking how they discovered you and what influenced their decision can reveal things that analytics alone won’t.
The important thing is deciding what success might look like before you make the film. Measuring and reviewing the results then gives you something useful to feed into the next piece of marketing activity. Pasted text
Sometimes video isn’t the next thing you need
This is something I’m quite happy to tell a client.
My background is in marketing as well as video production, so if I think there are more fundamental things to address before spending money on a film, I’d rather have that conversation first.
Perhaps your proposition isn’t clear. Perhaps you’re not sure which customers you should be targeting. Perhaps your website needs work. Or perhaps you’ve been doing lots of different marketing activities without really knowing which ones are producing results.
In that situation, stepping back and looking at the whole marketing picture can make more sense.
[Find out about my marketing audit and strategy work at DavidKilkelly.com]
The aim is to identify where the gaps are, decide what needs attention and develop a strategy before choosing the individual tactics.
Video might turn out to be part of the answer.
It might not.
Start with the strategy, then choose the tools
A good video doesn’t exist in isolation.
It has an audience, an objective, a place within the customer journey and a way of reaching the people it was made for.
Get those things right and video can be an extremely effective part of your marketing.
Get them wrong and even a beautifully produced film can end up sitting on YouTube with 20 views or buried on page nine of a website.
So if you’re thinking about investing in video, start one step earlier.
Work out what you’re trying to achieve. Then decide whether video is the right way to help you achieve it.