This video is for marketing managers, or maybe you’re a CMO, you’re running a marketing team and your goal is to grow brand awareness, drive demand your product or service.
And you’ve probably heard that content marketing works, and so you’re trying to scale up your content engine. Yet at the same time, you hear that video is the most engaging form of content. So you try to scale up video content, but then, of course, scaling up video is one of the most challenging things that marketing leaders today are facing.
Most of our marketing team members are not trained with the skills to create videos. And so we turn to contractors and agencies, but very quickly, we run into bottleneck issues, capacity issues. Turnaround time increases, we go over time, over budget, yet despite all that, some marketing leaders, some brands have really figured out how to smash through those bottlenecks. Here are the three ways I’ve seen marketing leaders successfully scale up video content creation within their teams.
The first is decentralizing the task of content creation away from the internal video team, the agency, or your contractors.
This means setting the expectation that those working on your marketing and communications teams need to be producing their own video content. And really, with today’s cadence of communication, with how rapidly social media moves, you need to be able to create content on demand, on the fly without going through a middleman. And the only way you can cut turnaround time from weeks to hours is if you get the individual team members on your team, to be able to create content in real-time. And marketing leaders that are successful at scaling up video content are leveraging every team member on their entire team to become content creators. That brings us naturally to part two.
Part two is equipping your team with the right tools to be able to get that job done.
And you might think your team members don’t know how to create video content and how are you supposed to suddenly train everyone overnight to do that? But I would argue that it’s not that they don’t have the skills. It’s that they don’t have access to the right tools. It’s kind of like asking your team member to prepare a PowerPoint presentation but then you don’t buy them a copy of PowerPoints. So what are they supposed to do?
And on this front successful marketing leaders will equip their team with some sort of online video creation platform that’s built for business people, like marketing communications professionals. So you wouldn’t go and buy a bunch of Adobe licenses because Adobe After Effects and Premiere are made for creative professionals, not business professionals. So instead of those creative software, you’d probably buy licenses to something like Lumen5 or an equivalent online video creation platform, that’s designed for marketing use. And once your team has access to the right tools and can get the job done, you should be able to see that the bottlenecks will begin to dissipate.
And the third piece is making sure that your team has access to a video template that is on brand, and follows your brand guidelines to the tee.
Decentralizing content creation away from bottlenecks can be really exciting but there are brand risks that come with that. If you go from one person creating video content to suddenly 30 members of your team creating video content. If you’re not careful people will start using the wrong fonts, the wrong colors, the wrong transitions. And so, you want to make sure that you prepare a single video template that everyone can access. So no matter who’s creating video content, they all come out looking on brand.
Going back to the PowerPoint example, you probably have many members on your team that regularly create PowerPoint presentations. And the way you go about making sure all of your team members are creating visually consistent marketing content is through the use of templates and there are many ways of getting that done. You could go through an agency to have a video template built for you. The modern-day online video creation platforms, like Lumen5, have many of those functionalities built right in.
That sums up the three part strategy I’ve seen and how successful marketing leaders are scaling up their video content engine.
It’s leveraging every member on your team to become content creators so you no longer have to rely and push content request through to your bottlenecks. It’s giving your team access to the right tools so that they can create the assets that you’re looking for, in this case, video content. And number three, making sure that your team has access to an on-brand template that everyone can access. So that no matter who’s creating video content, they all come out looking visually consistent with your brand.
Now of course, this kind of stuff doesn’t happen, overnight. It takes time, but it’s very well worth it. And many of the leading brands that I see have gone through this process and came out the other end much stronger. Shifting from publishing one video per quarter to one video per day creates so many more opportunities for eyeballs, for awareness, and engagement. So it might be scary to think about this form of change management, but I assure you, investing in your brand is always worth it long-term. Hopefully, this video sparks some new ideas and I’ll see you in the next video.
