It’s January 2nd (obviously at the time of writing!) and we’re all in a strange limbo between excitement for the year ahead and devastation that we’re back at work. New Year’s resolutions are being made aplenty but have you got a plan to do more this year with video marketing?
We appreciate that every good business will have a budget and business plan in place, you don’t just go from week to week deciding what to do, but you might not have specific items allocated against your marketing budget. If you’re about to put your 2018 – 2019 budget together, here are some things to consider when identifying how to spend, or allocate, your budget specifically for video production.
Think of the year as a series of video campaign opportunities.
You may be selling a product or a service, but inevitably you will have a time of year that is more fruitful than others. For instance hotels are busy for weddings in the summer and Christmas parties in December. It’s no good creating a video in June, or November as weddings and party nights will already be booked up. You need to produce these videos in January and August with a plan for video marketing shortly after production to secure the bookings at the right time.
Think about the months and seasons of the year and what your client base might be interested in, then plan to have the video in place to launch around that time. For example:
- Spring
- Easter
- Summer and winter solstice
- Christmas
- World Cup
- Olympics
- Other major sporting events (Wimbledon / Grand Prix / Ryder Cup / Super Bowl / Etc)
- New Year
- National ‘something’ day related to your industry or clients (amazing Wikipedia list here)
- May day
- School sports days
- Halloween
- Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes Night
- General and local elections
- Chinese New Year
- Back to school
- Hogmanay
- Burns Night
- Eid
- Diwali
- Other religious festivals and occasions
- Valentines day
- April Fools day
- Independence day (USA – if you have a US client base)
- GCSE / A Level results day
- Harvest festival
- January dieting and health drives
This list isn’t exhaustive by any means, but gives you a sense of how to create a video, beyond that of a ‘normal corporate video’ to stand out and hold relevance for your target audience. For instance, a couple of years ago we thought we’d celebrate Easter by doing a silly video on how many Cadbury’s Creme Eggs the team could eat in a minute. It was designed to be a bit of fun but to show people our capabilities as a video production company.
Square Daisy Easter Challenge from Square Daisy on Vimeo.
Nationwide have also started to put together a series of absolutely fantastic videos which are really quirky, launched at Christmas with the ‘Crimbo Limbo’ song (which is amazing!) and then followed up with a series of others.
Work with an agency on an ongoing basis over the year
It won’t have escaped you that video production and video marketing is on the rise, with more and more companies looking to use it as a medium to widen their reach and deliver their message more quickly. Often this means creating one or two videos when needed, but sometimes having a longer term strategy of video production and video deployment is a more successful way to achieve better results.
Establish what budget you would like to allocate to video production over the year, what you would ideally like to put out there and then establish with the agency how to get the most video content possible for that budget, in line with release dates that will resonate with your client base. Now of course it isn’t about quantity over quality, but if you can make the budget stretch further and produce more great video content to push out, it will achieve better return on investment for you.
If you work with an agency over a longer period of time it allows you to find these efficiencies, cross fertilising filming dates or graphics across several video productions, by planning in advance what you’re going to do.
Not all of your video content needs to be professionally produced
We always suggest to our clients that they should blog regularly, ideally once a week. We also suggest that one in four of these blogs should be a video blog. These don’t necessarily need to be professionally produced, because let’s be honest, that would be ridiculously expensive. Instead consider doing a Vlog using your webcam or your phone or tablet. There are lots of decent editing options out there for novices, such as iMovie, VideoPad or Movie Maker.
A couple of simple examples- An ex -colleague and very good friend of mine is a really successful blogger, and while a great deal of her blogs are traditional text and imagery, she kicks out a good amount of Vlogs which are so much more effective in certain situations.
Another of our clients is a premium marquee company, like really high end kit. One of the main barriers to people organising a marquee for their milestone occasion is that they see marquees as a glorified tent, that will be cold, windy and leak. Having a short video filmed on a phone on a windy day that allows a viewer to hear the wind outside the marquee but then walking in and hearing the relative silence, or showing a thermometer outside the marquee and then having one inside to show the warmth – enable the key messages to be much more effectively communicated rather than traditional words and images.
If you’d like to talk to a video production company about your industry and sector, the kind of things that would resonate with your audience at different times of the year and the best way of delivering them, either using live action video, animated video or a combination of both, then get in touch as we’d love to throw some ideas around with you.
Happy New Year and here’s to a great 2018 with a great video content plan!
