USING DATA TO PRODUCE VIDEO AT SCALE
By Ami Murphy Iannone, Creative Director - August 28, 2018
One of the most intimidating things about starting a video campaign is the perceived uphill effort to establish and maintain a video program at scale. It’s just a lot of work.
Scale comes from efficiencies and efficiencies don’t always have to mean more people or more money. They can mean using better information to your advantage. One way that video becomes cumbersome for teams is in the man-hours spent planning a video campaign. Someone sets up a meeting with 6 people to get their opinions on the creative brief, then someone else has to dig back through that bloated brief and narrow it down to a single video topic or a few videos. Someone else takes that streamlined brief and creates a script and storyboard, then you bring in the actual creative team to film and edit… this process can take ages. But it doesn’t have to.
Here are 3 ways to create efficiencies and scale your video process
Use data to make quicker decisions on what to create
Having a deep understanding of your audience’s interests and what else they watch online can help quickly inform content decisions. Making quicker, better-informed decisions about your video campaign topics will significantly shorten the video ideation time. Furthermore, understanding your audience’s interests can help uncover opportunities for your brand to differentiate its content from the competition.
Example: a pet food brand discovers that many of its followers love country music, this now opens up an avenue of video topics that the brand’s competitors are not pursuing.
Use data to find the right video partner
Just as data can inform your creative content, it can also uncover partners for the execution of your video campaigns. Using a data-informed search to identify video creators means that you’ll uncover untapped talent-- not just the same brand advocates you’re already aware of-- leading you to new audiences. The right data will validate the creator’s engagement potential and the alignment of their audience with your goals.
Example: The pet food brand can now look for rising country music creators whose audiences have a strong alignment to partner up on their next campaign.
Leverage influencers to help with distribution
If there is one lesson to be learned from the content revolution of the past few years, it’s that earning an audience takes a long time and a lot of hard work and consistency. There is no shortcutting or cheating. However, you can borrow from the hard work that others have already put in. Influencers earn a living by partnering with brands to provide value to their hard-won audiences. Using influencers can help you amplify your brand’s creative efforts to new, relevant audiences as well as borrowing on the established trust of these creators.
Example: The pet food brand creates a great country music video campaign. Then they identify 10 existing brand lovers with country music interests and large social followings to engage for amplification of the campaign content.
Yes, the idea of starting a video strategy can seem daunting and making even one video can be a tough task. But if you use data to your advantage, then you can be more efficient in your video creation process. Data can help inform your decisions about what to create by providing sure-bet options based on your audience’s interests. Data can also help you find the right video partners to both create and amplify those video campaigns.