Video success tips for your business in 2018

 

Are you looking to make the most of what video can do for your business in 2018? 

 

Do you want to capitalise on the advantage that social media video can give you?

Visual communication is all around us! Marketers have been telling us for the last 5 years that come 2018 over 70% of online content would be video – well that time has arrived!

Businesses who don’t use video as part of their marketing mix are the exception nowadays and the great thing is that you can do SO much more than a promotional video and it can be so much easier than it ever has been – either by working with a professional video production company or by creating social media videos yourself using your phone! Gone are the days where video will only get watched if you’ve spent 5 figures on it! These days quirky ideas, personality and engaging ideas stand for much more!

In 2018 there is so much you can do with video and in so many ways – the great thing with video is that it works for both long and short format, from

brief video messages on Snapchat or Instagram to full length documentary films and everywhere in between.

You can have a social media video that is a timely, standalone statement piece or it can be part of an ongoing series for social media.

You videos can be embedded on your website or blog, shared on emails or app, using third party video sites such as Youtube and social media platforms as well as incorporated into presentations, live events and webinars, so the opportunities to maximize your investment are bigger than ever!

Your video content can be simple customer testimonials or product demo’s, it can be regular, lively programming full of people and personality and interesting information, it can informative and educational or it can be produced as a show-stopping effort to launch your business.

You can also archive and use again and again or produce it on the fly using live platforms such as Facebook Live which is the newest form of social media video.

So, if you are looking on capitalizing on what video can do for you in 2018, keep in mind these 5 tips:

1/ Invest in the process – like any piece of marketing or business strategy; whether it will be a success is largely determined in the planning and the more you put into the process of getting your videos right, the greater success you will have. Even if you hire a professional video team to create your videos, a good team will need some time from you initially to help them to understand your objectives and how they can best help you. So invest this at the front end and it will be worth it.

2/ Always keep your end goal in mind – the Late Great Steven Covey said ‘Start with the end in Mind” and I think this is a great quote to keep in mind for so many business projects, and especially for video. Know what you want to achieve from the start; communicate this to the video team helping you and keep it in mind throughout. This not only ensures end objectives are achieved but it helps to save cost (you don’t get to the editing stage, asking for a shot of the laughing cat to be inserted only to be told the laughing cat wasn’t filmed because the crew didn’t know the laughing cat existed!)

3/ Write a script that your audience will want to follow – think about it from the point of view of what they want to know, not want you want to tell them. There’s a great presentation about this called ‘Their Bubble not Yours’ which will make you think more about this………

4/ Know your plan for distribution – as I mentioned before there are so many channels for you to publish your videos to and many different platforms and ways to use video, but its useful to have a plan for this from the start, rather than a vague ‘we’ll use it on youtube’ this is no good if the target audience you are trying to reach don’t use youtube very often!

5/ Research who can help you push your videos out there; influencers, subscribers, followers, raving fans! Find out who has a similar market to you, who would be interested in your content and who it might compliment. Also engaging with clients, customers and people you have a relationship with already; either online or off. Then ask them to help you to push it out. You can always create an incentive for this, but at the end of the day if your content is interesting and relevant they will want to anyway.

Cialdini’s  ‘Buy Influence; The Psychology of Persuasion’ has some great research about this and how to get people to share your content because it elevates their own social status!

6/ Don’t spend tens of thousands of pounds and 12 months of your life trying to get one video done. Create more video for your money; test them out, post them regularly, get feedback and keep improving. The new world of content and in particular video rewards those who use it regularly. That’s the video climate we are working in now. And if the idea of that seems overwhelming, go back to point number 1, invest in the process, find a team who will help you to create a batch load of content at one time. A good team will script a series, film and edit them as a package, so not only does it save you money per video but it means it is efficient and you have content to push out for the next few months.

To talk about how you can have our video specialists help you with your social media video contact us here