Jonathan English — August 11, 2017 Welcome to our Video Basics series, where we teach you the foundations of doing better marketing with video.
This video covers the three steps to creating a distribution plan to make sure your target audience watch your videos.
Video Transcript
An incredible video is one thing. Getting it in front of your audience is another. Planning how you’ll reach your ideal viewers is just as important as working out how your video content will engage them.
Step 1: Know Your Objectives and Audience
As always, it all starts with what you want to achieve. Be clear on your video objectives — do you want to drive traffic to a landing page and increase conversions? Do you want to generate engagement and brand awareness? If you haven’t set your goals yet, check out our other video on how to do so.
You should already have research into your audience that gives you some idea of where where they spend their time online and how they like to consume content. Do they read blogs? Do they hang out all day on social media? Do they listen to key influencers? That’s going to be a major steer for where you put your time, effort and budget into marketing your videos. Take a look at our other video for guidance on how to understand your audience.
Step 2: Decide Your Mix of Paid, Earned and Owned
Your audience will find your video content through three basic forms of distribution: across paid, earned and owned media. It’s your job to work out what ratio of your resources you need to dedicate to each.
Paid media means social video ads, retargeting, paid promotion, and basically anything where you have to pay to get your videos in front of people.
Earned media refers to reach that you have to work for. That can be your videos getting shared on social media, mentioned in other blog posts, or spread through PR and influencer marketing.
Owned media includes your website, your blog, your social profiles. It’s the bits of the internet that you control and where you can promote your videos for free.
The most successful video campaigns generally include a blend of all three. But again, it all depends on your goals. If you’ve got a short video advert you want to spread far and wide, you’ll need to focus on paid media to generate initial momentum and earned media to keep it going. Whereas if you’ve got a ‘how to’ video giving an answer to a specific question or problem — like this Video Basics series! — you may want to focus on owned media in places you can optimise for video SEO.
You should always be realistic about the resources available to you. Think about the people on your team who can work on promoting your video content, the time they have to dedicate, and the budget you’re willing to spend. Some videos you’ll simply want to spend less time and money distributing. But keep in mind that every single video you create needs a distribution plan, or it has no chance of achieving its full potential.
Speaking of distribution plans…
Step 3: Create a Video Distribution Plan
Whatever your video objectives, you need to put in place a plan for distribution that will allow you to achieve them. Otherwise you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.
If you’re looking for broad brand awareness, consider paid promotion for your video on YouTube and Facebook. Share it with media organisations that are likely to spread it further. Create a landing page to house it on your website and capture additional search traffic.
Or if you’re aiming to generate new leads, try running a targeted video ad campaign to your audience. Draw leads to a page built to convert and optimise it so your video is found in searches for relevant keywords.
You’ve got a limited number of resources, so allocate them wisely. Determine what it’s most important for your video content to achieve, and build your plan to make it happen.
Conclusion
With a solid distribution strategy you’ll get your videos seen by the right people, in the right way, to bring about the results you’re looking for.
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