Video ROI: Making Your Video Assets Work
We’ve all seen it; the world is producing and consuming video at an exponential rate. Cisco predicts that internet traffic will be 80% video by 2022. That isn’t surprising, considering that number hit 70% back in 2017. With the video boom, organizations and companies have an incredible opportunity to take advantage of emerging opportunities and see a return on their investment in video.
While there are ever-expanding video opportunities, outlets, and even mediums, here are four simple ways to get started harnessing what’s right in front of you.
1. Proactively capture video content
It may sound overly simplistic, but building a catalog of video content surrounding your company’s activities and key events can provide key assets for projects down the road. Whether you’re highlighting an event or assembling a video to express company values, having that content in existence is huge.
There is one slight caveat here; while we recommend filming a variety of things, it should never be aimless. Before filming anything, pull up your marketing goals and identify content categories and themes that speak to your target audience. For a number of customers, we keep a running wishlist of content so that we all know what opportunities to keep an eye open for. We’ve helped a variety of companies and organizations tell their stories through years of video footage from notable events, product launches, and even video catalogs of everyday happenings. And that brings me to an important concept: archives and catalogs.
2. Organize your video content
Even if you have 100 hours of great footage, it is pretty useless if it’s not organized. Often, a project requires a single clip, or a series of clips related to a certain subject. And within a project process, digging through hours of archives to find a single clip is a value killer. Why? We know as well as you: time is money. That’s why we use a catalog of archived folders and tagging to keep video footage ready and useful.
In this short blog post, I won’t prescribe a specific organization method; there are a host of great systems and protocols. The important key is to find what works for your company and be consistent. In summary, the important takeaway here is this: don’t throw video clips haphazardly on a hard drive.
3. Use your video content
When you’re equipped with a solid catalog of content, don’t let it go to waste! Schedule time to periodically look at the catalog and pull out collections for social media campaigns, ads, website features, blog posts, and newsletters.
Often, a marketing need will arise, and the cataloged footage can fill some or most of the messaging needs. A few new clips will either need to be recorded or purchased, but the time and effort needed to get the marketing piece created and published is much less. This was the case for an ad we recently built for Watts Heating & Cooling, a leading HVAC products and services company in the Portland metro area:
Sometimes, even the video footage itself can inspire an idea for a marketing piece. One great example of a quick marketing video assembled from years of content is a montage we put together for Omega Morgan, an industrial company with a growing range of turnkey services:
4. Measure results
Finally, take advantage of the many tools available to track the effectiveness of your published content. Whether using video for lead generation, sharing general product information, or any other intent, good analytics will tell us how your videos are being consumed. We’ll dig into this in a later blog post, but never resign yourself to judging content only by how cool it looks to you. Keep your KPI’s in mind, and pay attention to how your videos are performing. Do they raise awareness of your brand, generate sales or phone calls, or direct traffic to your website?
These four ideas are only the tip of the iceberg. And, as always, we’re eager to help folks navigate their needs or simply execute their ideas. Reach out to us, we’d love to hear from you.
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