Posted by Catie Foertsch on Fri, Oct 30, 2009 @ 10:27 AM
There are two ways to look at the video assets you create for your business. The first way: they are static, passive things that sit on your website until somebody happens to find them. The second way: you paid good money for them and you're going to flog those videos until they do as much work as possible.
While it seems obvious that the second approach makes more sense, you'd be amazed by how many businesses treat their videos like passive little lumps. They make them, place them, and forget them. This can happen when the decision to create videos isn't a strategic decision, but a spur-of-the-moment, our-competitor-has-videos-so-we-better-get-some-too impulse. Then someone in marketing is tasked with getting a couple of videos made. He or she gets three quotes, goes with the lowest, the videos are made and placed, and that's it.
Are there goals for those videos? Is something being measured? Are they being sent out onto the web beyond the website? Are there plans for re-purposing them?
Nope, nope, nope and nope.
A far better approach is to look at video strategically, to decide what you want your video assets to do for you, and to understand how you'll know if they're performing. Then, start by making videos that can achieve the goals you set for them, instead of making videos that are the cheapest to make. Create a distribution plan for sending your video assets out onto the web, like little ambassadors for your business. Use Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and YouTube and email marketing.
And then, when you've really, really flogged them, step back and see if you can re-edit them into other videos that you use for new applications - like connecting with different sets of potential customers.
How much work your video assets do for you - how effective they are at spreading your story and getting people excited about what you do - depends entirely on you and the choices you make. So choose to start with a plan, make your video assets and then get out your bullwhip and start flogging them. And don't stop until you've used them in every single way you can imagine.
Your business will thank you.