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

Telling a Story

The video shown below from General Electric tells a story about something awesome that the company is doing. If you can craft a story around it, that's another great way to create a marketing video. In this example, they talk about Grid IQ, which is a technology that they were marketing at the time the video was created. The production value doesn’t need to be on that level, but the method is key: They're telling a unique story around something that their company is doing.

Agile Marketing

Another way to create content is to think about agile marketing. The idea is to be able to quickly respond to something that's trending or a newsworthy topic. It's the ability to create something quick to catch onto the buzz of something huge. Everybody remembers the Volvo epic split, one of the most popular online videos of the year. Capitalizing on the popularity of that video, the team marketing the new action movie 22 Jump Street did a parody video with star Channing Tatum to promote the film.

A lot of companies took advantage of popularity of the viral First Kiss video with parodies and takeoffs highlighting their brand. One of the best examples was CollegeHumor’s First Sandwich (below). I'm not recommending that everyone go out and make a parody video--and it’s important, if you’re going to try it, to do it well--but if it makes sense for your brand, it’s one way to leveraging an existing trend to create effective content for your brands.

Just to recap what we’ve discussed in this installment on content: You want to make sure that you're creating good content that your audience wants. You want to make sure you have a specific goal for each online video that you produce. You want to make sure you're creating an editorial calendar that aligns with your other marketing efforts throughout the year. And finally, you want to also evaluate ways to make your content relevant and fun.