What I want to talk about today is creating more video content as part of our communications strategy. I talk to a lot of leaders in sales marketing communications and everyone agrees that they wish they were using more video as part of their strategy. Yet more often than not, there are blockers that prevent us from actually making that happen. And I’ve broken it down into a few key reasons. As to why I think we all want the same thing, but struggle to obtain it.
The first blocker is a fundamental disconnect between In our preconceptions of video and the types of videos that you actually need out there in the market today. Let me give you an example. When marketing and communications leaders think about video, often we associate it with high production. You hire an agency or a professional video editor, project might take thousands of dollars, maybe a couple weeks of turnaround time, prepare a project brief, there are iteration cycles. And yes, that’s true. Those are video projects but it’s not what we commonly associate with the types of video content, we need for today’s digital strategy and while true, those are video projects but I would consider them more to be your flagship video projects. They are your Super Bowl commercials, maybe a big ad campaign where you want to hire directors and actors and an agency to put that together.
But what I think most companies are lacking are the opposite end of that Spectrum. These are what I’d call Everday Videos. And every day videos are videos just like this one. It’s me turning on a camera, sharing a thought, sharing an idea, posting it organically on platforms like social media. And the key insight there is that video is a format and there are so many different types of videos out there. Most companies already know how to produce that high-budget go hire an agency to make an ad campaign. But very little teams have figured out how to really scale these types of everyday videos, where your marketing manager, hiring manager, sales manager, your communications manager, they are all creating content. How do we get everyone on your team to create engaging content on a daily or at least weekly basis? And my suggestion here is to really think about video as the new version of something like a tweet or a linkedin post or a blog post.
In order for your brand to be effective at communicating its key messages, we as marketing Communications leaders need to be able to empower our entire team to become great storytellers. Every single member of your team is a touch point to your customers journey of engagement, and that mindset shift requires us to see video not just as a specialized skill, but rather a key communication skill for today’s digital landscape.
So, to build an engaging brand, you need your marketing team making engaging marketing video content. You need your product managers sharing video updates of product releases and new features. You need your sales manager doing sales outreach in the form of video. And the analogy I often go back to is Powerpoint. Imagine how crazy it would be if you had to hire an agency every single time you needed a presentation. A PowerPoint presentation is a very effective tool for communicating ideas and concepts and proposals and my guess is that for brand success and job success, the business professionals of today and tomorrow are going to need the skills to communicate through video. Just like how you would expect a business professional to know how to prepare a PowerPoint presentation. The expectation of the future is that everyone on your team needs to be able to produce engaging video content.
And once you’ve accepted that paradigm shift, the next natural step is to go out there and look for the right tools for your team. And when it comes to new ways of communication, using the right tool is so important. For example, if your team didn’t have access to the PowerPoint or Google Slides, creating a presentation would be extremely difficult. So really the key to decentralizing video content creation away from your bottlenecks, or bringing it in-house, is to make sure that your team has the right tools and software to be able to create the content that they want to create. And of course, as you would expect, I use Lumen5 to create videos just like these ones. But there are many other video tools out there. If you google online video creator, I’m sure you can find plenty.
But the important thing is to instill the idea onto our teams that video is the new form of communication in today’s world, and once we’re able to get over that mindset shift, the rest is actually pretty easy. It’s just learning how to use a new tool to tell better stories. So those are my thoughts on how you can build an engaging brand by leveraging your team to tell better stories, would love to know your thoughts as well, so let me know in the comments and I’ll see you in the next video.
