Barriers to integrating video into your marketing plan and how to overcome them
In this month’s blog, Humanoid’s Project Director Tom Down shares his personal insight on how to introduce video seamlessly into your marketing plan AND your business!
Since we set up Humanoid 10 years ago, I’ve had the chance to work with lots of different clients; from corporate B2Bs to not-for-profit B2Cs – and everything in-between. While all their businesses are unique, there’s some common challenges all of them faced when integrating video into their marketing plans for the very first time.
Once they saw the benefits of video over time, they never looked back but it can be a culture shock at first – especially if you’re a business that’s tended to shy away from the more digital channels.
If you’re keen to introduce video into your next marketing plan, here’s some common barriers I’ve seen clients face over the years and importantly, how best to overcome them to make your first experience a real success!
Your senior management aren’t sold on video.
If you want to spend more of your marketing budget on video but don’t ultimately hold the purse strings, your first task is to ask yourself – “do I need to sell the concept of video to my senior management team?”. As marketers, it might seem obvious that video is the direction everything’s heading but your directors may not be quite so enthusiastic. Why? In my experience, it’s a fear of the unknown. Either because they lack the digital know-how or they’re nervous about you wanting to make wholesale changes to the annual marketing plan
How to overcome it:
Typically, people don’t like change. So, managing this change sensitively and getting buy in from senior management early on is key to making sure your video marketing strategy is really championed from the top down. One of the best ways to do this is through education. According to Forbes, 90% of customers say video helps them make buying decisions and 64% of customers say that seeing a video makes them more likely to buy. Sharing facts like these can be very persuasive towards executives and might help you get the green light on a more video-orientated marketing plan.
I also probably don’t have to remind you but management (generally the number-crunching ones) love to hear any mention of Return on Investment (ROI) – especially spoken by a marketer. Demonstrating how measurable video is compared to other channels like print will have them shouting ‘lights, camera, action’ in no time!
You can’t afford to do more video, without doing less of something else.
If you want to start doing more video, and can find the extra marketing budget to pay for it, then happy days. However, the reality is you’re probably going to have to get creative with your existing budget to free up the additional cash you need instead.
Whether it means printing less copies of your company’s annual catalogue or attending one less exhibition a year, introducing video can really shake up your marketing plan and budget. But, trying to decide what to reduce or even stop, can be a tough decision for you to make.
How to overcome it:
My best piece of advice would be to take a step back and try to review your current marketing strategy as objectively as possible. Think about your objectives and ask yourself – “What’s working really well? What could work better with some changes? What’s really not working and needs to go?”.
I’ve seen some clients use the process of implementing video as an opportunity to spring clean their entire marketing budget; stopping doing some activities altogether if they’re not delivering a sufficient ROI. Others have tested the water first; starting with one video initially to prove it works for their business then using its success as a springboard to justify spending more of their marketing budget on a series of videos in the future.
You simply don’t know where to start.
You’ve got sign off. You’ve got budget. Now what? You may have watched hundreds, if not thousands of videos in your lifetime, but it can still be daunting when you first decide to commission one for your business. To the untrained eye, they can look technical, time consuming and not to mention downright scary if you’re the one who’s going to be the other side of the camera being interviewed!
How to overcome it:
The truth is, videos can be all of these but you shouldn’t ever have to worry about any of it. That’s what you pay a video agency like us at Humanoid for!
Full service video production agencies specialise in taking your idea from ‘conception to completion’ – including storyboarding, script writing, scouting locations and casting voiceovers & actors to make sure your shoot goes off without a hitch. They’ll then take all the raw footage captured on the day, work with you to choose the best and apply post production techniques such as graphics & animations to give it the all-important wow factor. All you need to do then is sign it off and hey presto, there you have it – your finished video! Sounds too easy, yes?
Well a good video agency shouldn’t just stop there. They’ll help you to distribute your new video too and I don’t just mean putting it on your company’s website and YouTube. There’s lots of clever new techniques out there to maximise your video’s reach; increasing your video’s ROI and keeping your management happy in the process.
So, if I had one piece of advice it would be…
That if you want to fully integrate video into your marketing plan, you need to approach it in the same way as your other channels. For example, if you’re planning a new email campaign, you’d expect to define your objectives and target audience, plan for the creative and copy, distribute it and then measure it. Well, video should be no different. It’s ‘just’ another channel like any other and if you treat it that way, it’ll become an integral part of your plan in no time!
Video won’t be the cheapest channel in your entire marketing budget, but it offers great value for money, can complement your offline strategy really well and is super-efficient at getting results. What are you waiting for?”
Have you faced any barriers to introducing video in your organisation? Or are you coming up against barriers right now and need help? If so, we’d love to hear from you.
