How To Audit Your Goals And Build A Video Strategy That Works

There is only one reason why a video campaign fails: neglecting to consider your business and marketing goals when creating your content. If you want to see success and high ROI with your videos, you have to create a solid strategy aligned with your goals.

Nearly everyone at some point has a marketing campaign that totally flops, whether it’s video, written content, or another medium. Those “flops” are rarely the ones that follow a structured, well-researched strategy that’s in tune with your business objectives. The “flops” tend to be those campaigns that are created quickly with the hopes that your audience will like it, without knowing why you’re actually creating it.

A video is rarely an end in it of itself. Even the most creative storytelling video has some sort of purpose or goal, like inspiring brand engagement or loyalty. You need to know where you’re going before figuring out how you’ll get there. You need goals to strive towards in order to have a successful video campaign.

So how do you create goals that push your video strategy forward?

The True Film Production Flop

We’re a professional video and marketing company. We’re not in business just to create videos. Our goal is to craft stunning stories in our videos, which are used for marketing purposes. We are marketers first, creators second.

But even though we live this day-to-day, we don’t get it right all the time either. We’ve seen our fair share of “flops” with our own marketing campaigns, especially when we were just learning the ropes.

There was one video in particular that we thought would be super interesting for our audience. We were excited about it, because it felt “new and different.” We hurriedly created it in just a few short days, we posted it everywhere, and we waited for the overwhelming response.

But that response never came. The video just didn’t connect with the audience. One of our viewers actually commented, “Why did I just watch this video?”

And that’s when it hit us. The viewers didn’t know why they were watching the video because we didn’t even know why we made the video. We thought it would be a cool topic, but “cool” is just about as far as it goes. The video wasn’t aligned with our goals, mission, or vision.

We thought we liked how the video felt different. But that “different” feeling was actually because it wasn’t aligned with any of the other videos we’d done that were aligned with our vision and mission.

We’re not saying you should stick to the status quo, though. Since then, we’ve discovered that newness and uniqueness is a natural part of the creation process. And that creation process is part of the overall business strategy.

But it has to first start with strategy.

How To Align Goals And Marketing

We’ve asked clients to give us their business and marketing goals, and they’ll come back with “we want to make more sales” or “we want people to share the video a lot.”

These goals aren’t going to bring you to success. They’re basic and static. Instead, you need clear and defined goals that will help you organize a strategy.

For example, let’s say your primary business goal is to drive sales. You’ve got a lot of leads, but not enough people are buying. The business goal “drive sales” isn’t going to work, though. How do you know when you’ve reached the goal? By when do you need to reach that goal?

This is where SMART goals come in. Your goals get down to the “why”—why are you creating this video or marketing campaign?

SMART Goals

SMART goals, also called KPIs or Key Performance Indicators, ensure you have practical objectives that your business is working towards. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-based

Specific: The goal should be as clear and focused as possible. “Drive sales” is too broad. You’d instead want something like, “Sell more hair gel to male customers age 20-35.”

Measurable: Now, put a number on that goal. You want to sell more hair gel, but how much more? “Sell 10% more hair gel than Q2.”

Attainable: Can you actually reach this goal? If you sold a million hair gel products in Q2, will you be able to sell another 100,000 units this quarter? Is that too lofty, or can you actually get there if you strategize effectively?

Relevant: Does your goal actually push your business forward? Let’s say your company is looking to move away from hair products and focus instead on body products. It wouldn’t really make sense to emphasize selling hair gel if it’s not pushing the business to its next phase.

Time-Based: By when do you want this goal achieved? Why does this time frame matter? For example, you want to sell 10% more hair gel in Q3 than in Q2. That’s time-bound. You can figure out exactly what changes to try to see if you can reach that goal this quarter, so you can focus on making Q4 even better.

Learn more about KPIs here.

Setting a SMART goal isn’t enough, though. Once you have the goal in place, you need to figure out how you’ll actually attain that goal. Each department—like sales, HR, and marketing—will need to create individualized goals that build on one another to reach the overall goal.

This is where video can do a lot of the leg-work.

Read: How To Use Your Purpose To Share The Story Behind Your Brand

Business vs Marketing Goals

You’ll want to consider two types of goals before even looking at a video campaign. What are the overall goals of your business, and how will your marketing goals get you there?

If your business goal is to increase hair gel sales, every department has to work together to bump up hair gel sales by 10% this quarter.

Then you can narrow down to focus on how marketing can push this. You’ll want to create an even more narrowed goal. For example, “In order to help boost hair gel sales by 100,000 units this quarter, we need 2.5 million+ marketing impressions on a hair gel video.”

Now, your entire marketing department can work together to find different avenues and channels to get 2.5 million views, which they’ve anticipated will likely translate to 1.1 million sales.

Check out this awesome resource: 6 Questions To Set Up Realistic Goals For Your Video Marketing Campaign

Where Video Comes In

You know what your business and marketing goals are. Now, you can craft a video that actually pushes those goals.

Your marketing department needs 2.5 million views. What better way to broaden your reach and engage your audience than with video?

When you know what you’re working towards, you can better craft your video effectively. It’s about more than just form—like what kind of call to action you’ll use to sell the product. The goal helps you design the story you need to tell in a way that will best engage your audience.

And it’s not just for marketing. Maybe your sales team wants a product video that helps them better relate the benefits of the hair gel to their customers. Or maybe your HR team creates a short video for the on-the-floor sales team training to learn how to effectively create relationships and sell the product.

Video is a means to get your business to reach its goals, both internally and externally.

Make goals, see success

Ultimately, your content won’t resonate with people if it doesn’t align with your business and marketing goals. Creating videos needs to start with goal setting before the creative process can even begin.

Do you know what your business goals are? Wherever you are right now, start the conversation with True Film to begin building a content strategy that will actually show results.