7 Great Content Ideas for Ongoing Video Campaigns
If you want to start creating regular video content for your Internet marketing efforts, you are going to need to step outside the television commercial mindset. You’ll want to start creating videos that your target audience will choose to watch because they relevant and interesting, not because they are forced to.
This is not easy, especially if you are trying to publish videos with any sort of frequency. Here are a few ideas for publishing ongoing, relevant and useful video content that your audiences will want to watch. Disclaimer: These video examples here are not produced by Cognitive Films. They are only good examples of content, not production quality. The quality level of your production will depend on your skills, time and money invested.
1. FAQ Videos
Create an ongoing series of videos where you answer specific questions. You can create a single short video for each answer to build a nice collection of video content you can add to your blog and Youtube/Vimeo channels. FAQ videos not only help your prospects get the answers they need, they can help free up the valuable time you or your staff spends answering them.
Lowe’s created a series of videos offering answers to common household maintenance questions. This particular video would also work well for a pool builder:
2. Products and Service Review Videos
Think of products and services you may recommend to your customers. Would a quick video review over a product be useful to them? Do a video review on product benefits and features. Don’t just read the specs… Add your real opinion in order to make it useful. If you can, find other review sites and offer a “critics summary” of your findings as well. This can help you get in front of new audiences looking for products or services that compliment your own.
BHPhoto offers detailed reviews of the more popular products they sell. Here is a great example reviewing Manfrotto Tripods:
3. Business Vlog or News Update
Create a simple and accessible setup that allows you to give regular updates on your business. Think of it as a video newsletter. Depending on how you do it, it could be much easier and quicker than putting together a print or email newsletter. Commit to frequent updates and be spontaneous. Don’t worry about perfect production quality. If you over-think it, it will never get done.
Here is a company news update example. It’s pretty difficult to deliver this amount of information in a single cut, but kudos to this guy for pulling it off almost flawlessly:
4. Tips & Tutorial Videos
Are you an expert? Prove it. Offer up tutorials, tips, and case studies to your audience. Creating a how-to video tutorial that helps your audience learn something useful is a great way to become more engaging and relevant to them. Screencasts are very helpful for explaining how to use software or specific website features, and don’t even require a camera. Just download screencast sofware and you are on your way.
In this tutorial, Samson Inc helps customers learn how to use the Zoom H4N Recorder that they manufacture (Warning: 80′s hair rock ahead):
5. Video Interviews
Your audience may be interested in watching interviews with key people in your industry or staff. Set up and record interviews with people your audience may be interested in knowing more about. Let the interviewee offer his or her expertise and insights. If you are crafty, you can set these up virtually through Skype or Google Plus Hangouts for group interviews remotely. This is an excellent option if you are camera-shy but still want to produce great video content.
Salesforce.com decided to interview Google CEO Eric Schmidt to quickly give his 2 cents on the Salesforce/Google deal.
6. Event Videos
Use video to cover a local or industry event. This is also a great way to network offline, as it will give you an opportunity to meet new people. Capture the spirit of the event with b-roll, and combine it with interesting “on-the-street” style interviews. When you publish the video online, make sure and send it to the people who may have been present. Chances are, they will add it to their blog and you may even get a link or two.
Hosting provider MediaTemple makes its presence known at various local web developer gatherings and offers them time in front of the camera. Brilliant.
7. Testimonial Videos
If you are really charming, you may be able to get customers to offer glowing testimonials on camera. For the sake of authenticity, treat the shoot as an interview, and ask about what their experience was like when working with you or using your product. Cut one or more testimonial videos together to make a testimonial mashup, or publish them individually. These will be dramatically more effective than boring plain-text testimonials.
B2B Bonus: Client Co-op Testimonial video
In a B2B scenario, you may want to kill two birds with one stone by creating a testimonial video that also works to promote your client’s business. This is a great way to get the full context of the product or service in use, since your customer will be explaining in detail how you really help them work better. This may take a bit of creativity to make it a win-win for both parties.
Shopify, an e-commerce platform for businesses, pulls this off well:
With a little creativity, you can come up with dozens of ideas for great video to put on your sites. You don’t need to plan out an entire season to start a video campaign. Start with one and go from there. Get your first video published and solicit feedback. You can fine-tune your content strategy from there.
