How to improve your video production marketing strategy with automation!

If 92% of companies that use video consider it critical to achieving certain crucial goals, investing in a video production marketing strategy becomes a strategically compulsory move. Brands, regardless of industry and size, are increasingly aware of the impact that decisions about the video content production process have on business results. But what steps need to be taken to produce engaging and effective videos? And how does automation make the production process more efficient?

Creating awareness, carving out spaces for visibility, providing information about business propositions, motivating conversions: videos contribute to the success of business activities by acting on the many nodes of the customer journey. In this context, where marketers must envision new formats and channels to tap into an increasingly elusive audience, being able to maximize the potential of video content becomes even more complicated. 

Brands have been able to take advantage of previously unthinkable communication possibilities. Moreover, the expensive traditional video production of many years ago has now been unhinged, so to speak, by digital transformation. Whereas until a few years ago, making videos required a lot of time and resources (minimum sufficient conditions: trained professional teams, equipment, substantial budget), today video automation enables agencies, publishers, marketers, and professionals to quickly produce thousands of videos using existing data and to generate different versions of the same video quickly and easily, with a scalable approach.

Automation simplifies and speeds up the workflow. Knowing aspects of the video production process then allows us to identify possible points of friction where the use of new tools could make substantial improvements, positively affecting the final yield of the marketing strategy.

Before explaining how automation has revolutionized video production marketing strategy, let’s shed light on the main steps of video production, from concept to distribution.

A video production marketing strategy always begins with a why

A video production marketing strategy cannot be separated from thinking about the goals that a particular video is intended to achieve, whether it is stand-alone or possibly included in a playlist. Producing an effective video means first of all knowing what it’s for and defining why we are making it. To this end, it can help to ask a series of questions, which will probably seem obvious, but which form a basic outline for the writing of any script.

• What is the main goal of your video? To be informative? To create intrigue, entertainment, or amusement? Or does it need to fulfill a specific marketing function such as convincing the viewer to take an immediate action? Depending on the main objective, the message that will then be conveyed must be clear and unambiguous (it can be very useful to summarize it in a brief purpose statement, a kind of tag line that will serve as a guide for the concept in the creative phase). 
• What is the target audience? Who is the video aimed at? Previous research that has established the characteristics (demographic and psychographic) of the people the brand wants to intercept is essential here.
• Why should the previously identified “ideal viewers” watch your video? The answer to this question is by no means trivial: finding a “hook” with the viewer’s personal stories in a way that resonates with that of the brand is the central issue in any discussion of corporate storytelling. Once again, data analysis—whether derived from qualitative and qualitative surveys or directly from physical and digital touchpoints—proves providential. Having in-depth knowledge of the critical issues that the company’s product or service is intended to solve is not enough. Analytics make it possible to investigate the wealth of information stored in the company’s information systems with even greater precision and to extract the insights that are useful in understanding how potential customers face—or would like to face—solving those same problems. A video must develop its narrative from this knowledge base, offering concrete solutions to real needs.
• How do you keep your audience’s attention? There are no rules that always apply or apply to everyone. In general, we can report some general suggestions as examples, such as: 
  • making the introduction lively and engaging, 
  • distributing the most useful and relevant information in a balanced way throughout the sequences, dividing the content into distinct units, 
  • inserting a call to action within passages that work best for the narrative structure, 
  • choosing short durations or opting for a self-contained chapter structure,
  • avoiding obscure language, specialized terms, and excessive poetic license.

To make videos more effective, engagement metrics provide significant help (albeit after the fact), which marketers and content creators can use as indicators to measure viewer interest over time and intervene promptly with corrective action where it is most needed: for example, by pinpointing the exact point in the video where the hard-earned attention ends up failing or by determining whether the video was viewed in its entirety or not. Viewing duration, likes, shares, comments, session time, or time spent on the page not only measure the viewer’s intention and participation with relative accuracy, but also manage to describe the entire viewing experience in a timely manner.

• What should viewers do after watching this video? An audience that demonstrates greater engagement is also a more knowledgeable audience, for whom there is a greater likelihood of translating interest and attention into concrete action. Completed transactions, new leads, click throughs: videos must persuade viewers to do something: buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, download an app, attend a free webinar. Having a simple CTA is not enough to encourage the audience to take the desired action. To increase conversions, you first need to improve the calls to action, place them as close to the beginning of the video as possible, and to make them compelling and perfectly consistent with the content of the video. 

The answers to these questions, organized into a single document, result in an initial video production brief, which states the objectives, contains the main message, and defines the target audience. This is a summary that must be completed in the pre-production phase with budget, timelines, and technical notes covering logistical and organizational aspects. 

Today, thanks to automation, the greatest effort in a video production marketing strategy ends up being concentrated in the planning phase we have just described. In fact, it’s here that an organization’s video marketing projects generate the most value. 

Although, as we shall see, automation requires manual intervention for all the activities that do not require creative investment in the strictest sense, a proper overview of the traditional phases of the video production process can provide a great deal of help when it comes to deciding which tools and methodologies to adopt to achieve better results. Let’s try to go deeper.

From script to release: the video production process 

During the pre-production phase, the project brief is completed: budgets, timeframes, and deadlines are defined, and the script is written. If the video is being shot and filming locations are chosen,a list of necessary equipment is created.

Developed from the creative idea or concept, the script must contain a description of the sequences and carry text for voiceovers or any dialog. From the script, a storyboard is developed: a succession of boards showing what will happen in the video (people and subjects, locations, transitions, and literally everything that is said or appears on the screen). Also, directions for the cameras, lighting, and photography (if in shot) and instructions for the editing that will take place in post-production are usually part of the storyboard.

The actual video production follows two different paths depending on whether the video is in animated graphics or filmed. Just to give a general idea of how much the equipment and professionalism involved can vary: in the first case, software for illustration and animation is required while, in the second, video cameras and machinery are also quite complex, bulky, and expensive. Illustrators, animators, and speakers are part of the teams engaged in making videos in animated graphics; directors, DOPs, and actors are typical figures in the crew of filmed videos.

Post-production consists of editing the material produced up to that point, and includes all the operations involved in obtaining the final versions of the video: from color correction to sound design to the preparation of the content (rendering) by which the video file is translated into the format suitable for its publication on the most well known platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Video automation, the video content creation revolution

The three stages we have briefly described are part of a traditional type of video production. It’s an often complex and expensive process that, if not approached competently at every step, can be unsatisfactory even from the point of view of expected quality. Moreover, because it’s released in a single standard format, the video must be adapted to the technical specifications of different distribution channels in order to be used in a multichannel perspective. 

Automation is revolutionizing this, propelling video content creation to the next level and making the production process much more efficient and competitive. Automated content creation takes place in a few steps, in large quantities, and is much less expensive than the traditional video production process. Optimizing available resources also goes hand in hand with maintaining high standards of quality and effectiveness and helps build stronger relationships with clients.

With video automation, you can personalize individual scenes and eventually link the dataset containing the information you want to display. Once you have completed the automatic generation process (which takes a few minutes), you can easily share the videos via email, SMS, social networks, and in-app push notifications by incorporating them within any omnichannel digital communication project.

By creating the conditions for producing more content in less time and with less effort, video automation enables publishers, marketers, content creators, and communications professionals to focus on strategy development rather than on refining individual actions. 

The frontier of interactive video: how to leverage data within a video production marketing strategy 

Incorporating automation into the video production marketing strategy doesn’t just mean moving toward simplifying the video production process. It also means, in the case of the most advanced platforms, basing video on data, and in particular on crucial information such as that used to define buyer personas and map the customer journey, and concerning the buying behaviors and preferred platforms of the target audience. 

This is the frontier of interactive video, where users can be interacted with simply by inserting directly clickable calls to action. Video communications, in this way, not only offer new ways to connect with customers, either existing or potential, but also improve the overall performance of a marketing strategy because they transform data about the individual user into content and experiences that affect them personally and use that same data to visually tell their stories. 

Automation enhances the video creation process and improves video production marketing strategy 

Today, a successful video marketing strategy must be powerful and versatile and balance production quality with scalability and, most importantly, affordability. The solution to achieve this new balance is automation. In the case of more advanced platforms, then, data-driven videos, produced in an automated and large-scale manner, transform personal information, news feeds, and any other data into a unique and distinctive narrative. 

Automation improves your video production marketing strategy because it enhances the video creation process: it makes it an accessible resource that can be immediately integrated within a digital communication strategy. And the integration of video production services that can unleash creative energies otherwise destined for repetitive, low-value tasks can, in turn, have a huge impact on brand growth.