Try to think of a corporate video that last grabbed your attention. What about it made it stand out? Video production and content in 2024 is about to undergo another shift towards the long form. Platforms like TikTok in late 2023 began trials on 15 minute videos, and YouTube still remains the number one video streaming platform in the world.
How then should businesses in 2024 approach video marketing and production?
The six simple steps I’m about to list below are made with my years making videos for clients around the world at Chowder Media. They have stood the test of time, and apply to companies of all shapes and sizes that intend to produce videos that sell while taking advantage of video’s creativity to build brand and authority.
Six Simple Steps
The First Step: Define Clear Goals
Video marketing campaigns often get lost midway through the project, as we lose sight of the video’s purpose.
A clear goal needs to answer these three crucial elements:
With the depth and breadth of videos out there in the world today, it is important to stay above the fray and avoid mediocrity. Hence, ask yourself what would constitute a successful video to you.
In my opinion, videos have to evoke strong belief in your product while serving as an inbound lead machine.
The goal must be lofty but also aware of the reality of the crowded landscape today. This does not mean investing in video content is a bad idea. But rather, it is even more important, especially in 2024, that your video marketing content needs to be better in every way than your competitors.
Consider the amount of organic vs paid advertising your company is currently doing, and then think about your video. Would you prefer a large paid ads campaign for your video that grows quickly or would you attempt to earn media more organically at a slower pace. In my experience, this knowledge of how you want to market your video subtly affects not only the script, but the overall direction of strategy behind your video.
Be goal-oriented with your video, but do not be afraid to take creative risks. Know exactly why you need a video now, and why that is important for your business. To put it in perspective, by understanding timing and trends, you will be able to catch waves with the market, and position yourself strategically for the optimal results.
The Second Step: Understand Your Audience
Audience insights allow for tailored video content that addresses their exact pain and needs. It is always easier to sell something that solves someone’s specific problem, so make a video that highlights this pain.
To avoid getting lost in the process of video production, you need to know who your audience is and what they want. This affects the tone of your video. Whether it be lighthearted or serious, in a vibrant outdoor setting or in the air-conditioned office, there are pros and cons to either situation.
Think also about the size of your audience. Maybe you are a niched B2B business with a smaller client base but with high value clients. In that case, your video does not need to reach a wide amount of people, but rather it’s more important to reach the right people. Compare this to a B2C business that focuses on volume with a smaller customer lifetime value. When volume is required, you will need to reach a wider and larger audience to keep up. Hence, the type of video you produce changes as well.
Video marketers often overlook these nuances as they leave it up to the production company to produce the video. But as you now understand, from the size of your audience to their desires and nature of business, these factors ought to be integrated into your video marketing strategy and ultimately your video as well.
At Chowder Media, we ensure that the details are not forgotten but instead celebrated. Our focus is the audience’s pain and how we can best alleviate it with videos that connect on a personal and emotional level. This is how we help our clients build stronger relationships with their audience.
Third step: Story is king
You know your audience’s pain and you are clear about your goals, what’s next? Well, the next step might make or break your video. A video no matter its length, will not linger in your prospect’s mind if it doesn’t have a good story. I could list a million reasons why the story is king and if you disagree with me, try sitting through a movie with a terrible storyline for two hours.
While here at Chowder we specialize in the business of telling human stories, we can offer some advice to marketers and business owners out there.
Our three tips for crafting a strong story:
Your clients want to work with you because of the value you bring to their life. This value can be the price of your product or service, and it can also be the intangible aspects, like their trust in you or belief in your company. The story of your video needs to highlight the value you bring to your clients in a direct and pleasing manner.
The key is in addressing your client’s worries, highlighting the solution and building brand trust in the video. While also ensuring that the video, on a creative and visual aspect, is engaging and well produced.
So I strongly encourage you to think about the story of your video and the audience’s journey in the short few minutes of the beautiful moving image. When it comes to crafting a storyline, think more art, and less business.
Fourth step: Strategize to succeed
Strategy is a word that is loosely thrown around all too often.
What does video marketing strategy exactly entail?
A video marketing strategy is goal-driven, and looks at the totality of the problem you are trying to solve, while considering the storytelling and aesthetic aspects of creative media.
The media and video production game in fast moving economies like in Singapore require videos that can be A/B tested repeatedly to see which has the better metrics. This is an example of the goal-driven nature of video strategy here at Chowder.
While we work on scripts and storyboards and use it for the core of our videos, we are also keenly aware to not get attached to the stories we have crafted. If the video does not perform to the metrics desired, we test relentlessly. This can involve changing the opening scene, adding in additional motion graphics, or even changing the sound track.
Story is king, but the importance of a video marketing strategy isn’t too far behind either. Look at the video’s story as the arrow, and your strategy as the bow that will propel your video to the eyes of your audience.
Fifth step: Optimize for platforms
Consider the main platforms for videos on the internet in 2024: Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.
On the surface, the difference is their preference for their long form or short form video. TikTok, Instagram and Facebook videos are still the most popular homes for short form videos, while YouTube and LinkedIn work great for longer format videos.
So how do you best optimize your video for these platforms?
In our experience here at Chowder, we found that B2B businesses should spend their focus optimizing for longer form platforms like Youtube. At video lengths of 30-90 seconds, it is the right spacing for succinct videos that get most messages across in an efficient way.
A complementary approach would be to cut the long-form video into short form snippets that lead viewers back either to the main video, or to your desired lead magnet. These short form snippets could then be separately optimized for platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
With such an approach, companies are still able to optimize for their target audience on the best platform available. Although it is strongly recommended that short form videos have a separate strategy, script and even production style for true optimization, this is as good as it gets for companies who want to maximize their returns off one long-form video.
While in the B2C space, we found that going for maximum reach and brand awareness across viral short-form platforms would be the preferred strategy.
These approaches to platform optimization may seem simple on the surface, but generating consistent results can often be tricky as algorithms change. This is exactly the reason why experience matters here. Testing for the right platform and creative ought to take 10-30% of your budget, but with the right video marketing strategy and partner, you might be able to save more while also getting an optimized video campaign.
Sixth step: Promote, promote, promote
In the last step of the Chowder process, we offer clients the opportunity to grow their video and business organically through strategic positioning to the right audience. For clients on a tighter budget without the ability to spend on paid advertising, placing their video on their main banner of their home page, on their LinkedIn, and on Youtube are some of the first key actionable steps to organic growth.
Next, organic growth comes by getting the video to the right eyeballs. This means sending the video to current prospects and potential clients. This can be achieved through a newsletter, or via the tried and true email. The core idea of promote, promote, promote is that videos have to be sparked in order to spread like wildfire.
For clients with a desire for quicker and wider reach, a paid advertising campaign in conjunction with the organic approach will be able to give their video a boost like none other. However as previously written, before starting any paid campaign, clients ought to know their marketing funnel well and the segment they are targeting.
One video will not be able to satisfy all your business’s marketing needs. But when used in a sharp and strategic manner, it is able to deliver outsized growth that can often be surprising to even the most seasoned of marketing professionals.
At Chowder media, we realized the power of video and its ability to harness creativity in order to deliver outsized results for our clients worldwide. We believe that video production and marketing needs to be streamlined for the best value and this coming together of both functions under one roof will be the future.
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