When browsing your favorite streaming service, you don’t just consider titles and plot summaries. You consider genre - “What kind of movie am I in the mood for tonight?”

Your marketing videos should also be bucketed out into different categories, so that there is something for everyone. Your audience may span different age groups, ethnicities, backgrounds, interests, etc. so, naturally, they won’t all respond in the same way to the same type of video. But even if your product or service is in a very narrow niche market, it will still benefit you to think about how you can create buckets around your video content and create unique messaging within each bucket.

So, how can you create a video bucket list and start to populate each bucket with the right type of content? Here are a few ideas to consider.

Evergreen Content

These are the “big picture” videos; stories that speak broadly about your brand, your product, your service. They can be used across the entire business and touch on big themes, big ideas, etc. They provide general information and are designed to have a longer shelf life - one to three years.

Topical Feature

Pick out one specific issue that your product or service will help customers with and make a video about that one thing. This will allow you to go into greater detail, but won’t overload your audience with too much information. These videos can have a run time of two to four minutes, but then you can extract shorter segments for social media use.

Voices/Testimonials

These are short, simple, one-shot talking head videos. Find sound bites from customers, employees, volunteers, etc. who speak powerfully about your product, service, or mission and use these across your website and social channels. You can use a quick graphic to intro each video; a graphic that provides viewers with the question or topic the subject is addressing.

News/Happening Now

These videos are timely and are meant to be produced with a tight turnaround. If there’s anything happening around your business, product, or service that’s “newsworthy;” which would make for strong PR, make a video about it, edit it same-day, and then post it the following day while the news is still fresh. This could be a video about an award your company receives, an important milestone, a product launch, etc.

Human Interest

These videos don’t focus so much on brand, products, or big-picture themes. These videos are short-form documentaries, focused on people; day-in-the-life bio’s on those who have benefitted from your product or service, people in your company who work behind-the-scenes (like engineers, developers, etc.). These videos allow viewers the chance to know people personally.

Pre-Roll/Post-Roll

These videos are specifically for any paid digital ads you may run. They will probably be either 6 or 15 seconds in length and are focused on one, direct, call-to-action.

Infographics

These are explainer videos, relying on animated icons to give your viewers basic how-to information, or to walk your viewers through specific concepts.

As you can see, your marketing videos, just like movies, can fall into different genres, each with slightly different looks/feels, approaches, and story angles. Dividing up your video content into buckets will help you stay organized and will help you lay out a roadmap for your video content strategy.

Be sure to contact me if I can help you and your business in any of these areas.