In our last blog we started a discussion about the 7 P's of an online video marketing strategy.

Similar to the 4 P's of marketing, a successful online video strategy includes specific steps to ensure your videos contain the right content, are seen by the right people and can be measured. As a refresher, these include:

• Plan and identify your content's purpose
• Match your budget to find the optimum price and production value
• Getting people within your organization to work together and be efficient
• Ensure you have the most up to date publishing technology
• Plan out your promotion strategy
• Drive audience participation with your content
• Identify profitability metrics

 

In part one of our post, we reviewed the first four P's and today we will review the last three.

5. Promotion

How do I ensure audience discovery?

Successful publishing is about putting the right video in front of the right audience at the right time. Every video strategy should include a promotion plan to reach and engage your audience. There are three audience types - owned, earned and paid.

Owned audiences engage with your video through destinations that you own and operate – your website, products, mobile application, online catalog, intranets and even internal business applications like Salesforce.com, SharePoint and Blackboard etc. Find locations where your audience are and place your content in all of these destinations. Then very actively promote your video through email initiatives and even advertising on your owned properties with banner ads. Internal content always falls into this area, however so does some external content.

Earned audiences engage with your video across third-party platforms and social destinations such as YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter and blogs, etc. These can be very powerful in helping new audiences find your content via word of mouth, ratings, reviews, forwards, sharing and conversations. Reach these external audiences by publishing to destinations your audiences follow plus optimize your content for search engines, like Google and YouTube.

Paid audiences engage with your video through ads and links purchased through various advertiser and publisher networks. The defining characteristic of paid media is that the audience for your content was developed by a third party.

Make sure you plan how to reach your various audiences and ensure your publishing tools help you deliver to all destinations you need to be seen on.

6. Participation

How do I get viewers to participate and not just watch my video?

Your video is delivered via a player and there are a number of interactive tools you can use in the player which can provide a deeper engagement level. These tools give you another way to measure involvement or find where viewers have questions. Some of the most common player tools are social sharing where you can easily notify your network, but there are a number of other business related tools you can use.

Using a playlist will step viewers through a series of videos, which is helpful for training or compliance needs. Ecommerce controls allow a user to go to a shopping cart to purchase items while they are watching the content. Click to call is an immediate call to action features, giving viewers the ability to connect to a call center to place an order from the video window. Annotations let viewers place a post it note within the video and can provide a way for information to be linked from a particular spot in the content to a CRM system so you can capture questions from viewers about what they are watching.

Planning for viewer participation can deepen the message your video delivers and is another valuable part to a complete video strategy. When you're thinking about your content, consider how broadcasting your message and prompting audiences with productive response mechanisms - right inside the player - can change the video consumption experience from passive to participatory, making communication bi-directional - ultimately strengthening the relationship between a video content creator and the intended audience.

7. Profit

How do I measure the return on my video?

To fully understand the profit your content delivers, you should ensure your video profit measurement ties into the initial purpose of your video. Some organizations look at financial numbers. If you are using content for ecommerce, profit can be measured in terms of sales completed. For marketing and sales content you can measure profit in terms of leads generated. Increased productivity or cost savings is another way to measure the value video brings your organization. Are your support calls shorter if staff has had training on a specific topic? Can task be completed in a more optimum way? Can you spend less on travel costs if you provide remote access to training?

Other organizations focus on audience engagement, if you show specific content, like new product demonstrations, are you creating better brand awareness? Do your analytics provide valuable viewer insight about audience demographics, duration of content watched and other details like where content is being viewed. Will the ability to share content through SharePoint or social networks develop our company as an industry thought leader?

Whether your measurement is measured in terms of revenue, productivity, elimination of risk or greater brand awareness, decide on your measurement criteria and be certain that you have the tools in place to elicit, capture and understand all the ways video delivers profit to your organization.

Summary

A successful video strategy moves people to take action. This action can have many shapes. Video content creates brand awareness, develops business efficiencies thru knowledge transfer, provides valuable corporate training, demonstrates many aspects of your products and services.

The uStudio business video platform helps organizations tap into the business value of video by providing the backbone for live and on-demand content by providing an environment for content storage, collaboration, management and delivery of your content out to the audiences that matter. The result is you can spend more time on the aspects of your project which you have expertise in and let us provide technical services to address the aspects of publishing which are outside of your core business focus.