7 Tips To Boost Your Video Content Marketing Productivity

This is a guest post from Amir Shahzeidi of Unscreen.tv

To say that the world of video marketing moves fast is probably an underestimation.

Every year, consumer consumption trends take a massive leap forward, creating a “brave new world” in terms of marketing. Even as recently as a decade ago, video marketing was still a relatively new phenomenon that not many small businesses were leveraging. Flash forward to today and almost all businesses have some type of video content marketing campaign and have a presence on YouTube and social media channels.

This trend is not slowing down any time soon. Studies show that by 2020, more than 80% of all internet traffic will be video traffic. Because of that, video marketers need to stay focused and productive in this ever-changing online video landscape. Those that do will continue to break new ground whenever they have the opportunity to do so. Those that don’t will quickly find themselves left behind by their competitors.

As a result of all of this, video marketing managers need to balance video content planning, and creation, with handling customer needs and community building, simultaneously. The same is true of getting involved in promotional and advertising activities across your organization.

All of this is as time-consuming as it is challenging, to say the least. But it certainly isn’t impossible and, in truth, it isn’t as complicated as you might think.

In this guide, we’re going to cover the top seven tips that you can use to help with video marketing productivity. When taken together, they represent the perfect opportunity to drive innovation across your campaign, rather than constantly trying to catch up with the day-to-day tasks.

1. Have a Clear Strategy, Plan and Goals

Video marketing itself is nothing if not malleable – which means that a single video can be used and repurposed for many other marketing campaigns. Because of that, your content cannot be created in a vacuum. You shouldn’t just your video to an OTT service like YouTube or Vimeo and see what happens.

You should know and plan for the best possible outcome because your video was designed from the start for the specific purpose of achieving it.

Therefore, you need to not only have a clear strategy – but an equally clear plan and goals, too.

To come up with a clear strategy, ask yourself:

• What do you hope your video marketing campaign will achieve? Are you trying to increase visitors to your website and generate new leads? Or do you plan to raise awareness for an upcoming product launch?
• What type of content do you need to create to achieve the best results? Are you going to create a testimonial video, or perhaps an announcement video?
• How will you measure your goals in terms of success or failure? What are your main key performance indicators that your tracking?

These are the three questions you need to answer to develop a clear video marketing funnel before you ever think about content creation.

2. Create a Video Content Calendar

When you first start creating video content, it can be overwhelming to see just how much content you actually need to unlock your goals and grow an online community around your videos. One of the major ways to combat this and remain on the beaten path is to create a video content calendar of your own.

Video content calendar helps you plan out your content creation and gives you an overview look at your content strategy.

That way, you’ll always know which videos are about to go live, which are in the pipeline just waiting for their debut, and what you’re still working on at any given moment.

This is a great visual way to track the ongoing progress of your actual content creation. This is a technique we’ve been using for years to great effect, across all our video marketing campaigns, and if you’d like to make a copy of the exact video content calendar that we use in-house, you can do so by clicking here.

This is a great lead magnet. You can Insert a CTA to Make a Copy of the Video Content Calendar and collect emails.

3. Never Stop Learning

If you truly want to make good YouTube videos and scale your video marketing campaign, you need to acknowledge the simple truth that the very definition of the term “good video” is changing all the time. Every year, for example, we see new types of video formats go on trending. From vlogging to 360 and VR videos.

All of this is to say that the minute you think you’ve “learned enough” in terms of how far it’s possible to push video marketing best practices is the minute you’ve lost a game. Video marketing managers are expected to be experts in so many different fields and topics and to stay on top of all trends in content marketing and social media.

It’s essential for you to constantly research the latest trends, look into the newest technology and pay attention to what your competitors are doing to see what you can learn from them. If you truly want to grow an online community around video content, you need your abilities to grow right along with it.

You can’t get to that point if you feel like you’ve learned all there is to learn. You never will… but that’s a good thing.

There are many tools that can help you stay up to date with the new video marketing developments and industry trends. These include Feedly, Zest, YouTube and more.

4. Organize Your Tasks Efficiently

Video marketing involves a lot of moving parts and sometimes many different people within and outside of your organization at any given time. For the best results, you need to organize your tasks as efficiently as possible so that both you and your team members know what work you’ve accomplished and what still needs to be done. In-house teams might use just a board with sticky notes, but remote teams need an all-in-one task management software, where everyone knows their tasks, and managers can have an overview of the progress.

ClickUp and Trello are the best tools you can use for task management. I personally use Trello to track different tasks and oversee our video production. That’s because, Trello is mostly free to use and offers great integration with other tools. ClickUp is also another great choice as it combines amazing simplicity with enough customization to fit any needs you, your team or your organization might have.

5. Establish Processes and Stick to Them

Every organization, and industry is different from the next – which means that there’s no “one size fits all” approach to productivity. Your processes will be your own in that they’re built to support you, your business and the way you like to work as a collective.

These processes can include anything from tasks involved in content creation to promotion and more.

Once you’ve taken the time to actually establish a process that you feel comfortable with, you must stick to it at all costs. Even when you feel like you’re too busy and ESPECIALLY on those days when you don’t feel like it at all.

Your video marketing success essentially depends on your ability to be consistent. You need to release as much quality content as possible and you need to do so as often as you can. You won’t be able to do that if you can’t even stick to your own internal content creation processes – which is why this step may ultimately be the most important one of all.

For the best results, break everything down into a series of smaller, more actionable steps. Documenting your processes can be a great asset to you and your team, and new team members. This doesn’t mean that you need to create a huge document, a simple checklist will be a great way to plan out each step.

This way, each one is easier to follow and complete when compared to a larger and more general strategy that doesn’t offer as much in the way of guidance as you originally thought it did.

6. Outsource When Possible

By now, you’re coming to terms with the fact that successful video marketing and content creation is a lot of work. Some organizations have the capacity to handle everything we’re talking about fully in-house, and that’s great. Others won’t – and that’s perfectly okay too. That’s because there is a wide range of third-party providers who are ready and willing to step in and lend a helping hand.

If you don’t have time to research appropriate topics for videos, find a video marketing agency who can. If you know exactly what videos you want to film but don’t have the infrastructure, or manpower to do it, partner with an influencer or a production house in your area.

You can also find many great talents on platforms like Fiverr and UpWork for each stage of your content creation. From scriptwriting to video creation and production.

Above all else, don’t be afraid to ask for help if it means you’ll end up with better, more informed and more forward-thinking content. Your return on investment will still be through the roof and you’ll still be able to accomplish your goals.

A great trick to scaling your video marketing campaign can be to outsource each part of the process to people who excel at each aspect.

7. Simplify Analytics and Video Performance Reports

The insights unlocked by real-time analytics and reporting can be invaluable – but at the same time, actually preparing those reports can be very time-consuming. However, it certainly doesn’t have to be thanks to tools like Google Data Studio.

Creating an all-in-one dashboard with a tool like Google Data Studio for tracking content performance across a myriad of different channels can greatly improve the time and effort you need to invest in creating each and every report. This can include tracking your YouTube video performance, your website, Google Ads. social media videos and more. With that dashboard in place, you’ll have a one-stop-shop that you can turn to in order to verify which of your activities are working and, more essentially, which ones aren’t. At that point, you’ll have everything you need to double down on the former and strategically adjust the latter on a regular basis.

Google Data Studio also offers email report delivery. Once you set it up, you’ll an email with a PDF attachment of the report on a regular basis.

Wrapping this up…

In the end, remember that video marketing as an outreach and communications tool isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. If anything, it’s only going to become more essential over the next few years – even for the smallest of businesses.

That is ultimately why all of these steps are so important. Together, they represent the rock-solid foundation upon which the next decade of your organization’s success can be built upon. Once you’ve taken these steps and established these processes, they will eventually begin to build their own momentum. Strategizing, organizing and even filming video content will soon become second nature – to the point where you’ll begin to wonder why you took so long to take this approach in the first place.

Author Bio

Amir Shahzeidi is the digital marketing manager at Uscreen, an all-in-one video monetization and live streaming platform that empowers video entrepreneurs and creators to monetize their content and build thriving communities and businesses around their videos.