One Big Reason Why a Video Strategy Is Crucial

One of the biggest misconceptions I encounter in the video production business is the belief that you can hire a crew to shoot something at the last minute, figure out what to do with it on the back end, and then turn that into an edited video that meets your marketing needs.

Here’s an important point to keep in mind:  Capturing video, for the sake of capturing video, is not a video strategy.

I’ve seen it happen time and time again. It usually goes something like this:

• An important person in the company, or a key supporter of the organization, is coming to town at the last minute for a brief visit.

• People in the marketing department think it will be great if a video crew could capture b-roll and a quick interview with this individual (or group).

• They hastily hire a video crew, and ask them to show up and “spray” the event, getting a few quick sound bites before the VIP is rushed out the door for the next engagement.

• Days, or weeks later, people in marketing get together (maybe) to discuss how to leverage the video to meet current marketing needs.

Maybe you can already see the problem with this approach. The main issue is that it’s a waste of money. Why hire a video crew to shoot an event when you don’t exactly know how (or if) the footage will be used? 

In an earlier post I wrote about things you and your team should think about before you start the process of producing a video. It’s important to include video as a part of your marketing strategy from the start, rather than waiting until after footage has already been captured.

Here’s one big reason why:

Key messaging and Calls-to-Action

Let’s say you don’t yet know what you want your video to say, or what purpose it will serve. But you forge ahead and hastily schedule an interview with a few key people, thinking that you will just figure it out later. You run down a list of boilerplate interview questions and call it a day. Then, weeks later when you finally come up with a strategy for your video, you find that none of the interview questions actually addressed the key messages you now want to include. You can’t really go back and make someone say what they didn’t say in the initial interview. And so you’re left with a generic piece of video that doesn’t really hit the mark and the window of opportunity has now closed.

Video should always be included on the front end of your marketing strategy, not only for the reason listed above, but for a myriad of other reasons as well, including (but not limited to) distribution platform considerations (Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) and the nuances of each.

Have any other suggestions to improve your video marketing efforts? Leave them in the Comments.