YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. Forrester Research reports the value of one minute of video is the equivalent of 1.8 million words. Is your company using video to make its marketing more engaging and share your brand’s/cause’s story with the world?
Whether you are already using video to share compelling content with your target audiences or are evaluating what type(s) of video are best suited to your product, service or cause, consider how these three video formats can make your marketing more meaningful:
Q&A with the CEO, the CMO and/or the 20-year employee who was once an intern
Video is a powerful tool for helping people to deepen their connection to a company or cause. It is also a great tool for offering target audiences access to people with whom they may not ordinarily interact. For example, if your CEO is stationed in Chicago and you have offices in 10 states, your local market clients may not benefit from interacting with this key member of your leadership team at everyday networking and community events. That said, it is critically important for clients and prospects in these markets to understand how leadership impacts culture, client service and the innovations that are forthcoming from your brand. Something as simple as a professionally produced executive profile video can help to bring these insights to remote audiences, while also providing a marketing asset that can enhance everything from your monthly e-newsletter and Facebook updates, while also providing fresh content for your YouTube channel.
Event Footage
We all know that events are much more than the venues at which they are held and the content shared by featured speakers and noteworthy guests. They are a shared experience among stakeholders which strengthens connections to causes, cultivates new audiences and fills the pipeline with donors and leads.
Events are also a great opportunity to showcase new video assets (you can view a recent tribute video we produced for our client’s award gala here) and gather content for future videos. If you’re hosting a signature event, consider investing in a professionally produced video that captures not only the mood and atmosphere of the event, but highlights from featured speakers, special presentations and the moments that quantify the impact of your cause and power of your brand. Of course, you’ll want to think about maximizing the ROI of your investment so work with your video partner to identify what types of smaller, but equally poignant videos, can be extracted from the larger end product to populate your YouTube channel, for social media shares and to enhance future presentations made by your company or cause.
Stakeholder-generated Videos
Video contests are an increasingly popular way for companies and causes alike to aggregate user-generated content. We’ve seen organizations task stakeholders with crafting and submitting their own video PSAs, compiling videos that advocate for an issue or cause and even videos that share more lighthearted content like entertaining pet footage.
On the upside, user-generated videos can be an economical way to collect a high volume of content. On the flipside, companies and causes don’t have the stringent control over the brand message they would otherwise have over a video product they produced themselves.
If user-generated video is something you are interested in exploring, be sure to collaborate with your marketing team and other key stakeholders to ensure the guidelines for collecting and accepting this content are perfectly clear and that you have all of the releases necessary from those creating the videos to use them as you intend moving forward.
In an increasingly visual world, video is a critical marketing asset for helping companies and causes to break through the clutter and demonstrate value and impact to their target audiences. Whether you set out to create one show stopping event video or a short series of poignant video interviews this year, focus on quality, clarity and impact. After all, your video will live online for years to come and you want it to be a brand asset you are not only proud of today, but next year and beyond.
