The Video Marketing Blog

Business Video Content and Blueberries: There's a Connection

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

One spring, several years ago, I had an impulse to plant blueberry bushes. I went to the garden center and bought six big, healthy bushes. I was thrilled at the thought of fresh blueberries just a few feet from my back door. I planted them, gave them lots of water, and waited for the blueberry bounty.

The first year there was some new growth and a few berries, which the birds got before I did. The second year there was little new growth and so few berries that the birds just laughed. In subsequent years, the bushes got smaller, not larger, and stopped producing berries altogether. The leaves started to come in yellow and sick-looking.  A few bushes died; the others were dying.

Then I happened to complain about them to John Nourse of Nourse Farm in Westborough MA. He mentioned the importance of acid soil for growing blueberries. I remembered something about soil pH, but I had been in a hurry to get the bushes in the ground and just trusted that everything would work out. Which it didn't, of course. Blueberries won't do well in neutral or alkaline soil, and no amount of hoping and believing will change that. If you want blueberries, you need acid soil.

Which brings me to video. Specifically, to the video content businesses make for their websites, and the performance they expect. Some businesses are like impulsive blueberry-bush-buyers. They want the results, but they don't take the time to develop a plan. They don't ask important questions, like these:

• What kind of goals do we have for our videos?
• What specific kind of videos should we make to meet those goals?
• What will we measure to know if we're meeting our goals?
• How will we get the right eyeballs to watch our videos?
• How will we get our videos to spread?

They just rush into making video, they pop it up there on the website and on YouTube, or maybe just on YouTube, and then they wait. And wait. They're confused when nothing happens, when nobody says to them, "Great job with the video!" And when nobody says, "I bought your software (or dog jackets or accounting services or you-name-the-product) because of your videos!" So they conclude that while video works for some, it obviously doesn't work for their kind of business.

If you make the decision to invest in video for your business, congratulations. There's no better way to engage people on your website, tell your story, and begin a relationship. But video content isn't enough - just like blueberry bushes aren't enough. You also need to understand what your video content needs in order to bear fruit.

For blueberries - you need acid soil. For video content - you need to start with important questions, and then you need a plan.

(...and fyi, I am in the process of moving my just-barely-alive blueberry bushes to a different part of my garden, where the soil is plenty acid. I've also bought some new bushes, just in case my old ones are too far gone to make it. I have a plan in place to keep the soil as acid as it needs to be, AND I have a plan to keep the birds from gobbling next year's blueberries.)