Finding the magic formula for your online video strategy

Posted by intro60.com on Aug 16, 2012 in Branding in the 21st century, Marketing tips, Online Video Marketing | 0 comments

By now every mar­keter will know that the poten­tial for online video is huge. ‘Branded con­tent’, ‘earned media’ and ‘viral video’ are among the most com­mon phrases in agency board­rooms today.

When used prop­erly video is arguably the most pow­er­ful tool in a marketer’s tool­box; get it right and Cannes here we come!

Yes, the poten­tial is huge but there are a few key areas that need to be fully under­stood before brands can use online video effec­tively to engage with con­sumers en masse.

Con­tent – qual­ity and quantity

Not only are more peo­ple watch­ing online video (up 15% in the twelve months to May 2012¹), but they are watch­ing it for longer peri­ods with total video view­ing time increas­ing by 69%¹ over the same period. There are a num­ber of rea­sons to explain this sud­den surge of streams.

Con­sumers view­ing habits have changed sig­nif­i­cantly with the mass own­er­ship of new devices, greater wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity and increas­ingly cheaper data plans. Own­er­ship of tablets such as the Apple iPad or Sam­sung Galaxy is expected to reach 39%² next year and with an increase of all other con­nected devices such as smart­phones, lap­tops, note­books, games con­soles and IPTVs; Aus­tralia is cer­tainly liv­ing up to its ‘early adopter’ billing. All of which makes video con­tent so much more acces­si­ble than ever before.

The one other ele­ment dri­ving these sta­tis­tics is con­tent. As the acces­si­bil­ity to online video improves, so does the over­all qual­ity of the con­tent avail­able to today’s con­sumer, allow­ing for a much richer user experience.

There are many types of con­tent the viewer can con­sume, such as music videos, last night’s episode ofMas­terchef or a repeat of the men’s 100 metre Olympic final and with more than two in five online Aus­tralians obtain­ing TV, movie and related con­tent via the inter­net², it’s cer­tainly prov­ing to be an area of great inter­est to mar­keters as it can add impor­tant incre­men­tal reach to a more tra­di­tional TV campaign.

How­ever, the qual­ity of con­tent con­sumed by a user is an ongo­ing debate among media plan­ners, as it can fall under many sub-​​categories such as pre­mium, user gen­er­ated, flash gam­ing, social gam­ing, jour­nal­is­tic plus many more. There is no indus­try def­i­n­i­tion to these sub-​​categories (some­thing which should exist) so it’s up to agen­cies and pub­lish­ers to define in their own right and deter­mine the value of run­ning their client’s ad in front of each con­tent category.

As far as brands are con­cerned there is essen­tially two types of online video content:

1. Repur­posed TVCs, or
2. made-​​for-​​web content.

Repur­posed TVCs are essen­tially repack­ag­ing your TV com­mer­cial to run as a 15 or 30 sec­ond pre-​​roll ad for­mat in order to gain incre­men­tal reach by hit­ting that all impor­tant ‘light TV viewer’. These would run prior to any form of online video con­tent the user wants to watch from ‘pre­mium’ to ‘user generated’.

Alter­na­tively they can expe­ri­ence the con­tent that brands pro­duce, which can be infor­ma­tion based, trail­ers or specif­i­cally made for web con­tent cre­ated with a par­tic­u­lar pur­pose in mind. These tend to be either ‘snack­able’ and two to three min­utes in length, or take the form of a more length­ier ‘episodic’ concept.

The two dif­fer­ent types of con­tent avail­able to brands gen­er­ally answer dif­fer­ent objec­tives. Repur­posed TVCs have a much greater propen­sity to increase aware­ness met­rics and cam­paigns can be planned against a par­tic­u­lar reach and fre­quency, whereas made-​​for-​​web con­tent gen­er­ally increases more behav­ioural and con­sid­er­a­tion metrics.

Longer form con­tent gives brands the oppor­tu­nity to engage with their audi­ence, it’s much more likely to gar­ner share­abil­ity and if the con­tent is good, also spread organ­i­cally. In addi­tion, it has the poten­tial to explode to heights not matched by any other medium.

Objec­tives – what is it that you’re try­ing to achieve?

Do you want to reach a mass audi­ence, or a niche one? Do you need to increase your aware­ness or has every­one heard of your brand but you strug­gle to get peo­ple to engage and take action? Have you already pro­duced tonnes of con­tent but no one is view­ing it?

All these ques­tions and more need to be asked before embark­ing on a video strat­egy. It is imper­a­tive that the objec­tives are deter­mined before even enter­ing into a stu­dio. Oh and ‘I want it to go viral’ is not an objective.

Using the right approach to con­tent, com­bined with the right dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­egy is man­age­able and more impor­tantly bank­able. Your videos may or may not ‘go viral’ but my advice is to focus on a more sophis­ti­cated video strat­egy that works for your brand. You need to work out what is the right mix of adver­tis­ing, enter­tain­ment and information-​​based video for your brand. Rather than just try­ing the next seem­ingly good idea, or worse, copy­ing another brand’s, you should iden­tify the objec­tives, pro­duce con­tent that is going to help meet those objec­tives and employ the right dis­tri­b­u­tion methods.

Dis­tri­b­u­tion – paid, owned or earned?

If con­tent really is king, then in my opin­ion dis­tri­b­u­tion is the emperor. The right con­tent strat­egy sim­ply has to be sup­ported by the appro­pri­ate dis­tri­b­u­tion approach to achieve a good ROI. There’s a lot of vari­ety when it comes to dis­tri­b­u­tion, as it can occur through numer­ous meth­ods, all of which can be neatly buck­eted into the paid, earned or owned channels.

You’ll have heard much debate about these media chan­nels and how they’re all essen­tial as part of a brand’s mar­ket­ing strat­egy. It is imper­a­tive that these chan­nels are under­stood not only inde­pen­dently, but the rela­tion­ship between them is fun­da­men­tal to your video con­tent distribution.

Plac­ing your con­tent on your ‘owned’ chan­nels such as your own web­site, Face­book page or YouTube chan­nel will drive organic growth and of course it’s the most cost effec­tive method of dis­tri­b­u­tion, but it comes with limitations.

Earned views or free media are the Holy Grail and what every mar­keter yearns for. These are the views that hap­pen because of social shar­ing. In essence, some­one that you pre­sum­ably share either some rela­tion­ship with or some mutual inter­ests is telling you to watch this video, and for that very rea­son, you are then more likely to also. A well-​​executed cam­paign to encour­age shar­ing is essen­tial. But ‘earned views’ aren’t free, and the most effec­tive way to gar­ner them is to kick start with some tar­geted and timely paid media, employ­ing tech­nol­ogy that opti­mises to the place­ments that receive a high share rate.

Engag­ing your audience

Under­stand­ing how an audi­ence sources their video con­tent online is crit­i­cal when putting a dis­tri­b­u­tion strat­egy together. The way in which con­tent is con­sumed has changed dra­mat­i­cally over the years with the ‘appoint­ment to view’ of yes­ter­year long gone as less than 40%³ of online video view­ers watch­ing con­tent that they specif­i­cally wanted to con­sume and 30%³ admit­ting they have watched con­tent that was shared.

We’ve known for a long time the ‘build it and they will come’ approach sim­ply doesn’t work these days. A far more effec­tive method would be to find your audi­ence first and then direct them to your con­tent. There are many ways you can find your audi­ence around the web: a com­bi­na­tion of con­tex­tual place­ments, social book­mark­ing, social gam­ing and search all ensur­ing the high­est level of targeting.

The next chal­lenge is direct­ing them to your con­tent. Due to the highly tar­geted, qual­i­fied leads they are much more likely to be engaged, fur­ther down the pur­chase fun­nel and share your con­tent, there­fore increas­ing your ‘earned media’ potential.

So what’s the magic formula?

Truth is there is no one size fits all approach but a well-​​executed video strat­egy is essen­tial to ensure you achieve your objec­tives and good ROI. It is dif­fer­ent for every brand so you can’t just copy some­one else’s suc­cess. As long as you method­i­cally go through each impor­tant step in the strate­gic process by iden­ti­fy­ing and find­ing your tar­get audi­ence, devis­ing the right con­tent and dis­tri­b­u­tion strate­gies to reach and then engage them, you are guar­an­teed to be happy with the out­comes for your brand.