3 Ways to Get More Life Out of Your Video Marketing

The Michelin Man, Tony the Tiger, the Geico Gecko – we were exposed to these characters more than once. Only after a calculated series of visual impressions did our favorite characters morph into our favorite brands.

Over time, the Michelin Man became more than just a stack of white tires; he became an ever-present stack of white tires that was beat into your head. We all remember him because we saw him over and over again. While there’s no exact science to creating a character as enduring as the Michelin Man, there are plenty of tangible steps you can take that are guaranteed to extend the useful life of your videos.

Remember this if you remember nothing else: It’s crucial to treat video marketing as an investment in your overall marketing strategy and treat the creative process similarly to any other marketing or advertising campaign – taking the target market and message into full consideration. If produced and implemented correctly, your video marketing strategy will continue to drive results years after it is created, paid for, and paid off.

This one may seem fairly obvious but there are plenty of small things that can limit the useful life of your video production from the start. While the product or service you advertise might be a seasonal item, it’s important that the video doesn’t become inseperable from any one specific moment in time. For example – whenever possible, try to avoid referencing specific dates or years and using phrases like ‘next week’ or ‘tomorrow’ – all of which will make your videos harder to implement down the road. Knowledge is power. By simply avoiding the use of phrases that reference time during the scriptwriting process, you’ll end up with video content that has a useful life measured in months, instead of hours or days.

There are, of course, obvious exceptions to this obvious rule. Sometimes the purpose of your video is to advertise a certain season, such as a store that sells Halloween costumes. Common sense would dictate that this store would create advertisements that would be forever linked to October 31 and only target people during the fall. The same could prove true for many other specific events or holidays.

However, you can still keep these pieces of video content timeless, too. When crafting the message of your video content, it’s important to target a specific audience without limiting the general appeal over the long term. Be specific, but not too specific.

It’s also useful to have your campaign strategically designed to run during certain times: be it hours, days, weeks, or years. With a scheduled campaign in place, you can take timing into consideration, and avoid wearing out your content too quickly. Avoid blasting your video content so often that it becomes irrelevant noise. It’s crucial to have a rhyme and reason behind what and when you share. Even if your video content is designed from the start to target a particular audience at a particular time, it should still be created with the future in mind.

While this step benefits greatly from some extra care during the pre-production planning process, there are still some actions that you can take to re-purpose already existing content.

When the Michelin Man was invented, you had to have a massive advertising budget for people to see your videos. These days, you can instantly push your video to your target audience for as little as fifty dollars. In general, the more that you invest in sponsored and targeted posts, the more that you increase the chance of reaching the right group of buyers.

There are dozens of different advertising techniques and platforms to consider. You can advertise on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google AdWords for video – just to name a few. You’ll even find that it’s not as expensive as you think to place your video on the-good-old-set-top-box cable provider in your area. Cable advertising services now also enable you to reach their customers that are streaming on mobile devices. This is particularly helpful if your buyers are mainly located in the same area as your business.

You never know who may see it. While your video production may be targeted to a consumer audience, it still may be relevant to a vendor on LinkedIn. When posting to different platforms, be sure to appropriately update your descriptions to match the behavior of that specific platform. For instance, your post on LinkedIn may be promoting the same piece of video content as your Facebook post, but it should have language aimed at LinkedIn’s network of professionals. By taking these steps, your content can become appealing to a totally different demographic.

Other social media strategies, such as giveaways and contests, can incentivize your fans to share your video content. Taking part in weekly social staples such as Throwback Thursday (#TBT) or Flashback Friday (#FBF) also provide perfect opportunities to share a piece of content from your video library each week.

Your content can never die, but it can be forgotten about. This is the battle all video marketers face, but you are not alone in this fight, and we are not unarmed. By freeing your video strategy from the chains of time with timeless messages, you can strategically promote your videos in different places and extend the useful life of your entire video library. If you’re interested in learning more about these or any other ways to get more useful life out of your video marketing, let’s chat!