How to Make a Video Part I: Strategic Planning

Nowadays, marketers rely heavily on videos to create a buzz about their products, services, and brands. And why not? Video marketing is a highly effective and efficient method of delivering your message to the world. Most people would rather watch a video than read text. In fact, all over the globe, people spend more than 6 billion hours watching online videos every month. That's equivalent to almost an hour for each person on the planet. Another fun fact: video-sharing website YouTube is the second most used search engine, right after Google.

In this digital age, many companies use video marketing because it can be time efficient and cost effective. (Uploading a promotional video onto websites doesn't take much time and is often free of charge.) Although a video might be easy to upload, creating videos that engage consumers can sometimes be a challenge. There are 5 aspects of video marketing and they all require substantial amount of work. They are strategic planning, pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution.

This blog will outline what is required in the Strategic Planning stage:

Decide on Your Purpose

As Stephen Covey says, “Begin with the end in mind.” Every video can’t do everything, and before you start writing your script, it’s important to decide what you want your video to do for your company. Ask yourself, “What do I want to achieve?” You can then pick one primary goal and generate a strategy from there. Examples of goals might include generating awareness for your brand or increasing sales of a specific product. Choosing your overall goal will also help you decide on what your message is. You can then tailor the video to communicate a clear and specific message to your viewers.

Define Your Audience

Not all video content is appropriate for all audiences, so you need to decide who your target audience is. Marketing campaigns often fail because they did not focus on their target viewers; hence their content seemed either irrelevant or too broad. Make sure that your goal of your video is aligned with the most important people in your business -- your prospective customers.

Building a buyer persona will simplify the process. To do this, determine the imaginary profiles of your customers by establishing their age, gender, income, and preferences. This will help you narrow down their wants and needs and anticipate what kind of content will be suitable for them. Moreover, once you’ve figured out who your audience is, you can decide on what kind of platform you will use to deliver your video to them, for example, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs, or your own website.

Organize Your Budget, Timeline, and Marketing

Planning also involves budgeting for your video. It is important to decide on the amount of money you want to invest on this endeavor, because this budget will guide you it determining your limitations. Make sure that you also set a timeline. At this stage, you’ll mainly decide when you must shoot, edit, and distribute the video, and you’ll organize your production schedule at a later stage. Make sure you provide allowances to compensate for unforeseen events, though. You may also want to pre-determine your distribution and marketing strategy, which primarily involves how you are going to share and promote your video.

Ready to learn about planning your script and the logistics of your video? Click for Part II.