Developing an Online Video Marketing Strategy, Part 1: Creating Content

In this three-part series on developing, delivering, and leveraging online video for marketing purposes, we’ll begin in this first installment with a look at creating content for market videos. In Part 2, we'll segue into the production cycle and how you can think about your marketing strategy during the production phase so you’re producing with marketing in mind. In Part 3, we'll get into distribution channels and talk about analytics and metrics and how those can help you can continue to improve your videos down the line.

Most of us who create online video professionally are familiar with the power of online video to promote a company or brand. It's quickly becoming one of the largest forms of content marketing out there.

It Starts With Content

How do you start creating an online video marketing strategy? It begins with content. What does your audience want? How can you create something that's going to help them and impel them to engage with your videos? It starts with good content. The first thing is to figure out what you want to accomplish with your videos, and develop a single call-to-action for each video. There's not a one-size-fits-all approach with online video.

Every video you produce should be created for a specific reason, whether it’s a how-to video designed to educate or train, or an informational piece intended to raise awareness about a cause or demonstrate a new product. Regardless of the format or purpose, it starts with figuring out what your audience wants, needs, and will respond to. Sometimes that requires involving different players and departments in your organization, whether it's your public relations team, your marketing team, or your sales team. In different ways, all of these people have direct dialogue with your audience, and thus they can be instrumental in helping you figure out what your audience wants.

Developing an Editorial Calendar

Once you've figured out what you're going to create, it's important to establish and create an editorial and content calendar to make sure that your online videos are aligning with your organization’s other marketing efforts. Online video marketing is just an extension of your traditional marketing, so you want to make sure that throughout the calendar year you're creating content that's going to match up with those efforts.

Again, this may require getting all the players involved (sales, marketing, PR, and so on). If you're a small business, then you just have to put on different hats and think about how your video is going to get the most bang for its buck.

Using SEO

After you’ve developed some concrete ideas about the content you’re going to create and sketched out an editorial calendar, your next step is to take a look at some examples of how some of the best online video producers are creating content. One of the best ways is using SEO. One example of the effective use of SEO comes from campaign that we worked on with a company called Tether Tools that manufactures equipment and gear for people shooting tethered photography and video.

Not only did we find out what it was their audience was searching for online through keywords, we created a campaign of videos that offered a solution to these people's problems. We used keywords to create this campaign of videos. We also found a quick and easy way to show how their product line comes together and again offers a solution to these people's questions. Using SEO was a great way to create content. Again, one of the keys to developing effective marketing video is to identify a need and fill it. Look at what the problems are in your space. If you have a product or a service that can offer a solution, then create a video on it.