Businesses and teams with the highest return on investment from video are those with a clear video strategy. At the core of any strategy is knowing what you want to achieve, and the tools you have to help you get there. Here are the key things to consider as you build your video strategy.

Set your goals at the beginning of the strategy planning process to make sure that you’re investing your time and energy purposefully. If you already have existing business, department, or content goals, use these as the foundation of your video goals.

If you don’t already have clear goals, take a moment to consider what you would like to achieve with video over the next few months. Are you looking to boost team engagement? Launch a new product? Upskill your team or customers on a particular skill set? Set measurable goals and KPIs so you know when you’ve hit your mark.

At a business or department level, you probably already know your target audience. Write it in your video strategy plan, being a specific as possible about the ideal persona of your target audience.

e.g. Senior marketing professionals in mid-sized tech firms in Sydney, Australia.

Once you’re clear on who your target audience is, think about where they are, or in other words, find the platforms that are the best for you to reach the people you need to reach. Don’t limit yourself just to social media platforms; also think about digital displays, television, tablets that your sales team takes into the field, and any other possible video applications within your business.

Finally, consider the type of content that your audience wants. SEO/SEM tools like SEMrush can help you to figure out what your target audience is searching for, which will help you to plan what sort of content to create.

It’s important to know why your audience is watching your content. Online audiences have specific mindsets when they watch video. Google uses the concept of ‘micro moments’ to describe content created for these different mindsets. For example, some marketing teams describe four key mindsets among their viewers:

1. Learn. Viewers in this mindset are looking for educational content like webinars, documentaries, thought leadership videos, or industry insights.

2. Do. Viewers in the Do mindset also want to know more, but here they’re looking for instructions, like how-to videos, tutorials, and walkthroughs.

3. Buy. These viewers are looking for information about whether to buy specific products. Videos in this category include testimonials, product unboxings, demonstrations, and reviews.

4. Be inspired/entertained. When viewers are in this mindset, they’re looking for content from others who share their interests and passions. This includes visual stories, behind the scenes videos, and brand stories.

The audience for your team or business might have other mindsets, so find a version of this that works for you.

At Shootsta, we follow the Google model of video classification, which splits video content into three key categories: Hero, Hub, and Help.

1. Hero. Promotional content designed for a broad audience. e.g. Product launch

2. Hub. Regular content pushed to a more specific audience. e.g. Business updates

3. Help. Helpful content that your audience is searching for. e.g. “How do I…?” tutorials.

Make sure that your video strategy contains a mix of all three categories.

With consumer demand for video continuing to rise, most video strategies contain more content that it’s realistic to create in-house. For this reason, we recommend that you source your videos three ways: Create, Curate, Collaborate.

1. Create. These are videos you make yourself from scratch. Create videos when you want to establish a direct relationship between the viewer and your brand.

2. Curate. These are videos you feature, made by other creators or your audience/followers. For example, you could put a call out on social media for your existing customers to post video reviews of your product.

3. Collaborate. These are videos you collaborate on with other brands or individuals. Consider approaching collaborators who have a similar target audience to your brand. In an internal context, this might be a collaboration between two departments, or between your department and a business partner.

Depending on your resources and your team/brand, you will have different proportions of Create, Curate, and Collaborate videos. For example, using Shootsta, it’s much easier to generate Create content at scale, minimising the need to Curate and Collaborate.

As you plan your Hero, Hub, and Help content, you’ll likely end up with a blend of Push and Pull content naturally. Double check to make sure you have both:

1. Push. Content you actively send out to your audience.

2. Pull. Discoverable content you know your audience will look for on search engines, websites, and social media.

Remember that some videos can be used as both Push and Pull content. For example, at Shootsta we record tutorial and how-to videos for our Help Center (pull), and occasionally we will share the same video with our LinkedIn audience (push).

Once you’ve created your video strategy, it’s time to translate it into action. Take a look at our article on how to build a content plan to learn more!