What the heck is that man doing?

Like life, your content and marketing strategies are all about balance. You don’t want to put so much time into producing your videos that your written posts, interaction with your followers or other communication methods suffer. Video is a very important piece of the overall puzzle but in planning your video content strategy you must keep in mind all of the pieces.

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Creating video content can also seem a bit daunting at first, so the idea is to keep it simple until you get the hang of it. And you will get the hang of it. Start out with a simple introduction or product demo video and once you get the process down move up to a regular video post schedule. Ideally weekly or even bi-weekly, but if your schedule doesn’t permit make time at least once a month. Whatever works for you well enough and is not stressful. Making videos can be really fun to do but only if you are not forcing yourself to produce them on an unrealistic schedule.

To minimize your video turn around time planning becomes key. Script out or at least create an outline of what you are going to say. Use some sort of teleprompter (check out this $10 iPhone app) or print out your outline in a large font and tape it to your tripod. Keep your videos less than 5 minutes, and usually 2 to 4 minutes is better. We live in a day and age where people’s time is very valuable and everyone is pretty “click happy” when surfing the net. Anything over 5 minutes you should break it up into 2 parts.

Shoot for as little editing as possible. Do it all in one take if you can, then all you have to do is capture, maybe add some text or photo cutaways, a logo for branding and you are all set.

Should you write it or shoot it?

When you have a content idea for your website, sometimes it will be clear if the information would be better served by text or by video. Sometimes you will want to do both, so you can take advantage of multiple distribution outlets. If you write a great post about “new ways to find customers,” you can’t post a text version on YouTube. But you can make a video version that links back to your written post.

Another reason for doing both is that currently web videos are difficult for search engines to index the entire internal content of the video. So including a transcript, written version or at the very least a summary will help out with your content being found by search engine spiders. It is also possible to have the video version and the text version listed on the same search engine results page, doubling your exposure.

The main idea is to think of using web video as a key part (but still just a part) of your overall content and marketing strategy. Don’t get bogged down by the technology, editing and SEO elements. You don’t have to do it all correctly the first time, or second, or third etc. You will make mistakes and that is OK. But believe me, adding web video to what you offer will raise your production value, allow you to more authentically connect with your followers and gain you more traffic through new distribution channels.

Tags: content strategy, video strategy, web video strategy

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Strategy, Techniques, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.