With any type of content you produce for online consumption, what you’re actually trying to achieve is extremely important. The trouble with many businesses is that they produce video content without considering their objectives deeply enough.
Getting your focus right can mean the difference between achieving a good return on investment or none at all.
Here are four important factors that should ensure you set the right objectives for your business or organisation:
- What is the Problem?
You want your video to do something, not just sit there online gathering digital dust. What problem are you trying to solve?
It’s not always about selling your product. You might want to improve engagement with your company and get employees motivated. Perhaps you want to introduce some kind of training to ensure that staff are all up to speed in specific areas.
Maybe you do want to create greater brand awareness for your customers. What do they want to see? How do you need to present yourself? And maybe you have a brand-new product about to be launched and want to reach a whole new audience.
Identifying the exact problem that you want to solve with your video content is the first step to setting strong objectives. Without it you’re nowhere.
- Your Company Goals
The next thing you need to do is understand how this one particular problem/objective fits in with your overall company goals. This can go a long way to identifying what you video content really needs to achieve in order to be successful.
- Finding a Solution
It can take some work to find the right solution to any particular problem. There may be other research involved that will inform the type of video content which is going to work. The key here is to carry out an old-fashioned SMART analysis to delve deeper into your objective and really nail it down.
- Your objective needs to be Specific – the woollier it is the more difficult it is to solve and implement a solution. Simple, clear and focused objectives work better.
- It should be Measurable – there needs to be some analytic process that tells you whether you have achieved your objective or not.
- It needs to be Achievable – for instance, do you have the capabilities in house or even the budget to achieve the objective in the first place?
- Your objective should be relevant – it needs to mean something for your company and gel with your goals and ambitions.
- Finally, it should be time-bound – it should be achievable within a reasonably acceptable time period.
If you’re objective can answer the questions raised by all these criteria, then the chances are it is worth persevering with. One issue, of course, is whether video is the right medium to deliver the results that you are looking for.
- Measure Your Success
This is going to depend on what you are trying to achieve. If you want to increase the number of leads to your business, it can be relatively easy to measure. If you are hoping to improve the quality of your service by delivering video training, measurement can be a little more nuanced but not impossible.
Setting the right objectives and understanding their importance is key when developing video content, not least because it tends to be more expensive than many other options. Spending time in the planning stage to flesh out these goals will save you a lot of time and money (and heartache) and ensure you have content that is fit for purpose and achieves what you want it to from the minute you upload it.