Fix your videos before they're broken!
If you're involved in marketing of any sort, you know how important it is to keep your content fresh and relevant, and maybe more importantly, how important it is to make sure that said pieces of content fit their intended platforms.
These basic principals of marketing are what underlay the importance of re-tooling your video products from time to time. Let's look at why it's so important that this concept stay front-of-mind in all your video marketing endeavors.
Suppose you have a video produced, intended as a promotional piece for web use. Web use in that case probably meant, originally at least, your website. So you've made a video for your website. You probably made this video with the website in mind, meaning that you took care to keep the video to an acceptable length for that particular medium, and produced the video with a particular buyer persona in mind. This means that everything in the video - from the type of content (interviews, b-roll, branding shots) to the music selection and sound design to the type and amount of graphics you incorporated - is working for that particular medium and that particular type of customer. If we're still on the same page, you're already miles ahead of a lot of companies using video content - so congratulations!
Now let's imagine that you want to get more mileage out of your finished product. You want to post it to Facebook and Instagram, you want to embed it in the monthly email newsletter to your valued customers, you may even want to utilize it as a sales tool at your next trade show outing. That's perfect - that's good video marketing sense. But that video shouldn't be pushed out to all of those different channels without being tweaked a bit.
Videos that occupy social media channels should be significantly shorter - broken up into many, smaller videos focusing on one point each. The attention span of the average social media crawler is notoriously short. Videos that are used for trade shows can be much longer and might need to be entirely visual with repeated CTAs peppered throughout. These videos probably only have a few seconds to answer a passerby's burning question and get them to stay and chat. So it's important that, before simply snatching a video product from its intended channel and dropping it into another, you go over these considerations.
Re-cutting is also extremely important to make sure you're staying relevant. Take it from revered NWA member and hip-hop legend Ice Cube.
[Hip-hop] has its waves and the waves crash against the beach and the new waves come in. So to stay relevant you have to roll with that.
Say that the video you made includes footage from a small manufacturing facility but you've since finished construction on a new flagship location. Or say that your video uses graphics to point out a particularly desirable product feature to get your customers' attention, but product design trends have since shifted and your collective customer's interest has shifted along with it. Whether it involves re-shooting or simply swapping out shots or modifying stats and graphics, these kinds of issues need to be addressed or else you'll risk losing the impact of your video product.
Lead the charge for your own content.
Make sure that your video partner is keeping these issues above-board and on the table. The importance of taking a step back and asking yourself, "Does this fit here as is?", or "Is this still relevant?" cannot be understated when it comes to effective video marketing.
Are you interested in leveraging video content but aren't quite at this point? You can find some very helpful infomation and ideas on getting started in this E-Book.
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