The Video Marketing Blog

Four Top Questions to Ask Before You Invest in Video

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

If you're thinking about using video to market your business, good for you. Video's interactivity and rich content are very effective for engaging, communicating and connecting. But before you invest time or money (or both), it makes sense to be sure you aren't just making video for the sake of having video on your site. You want your video assets to work hard for you and justify your investment, don't you?

Here are the top four questions to ask before you begin shooting. Consider them thoughtfully, and you'll have the answer to the really big question: what kind of video should you make?

1. What do you want your video (or videos) to do for you? This forces you to get beyond the very general "We just want to have video on our site" and define your goals. Be as specific as possible. Here are a few examples:

• streamline our customer service process
• introduce our key people
• inject humor into the early stages of our sales process
• move people through our sales funnel
• demonstrate how our product works
• provide different ways for visitors to understand who we are and what we do
• provide in-depth learning experiences

2. Who are your audiences and how do they learn? Who will watch the videos you'll make? This question will help you define what style of video to make. If you're connecting with 19-year-old males, you'll make a different kind of video than you would for new mothers or retired golfers.

3. What is the message you want to deliver to your audience(s)? If you make them correctly, videos are like arrows. They deliver a specific message to a particular target. Figure out what message you need to send. If you have more than one audience, don't use the same video for all of them. Instead, create different versions of your message so that each group sees and hears exactly what they care about.

4. How will you measure success? It's not a good idea to invest in assets and then leave them alone because you trust (or hope) that they're doing what you want them to do. Better to know how you define success so you can determine if they're working. If they are, great. You've figured out what works, and you can continue to create video assets that do the job. If you find that they aren't doing what you want them to do - understand why not, and then try something different. The goal is to create assets that achieve your goals and contribute to your success. You won't know if that's happening unless you measure and analyze.

Take the time to answer these four questions before you begin production, and you'll have the information you need to make video assets that are powerful and effective communication tools. They'll work hard for you, and they'll do the job you made them to do.