Save Your Sanity: 4 Tips To Plan Your Videos Efficiently (Episode 123)

Welcome to the Video Made Simple podcast that takes the mystery out of video production and provides business leaders support to help them break through the monotony of day to day communication. I'm your host, Chris Schwager, and if you want your business to attract leads, educate the market, convert faster, then you gotta plan it baby.

[00:00:20] Plan, plan, plan. One of the common mistakes is having a video without a goal. First question to ask yourself. Why video in the first place? And if it's not solving a problem, then why are you doing it? So it must solve a problemo. It must plug holes in your sales or enhance your marketing. The consequences of not having a plan or a clear brief are...

[00:00:48] How do you guarantee the success of the video if you don't know why you're doing it? It leaves you exposed to changes like scripting, shooting, reshooting, editing, iterations coming out, your ying yang. You don't want to go through that. The cost is financial. It's also resources. It's also your time and your sanity. You don't wanna be going back and forth with iterations. You'll go crazy, trust me.

[00:01:16] And if you spend time in the black and white and less time switching on the camera and just shooting randomly, then you can have videos, you can diversify to all your social media channels, you can be repurposing to ensure that you get longevity from your investment.

[00:01:34] Now, this is under the provision that you know what type of video you need to produce. If you don't know, then you can go to Ridge Films and the portfolio there has a whole bunch of videos that are segmented by buyers journey. So awareness, education, and conversion content. Now, how do you plan for your video?

[00:01:57] Well, that's one thing you really want to be doing first of all. That is outline your objectives. What is the goal of the video? Is it to get more people in the door? Is it just to give them some information or is it to convert them in some way? Identify the issue you want your video to solve. List all the resources you need to make your video possible but if you have a video company or a video marketing company or agency or a video expert to help you do this for you, it's gonna be a hell of a lot faster. If you don't, then you will have to put some time in to make sure that you get those resources right.

[00:02:34] You'll have to understand how long these things will take you and your team to produce. And let me just tell you, it is longer than you think. Video has a hundred thousand different tasks that you need to carry out, from the idea right through to the delivery, and you need to be prepared for the fact that there's going to be a lot hitting you all at once, and you need to be able to disseminate all that and prioritize them.

[00:03:03] Now, number two, you've gotta know your audience. Describe your audience as best as you possibly can, because that'll help focus your messages and tailor the type of wording that you use in your script to make sure that it's not sounding uh robotic or kind of going over their head.

[00:03:22] Three, focus on key messages. Less is more baby. Only what the audience needs to know should go into those key messages. You know, this is where some amateur filmmakers can get unstuck, right? They're trying to pack everything into a single video. The video becomes longer, it becomes more waffly, and in a lot of cases it's over delivering on information that the audience probably is just too soon for them, right? So just keep it topical. If it's awareness content, just make it surface based stuff. If it's education on, you know, product or service, just give them the product or service content. If it's case studies and testimonials, just give them that, okay? Focus on the things the audience really need to know. The less info you give, the more effective your video content will be.

[00:04:13] Now, number four. Where will your video live? There are a whole bunch of different solutions for where your video will live. Obviously, some basic social media, website, email signatures in your live presentations, these are all great areas to promote content, but realize the more that you think about how you diversify your efforts producing content, the greater the reach your video will have. And to understand how your videos are performing, get some feedback. You can't always get that from like, view, share, subscriptions, all of that type of stuff. You want to get feedback based on people that have actually watched the content, and this is the way to learn if you're going to continually do it yourself. If you want more personalized coaching on this, we now have one-on-one video coaching to support you through any aspect of content creation.

[00:05:07] I'll stick a link into the comments below, so jump on a 15 minute video call with me and let's discover what's needed together. Join me next week where you'll get Video Made Simple ideas to produce the videos like a pro. And that's all for this episode. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.