Ultimate Advice on Video
Day 15 of my video challenge and today I give ultimate advice on how to make video work for you.
I have worked with hundreds of businesses and made thousands of videos over the last 15 years, and I see most companies a video seems to be a one-off event. The attitude is, “We’ll make a video when we need one”. I think in this day and age, if you look at the stats, see how video is dominating the social media channels and looking at the engagement you get from video content. I think as a marketing manager; you need to include video as part of your strategy, of your overall marketing strategy, rather than seeing video as just something as a “We’ll do it when we need it.” The best way to start doing this is to allocate some money towards it. When you do your annual marketing budget, make sure you include a budget for video, not just one video, but by creating a series of videos. This will help focus the mind on working out what content you need, so when you go out to video producers, to say that we’re looking at an annual spend of this, see what kind of deal or negotiation you can get with the company.
The second part is that when you have this video content, is to make sure that it’s being viewed in by the target audience, one of the best ways to do that now is through paid-for promotion. It is not enough just to put the video on YouTube and website and do some social media posts You need to amplify by placing some money behind some Facebook ads, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. There are lots of opportunities now for doing that. When it comes to paid-for promotion, I suggest allocating about 20% of the production budget. For example, your production budget is $10,000, set aside at least $2000 of that for paid-for promotions. The main point is to test it to see how it works out. You may be surprised how well it works and how you can actually really reach a new audience and can be so targeted in what you’re doing.
My big tip is to make sure you’ve got a video strategy and have a budget for the year. Here is a link to our guide to making sure you get a return of investment on video.