Video marketing requires more than simply hiring someone to hold a video camera. Far too many production companies send out a video team that might be great at technically capturing the footage they are tasked with getting but are not strategic storytellers for social media nor are strategic marketers. Unless your internal marketing department has the experience and wherewithal to direct a production company and its crew into the intersection between marketing and storytelling, your video marketing strategy will probably benefit from having a social media audit conducted. The deeper the dive into exploring your competitors and obtaining customer insights, hopefully more relevant and powerful story opportunities will reveal themselves. Armed with a video marketing strategy based on comprehensive data and insights from a B2B and B2B perspective, brands can avoid unintentionally neglecting or alienating an important audience segment. We’ve found this to be more the case when it comes to large, legacy brands that have been doing things the same way for too long without having yet invested in an authentic social media marketing strategy. This is true whether we’re focused on marketing to a B2B or B2C audience. While not mutually exclusive, the platform, content, messaging, style, and tone can be drastically different depending on whether we’re communicating to one audience over the other.

Video marketing, especially video marketing created specifically for social media, can take on any style, tone, or story format, depending on what resonates with your consumer audience and your overall marketing objective. There are general guidelines for what typically works for most audiences on social media, but what works for one brand will not always work for another brand competing in the same space. Many small businesses, from local brick-and-mortar shops to e-commerce brands with a niche product offering, may not have the marketing budget to splurge on agency content with more complex video stories that have a polished look and feel. In many cases, the smaller the business, the smarter strategy would be to keep the content simple and raw. This means utilizing the benefits of connecting with your consumer with live video or sharing quick smartphone-shot videos with little to no editing. This is especially important for smaller brands garnering support from customers who take great pride in supporting smaller, local companies. Authenticity sells.

On the other end of the spectrum are two groups: First, there are those national and global brands with consumers audiences that have higher expectations for the video marketing they’re exposed to in their social streams, and second, those mid-size companies or new entrants trying to carve out some market share scraps from the giants in their competitive landscape by having video marketing produced that makes their brand appear on-par with what their customer prospects are most familiar and comfortable with. In many of these cases, video marketing should be the next level in their story strategy. The messaging and story theme needs to have strong positioning, and consistency throughout the year and holds value to the viewer in the form of entertainment, education, or ideally both. The content requires professional agency teams to develop, produce, and manage this content. The genre of the content can be dramatic, it can be silly, and it can be inspirational. The content can be scripted with actors. The content can be documentary-style with production teams capturing testimonials, user experiences, or product demonstrations across the country or world. This level of content requires a substantial video marketing budget, but in this world, you usually get what you pay for.

Younger professionals still perceive their senior professional colleagues as “old-school” and not working as smart as themselves. The cycle of life. It won’t be long before the Next Generation will be making these same claims about today’s professional Millennials currently on the path or already integral members of the C-suite. The tools of the trade used for creating content and marketing this content are unrecognizable to a marketer from the 90s. Digital equipment, streaming, and social media compelled innovation.

Gone are the days of solely relying on brand awareness through the endless playing of a television gimmick during primetime. DVRs, on-demand, and the overall cultural shift in consumer behavior, online and off, have forever changed the video marketing assets agencies create to help companies become stronger brands, and for many, create online revenue streams the C-suite never imagined were possible