Video Marketing Strategy Part 1 – Setting Goals

Want to know how to grow your business with video marketing? Do you want to create a video content marketing strategy for your business? In this series, we walk you through the process of creating a video marketing strategy, from the ground up.

Goals are critical to any video marketing campaign, if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish with a campaign, how can you determine whether it has been a success or a failure?

So, if you want to create video content that will really benefit your business and deliver you actual ROI, you need to keep it locked right here.

In this video series, I will take you through the vital planning steps which will allow you to build that critical foundation from which to build your video content. Without this planning stage, you risk producing video in a scattergun way, with no focus on audience or business goals, videos which ultimately may cost you money and time, but ultimately won’t perform in the way that you want or need as a business.

Questions you ask before starting a video marketing

Before you go anywhere near pressing record on your video, you need to do some strategic thinking in terms of what the role of video is in your business. So first up, ask yourself, what do you need more of in your business right now? What is missing that you want video marketing to help you achieve?

Video is such a powerful medium, it can be used for so many things, it’s really important that you zero in on what results you’d like your video content to deliver for you. This will determine the kind of content that you need to produce, and in turn, will inform the audience you need to target with your video content. Making sure you’re clear, crystal clear, about your goals, really does determine the direction of so many aspects of your video marketing strategy, so it’s really, really worthwhile investing time in digging down and asking yourself these questions, and getting clear answers, which will point your way forward.

• What does your business need more of? What are you currently lacking? Do you need more people coming through your doors? Is your business not working well because you’ve not got enough volume in terms of custom?
• Are you at capacity customer wise, but are you missing opportunities within your sales process to increase the value of sales you’re making per client that come through your door?
• Are you struggling to get repeat clients, which is such a powerful way of creating a sustainable business, so you need to encourage your clients to return more often?
• In a nutshell, are you after more traffic and awareness, more customer spend per client, or increasing the lifetime value of your clients?

Now, it could be that your business needs more than one of those things, in which case, that’s fine, but you do need to prioritise and formulate a plan more widely in terms of business development that enables you to concentrate on and tackle your goals one at a time.

Creating SMART goals

So, within the basic three areas of business optimization, there are a myriad of ways to create and structure video campaigns to help meet those goals, the point is, once you understand and have clarity over what it is you want to achieve with your video content, the more likely you are to be able to create video content that will get you there.

• Specific, so the goal is clearly understood.
• Measurable, the goal and progress towards it can be measured.
• Achievable, the goal is actually realistic.
• Relevant, the goal aligns with your marketing strategy.
• Timely, the goal is bound by a specific timeframe.

So by using the SMART goals, you can put in place measurable outcomes that you want to achieve and then put a timescale on it. So the bottom line here is we’re transforming an overall business objective, for example, we need more customers/traffic into our business, into something smaller and much more measurable, almost on a campaign level.

So let’s assume we want to get more customers into our business, using the SMART goal system, we would end up with a goal like, we want to increase our monthly web traffic by 50% from Facebook by the end of this financial year.

So that is specific, there’s no mistaking, we’re talking about web traffic, and that is what the goal is about. It’s measurable, web visitors are easily measurable with analytics and such like. It’s achievable, 50% increase over 12 months, that’s realistic. It’s relevant, increasing web traffic from Facebook or a social platform is a desired video marketing result. And it’s timely, this goal must be achieved by the end of the financial year, so you’ve put a definitive date on it.

So by distilling our overall goals like this, we’ve ended up with actionable, measurable targets that we can then create video content and video campaigns around to hit.

Also, the fact that we’ve set a timeline to all this too means that we can track our progress towards that goal over time.

If you want to find out even more about our production company, check out our free YouTube resource.