Building a Video Launch Strategy

It is easy to get excited when your boss provides you with a budget to make a video. After all, creating a video is a fun process where you get to explore your creativity. Try not to get too lost in the aesthetics of the process because your video is a piece of marketing content for your business. Like a blog post or a billboard, you are creating this video or video campaign with the ultimate goal of helping your business grow. 

At Chocolate Bar Studios, we work with businesses every day to create video marketing content that not only looks good but delivers a strong marketing message to connect with your customers. Whenever we are working with customers, we put all of our videos through our Video Launch Strategy. It is a 5 step process we recommend business owners and marketers go through before making a video. So please put the camera back down and discover how to maximize your chances of success we recommend you follow our Video Launch Strategy. 

Video Launch Strategy

A preplanned method of how to release your marketing video in an effective and trackable way. 

1) Assess Marketing Goals

When creating video content for your business, you always want to start by determining what you are hoping to achieve with this video or video campaign. Your goal can be as simple as “showcase expertise in x area” or detailed as “re-target past customers with a promoted Facebook video post to reveal our new products.” 

The more granular you can break down your goal, the better chance you will have at measuring and obtaining success with your project. By doing this step first, it will provide your video direction and keep you on task when brainstorming different concepts and storyboards for your project. 

2) Select Method of Distribution

With your marketing goal broken down into detail, we should know 1) who your audience is and 2) what we are trying to achieve with this video project. This information can then be distilled into how we can connect with your demographic online. Depending on your audience and your marketing goal we will select the appropriate distribution methods.

Knowing where your video is going is imperative to how you produce the video. A video produced for TikTok is going to look very different than a video you embed on your homepage or post on your Youtube account.

3) Promote

After we know the means of delivery, we can then move to different strategies for promoting your content. This can be simple as putting a few ad dollars to promote the post on social or having friends share your video content.

It sounds easy, but it is essential. Slapping a video on Youtube and doing nothing else is a sure sure-fire way to make sure no one sees it. Creating a video takes a significant amount of time and resources, so let’s give it a boost; however, we can. 

• Share on your business social media pages
• Boost post on social with ad dollars
• Ask friends/colleagues/client to share your content
• Deliver through email list
• Insert into marketing automation
• Add subtitles – makes it easier for search engines to crawl your video
• Correctly fill out name/description fields for SEO

4) Analyze and Measure

In your marketing assessment, you put forth a loose marketing goal. Now we want to outline a plan of how we will analyze and ultimately measure your video’s performance at set time intervals. Video marketing is packed full of analytics that is not as clear-cut as other marketing methods, so we want to be selective about what we are looking at.

• Views
• Click-through-rate
• Percent watched
• Video completion rate
• New subscribers/followers
• Engagement 
• Shares

Measuring the analytics of your video can be difficult, depending on how you distributed your video. We recommend using Wistia for your marketing video content because it provides high-caliber analytics that other video hosting platforms such as Youtube do not offer. Using social platforms such as Instagram, you can re-route viewers to your content through a link in your bio. 

If you want to do a deep dive into the return-on-investment of your video, you will have to quantify aspects of your marketing funnel. For example… your marketing goal for your video is to increase Instagram subscribers. We will have to determine the value of an Instagram follower. How long until a follower becomes a customer? What is the customer lifetime value of one customer? 

5) Rinse & Repeat

After your video has run its course, take a look back at the entire process to see what aspects worked or didn’t work. Through testing and tweaking of your video process, you will be able to increase your return-on-investment and most likely reduce your cost-per-video (CPV) over time. 

The launch strategy can feel tedious the first time, and that is ok. Try to push through and endure! As you begin to create more video content for your business, this process will slowly become second nature, and your videos will see a boost in performance because of it. Get started today on your next video, and be sure to reach out if you have any questions at all.