One of the first things you need to be aware of when planning a digital marketing campaign is that the format you choose matters nearly as much as the content itself. You see, only 2 out of 10 people will read past the headline, which doesn’t leave you with a lot. One of the reasons behind this is the fact that text isn’t a mobile-friendly format, which in the world where mobile devices are preferred tools for web browsing definitely isn’t a positive thing. For this reason alone, you might have a better shot switching to video. Here are a few tips for a successful video campaign.
1. Write the idea down
Before you even start shooting, it is vital that you write some of your ideas down. In fact, you don’t even have to start with the video at all and during this first draft, you can focus on your goals and expectations for this video. Next, you need to determine who the audience is, seeing how this might determine the tone and even the voice of your narrative. After this, you need to have a topic and themes, no matter how short your video is. Most importantly, you need to have an efficient call-to-action. Even if this is the only thing you manage to do in this brainstorming stage, pulling this off early in the process can be considered as a significant success.
2. Make a budget
Once you are done with your initial idea you need to make a budget for the video. Sure, people make YouTube videos every day with no production costs whatsoever, however, for a corporate video, this is simply unacceptable. Even if you make your campaign deliberately amateurish-looking in order to get that look of spontaneity, the value of your production needs to be held to a certain standard.
Here, you need to consider the costs of the editing, actors, camera (if you don’t have one so you have to buy or rent it), locations, props, stock footage and many other factors. The problem with this is that with no previous experience in corporate video production, you most likely won’t know where to start, which is why you might want to contact experts in the field of video production and inquire a bit on this topic.
3. Organize your team
Regardless if you are doing this in-house or outsourcing your video campaign in its entirety, this is simply too much work for a single person to handle. What this means is that you have to delegate various duties to your team members or even give one of them the title of an assistant during the shooting. Still, before you even start, it is vital that you make a great team, which on its own, isn’t a simple task. Make sure to handpick people according to their skills and predispositions, seeing how this will help them give it their best.
There are a few other things you also need to have in mind. For instance, while a triumph of the video campaign may bring great benefits to your business, this doesn’t have to be a strong incentive for your team. This is why, you might want to talk about individual or team rewards upon the successful completion. Finally, you need to give your team a great deal of autonomy, which usually means holding back your impulse to micro-manage everything they do.
4. A product or customer based, that is the question
Once you have these technical issues out of the way, you need to determine whether your campaign will be product or customer-based. By making this choice, you will decide where to put the emphasis during the video and therefore completely change the nature of it. Going with product-based requires you know your company in and out and play around your corporate strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, the customer-based approach requires you to do an extensive market research and get acquainted with all the demographics you are trying to approach.
5. An attempt at going viral
Finally, while some may argue that there is no rule to what goes viral, there are more than a few methods that are known to work. First, you need to do some research on other videos that went viral in the previous few months (preferably in your industry). Next, you need to embrace the idea that you will have to shamelessly self-promote and ask others to do so in your stead. Keep in mind that if you want to go viral you can’t be too good for marketing. Finally, it has been known that releases on Mondays and Tuesdays usually meet the most success and even this subtle edge can sometimes make all the difference.
Conclusion
As you can see, creating a great video for your product placement requires more than just creativity and imagination. It also needs you to have a highly developed sense for marketing and business in general, as well as some exceptional organizational skills. Luckily, for those persistent and determined enough, these things come in time.