Video marketing isn’t just about the video

Journey

JourneyAnyone who has made an online video will usually agree that it can be an exciting project to complete. The nature of the format means that there is planning, script writing, the actual production and then the big moment when the video is previewed. This is all rather fun, and so it is no surprise to see just how easy it is to forget about the bigger picture.

As much as we love video, we have to remember that it is part of a journey. You viewer will most likely have already completed a search, followed a link or viewed a social media post. The video will often be the content, created to engage, inspire and inform. The final stage will be an action, this could be a purchase, a subscription, completing a form or making another type of commitment. This means that the video has to be planned with all the stages of the journey in mind.

The majority of projects we complete at Bitpod start with one question; ‘what should the viewer do after they have watched the video?’. This question helps our clients to consider the viewers journey and to remember that without the input and the output stages, the video is not part of an overall marketing strategy. This question also rather handily prevents solutions from being determined too early (‘viral’ videos such as parodies, spoofs, gotchas and so on), these one-off YouTube hits can serve as a serious and damaging distraction to an effective campaign.

Obviously your video content needs to be good, it therefore needs to be interesting, of the optimum length and created in such a way as to inspire the viewer to take a positive action. However, this post makes the assumption that you know this and instead urges you to consider the whole journey from start to finish, in some cases the journey may be different, longer or shorter. The important point is that the majority of the time your video is part of something bigger and therefore needs to be thought of as part of your overall marketing strategy.