All too often we encounter businesses and non-profits that make the same mistake time and time again. They hire a video production company to produce a single marketing video promoting their product, service or brand for the entire year. This may be better than no video marketing, but it will have a short life cycle. The key to marketing is consistency. Start thinking of a campaign of videos time-released over the course of the entire year.
Budgeting Your Campaign
What messages do you want to tell your audience this year? What stories would you like to share? You can start off by figuring out your annual budget for video marketing and explore what is possible. It could be a bunch of simple videos, a few highly produced videos with basic videos in-between, etc.
Are you looking to limit your budget or testing the waters to see what’s working? I would suggest starting with many simple videos so you can get more traction through out the year. I understand if you need to get that first “About Us” video on your home page. If so, start with that and create a goal to build your campaign after. As you find whats working best you’ll begin to see the return on investment building through the year. You’ll discover what’s working and what’s not working as well. Then you decide how to grow the next year. The main idea is to follow a successful video marketing strategy that you can scale every year. The more you invest, the more business will grow.
Still not sure how effective video marketing is compared to other forms of marketing? You can simply google it or visit one of many articles that share incredible stats like this one from Video Brewery.
Limit Your Lengths
Limit your lengths of each video. 30 second videos with a single message can be powerful. 60 second videos are great. Even 2 minute videos can deliver phenomenal response. Once you venture into the 3+ minute land, you may start to play with fire. If you produce longer videos, make sure they’re produced better with engaging stories. Here is an interesting article from ReelSEO about how length does matter.
At Pennylane, we see the same mistake all the time. Companies try to squeeze too many messages into one video. They’re afraid that the viewer will not understand everything they need to know to become a customer. This is untrue because most viewers will never watch the entire video if there are too many messages. By spreading your messages out over multiple shorter videos, you will be able to accomplish much more:
- Create a higher impact for each individual video
- Show the customer how to focus on core messaging
- Have a better retention rate on videos which helps your SEO
- Building your library by adding videos to your annual campaign (which you need to do anyway)
So to wrap it up, simplify each video message and think of your master plan for the year, not for a single video.
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