Video takes a lot of time to produce. It’s a fact. No matter how much experience you have, it is still quite a time-consuming process, unless you’re jumping on a live and just streaming it as it is.
However, the nature of the process shouldn’t stop you from using videos – you most probably know yourself how effective the use of video content is.
The good news is, there are ways to make video marketing simple. Here’s how…
Alongside the 3 P’s of Video Marketing Strategy you’ve learnt about in one of our previous posts, which help make sure your efforts bring results (see here if you missed them), I’ve formulated 6 of my own “golden rules” for successfully planning and implementing video marketing strategy in the most efficient way.
I find that it’s simply not enough to let people know what they need to do, but they need to know how to do it and implement this new knowledge. I’ve seen so many cases when people go through training and would produce fabulous videos to then post just a couple of those (if at all).
Now I noticed they are much more likely to post regularly when they understand how to implement strategy in the most efficient yet least painful way.
The 6 Golden Rules to Creating Successful Video Marketing Strategy
Rule #1- Choose a Theme
When you want to start creating your content videos, think about which theme you’re going to be covering. I always recommend that you try to focus on one theme for a month and produce enough content to cover the whole month of posts. This can be a combination of all sorts of content alongside videos, which we’ll speak about in the next rule.
For example, if you’re a virtual assistant, you can be talking about how to create a newsletter that people actually read and enjoy. So the idea is for the entire month, you’ll be mainly speaking about newsletters and different tips and tricks on how to make them valuable and interesting – not just selling and spamming people’s inboxes.
If, for example, you’re a jewellery designer, then maybe you want to speak about a very specific type of gem that you use to create jewellery with or a very specific kind of technique and how it manifests itself in jewellery. It can be the same technique applied in different ways, or 4 different techniques/gems you cover weekly. The sky’s the limit.
The idea is you should stay away from just randomly creating videos, but actually linking them with some sort of theme so that you have more than one video on a specific topic that you will be covering. It makes your content look more coherent, helps create consistency and also makes it more interesting to follow.
Rule #2 – Plan All of Your Social Media Content
The second rule is to plan all of your social media content ahead and if you are using videos for blogs and newsletters, then plan those as well.
Basically, the idea here is to have different kinds of content to make your social media cater for different types of followers and make it look varied and more interesting, too. You’ll want to be using video marketing along with other strategies.
Video is very effective and it’s an amazingly beautiful tool to use, but you still need to combine it with other kinds of content if you want to achieve more with your social media strategy. People like watching videos, yes, but they also like variety.
During your planning stage, think about if you’re going to post a lot of text, or stories, or if you’re going to use any pictures, or infographics, etc.
How many videos are you going to be using in your strategy? And how often? Is it once a week? Is it twice a week? Is it every single day?
How does all of that content link together to create a theme and add different aspects to what you are covering in your posts?
There’s no “right” answer so don’t stress about getting it right, it all depends on your individual strategy and how you want to do it. The questions are there to guide you and help you understand what you post and why and choose the right types of content.
It’s important to consider all of this because you’ll need to combine all those types of content to make one cohesive strategy. If you’re planning to post on Instagram, for example, then you’ll need to take into account how your grid is going to look and think about how you are going to combine that with your videos.
Rule #3 – Break It Down Into Bite-Sized Pieces
Big chunks of content are hard for your audience to digest, you need to break them down into bite-sized pieces.
Remember that with each video you create, you don’t have to try and explain everything. For example, if you’re giving tips as a marketing professional, then don’t go into giving out all of the marketing plan or the entire method of a launch strategy in one single video that you hope will get you 5 new clients.
Instead, give 3 of your top tips on how to create an effective launch strategy. Then you can go into creating a video for each tip or something along those lines.
Focus on making each piece of content really, really digestible for your audience. Remember that the information you’ve been mastering for years is completely new to your viewers and they need to learn this new information in small doses.
Additionally, they’ll need to hear the same information a few times before they actually take it on board – so if you feel like you’re repeating yourself, that’s alright!
If you’re covering topics like tips or tricks within your niche, then I normally advise you to just cover one of these per video. This gives you quite a few advantages when it comes to your video marketing strategy, too. For example…
If you come up with 4 tips to share with your audience, you can potentially have 4 different videos – so one month’s worth of content covered! This also keeps your audience looking out for more, which we’ll cover below.
Finally, this creates a theme we’ve been talking about and makes it much easier for your viewers to digest and build upon things they’ve already learned from you. This will also give you the perfect sized video to make all of that happen without you thinking about it too much.
Bite-sized videos are short in length, so aim to create videos of up to 60 seconds. This may not seem like a lot of time, but the truth is, unless you have a huge following and people really, really like watching your videos when you explain something for a long time or they are interactive, people don’t tend to watch for much longer than that. (Next time you watch someone talking at you, notice how soon you lose focus and swipe or look away to check if your plant is watered or whether you clicked ‘Send’ button in one of your emails on your laptop)
These short clips will keep your audience engaged, allow them to take away value, and keep them interested in hearing more.
Rule #4 – Hook People In
Ideally, you want to share one tip per week (or per day if you’re a video enthusiast) and keep it consistent so that people want to come back for more and they’d know when to do so.
Your short videos will get them excited because they’ll learn something. If they’re short and brief, they will also get your viewers curious and want to know what else you’ve got to share and will either check your profile for more bite-sized tips, or mentally note to check in with you to see your latest content.
You can even entice them to watch your next video by adding something along the lines of, for example: “I’ll give you my top 5 tips, watch out for my next video where I share my next tip…” or “This is part of my 3-stage strategy – this video will cover stage 1, tune in next week for stage 2!”
People will be interested if they like what you’re talking about and/or showing in your videos, and they’ll surely come back for more (and they know that there will always be more!).
Especially when what you share is valuable, unusual, and time or money saving.
A “hook” is always a good idea to add to your video or even in the caption.
Rule #5 – Create Different Types of Video
Variety is key! In order to keep your audience interested, you should really consider creating different types of videos. Those could be tips, behind the scenes, introducing a new team member, etc.
What you should try to avoid is simply posting a video every time you have something you want people to see or do, for example, “Hey, I’m creating a workshop. So I just thought, I’m going to pop in here and share with you…” or “I’m excited to announce I’m launching a new masterclass so I wanted to let you know…”
This is selling. Selling is good and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be doing this, but just like in any other strategy for social media marketing, if you only sell, people don’t really resonate with it because they want to see something different before they trust you enough to buy from you.
They want to understand how much you know about your topic and what they can actually learn from your content. They want to learn and feel like they get something from you before they’re ready to buy.
Honestly, there are many ways to create amazing content videos, I actually have a list of 25 ideas for content videos, which you can download here.
Rule #6 – Batch Film Videos
Yes, videos are a little tricky because they always take time to produce.
So if you are going into producing video content, it doesn’t matter how much experience you have. Videos always take time and they are time-consuming. Even if you’ve got, like, decades of experience, they still take time.
So when you are planning to film, the best thing you can do is plan to film more than one video at a time.
This is the tip I always give my clients and some of my clients actually told me that it is much easier for them to do it that way.
So batch film about three or four videos at a time so that you can be sorted for all the videos you have planned for the month. (Assuming you decide to post one video per week.)
This may sound a bit stressful, but it will actually take a lot of pressure off your shoulders because you will already have the time planned for filming and you’ll save time setting up your camera and filming area.
Implementing the 3P’s and the 6 Golden Rules are going to save you so much time not only in the creation of your video content, but they will speed up the rate at which you will start to see results from your video marketing strategy. Best of all, they actually bring you the results you want.
If you’re stuck on getting started, sign up here to get my list of 25 content video ideas.