Nick BuchheitToday, video has become an integral part of marketing. With more and more people watching videos on their smartphones or tablets, it’s essential to create content that will keep them hooked. But how do you come up with great ideas for video production? In this blog post, we’ll show you the way!
Define Your Audience and Target Persona
As always, in marketing, you need to understand who you’re trying to reach with your videos. Before you start the ideation process, you need a clear view of who your target persona is. Who is it that needs your product?
Valuable questions to ask when you’re defining your target persona include:
- What are their goals?
- What are they struggling with?
- How do they perceive the world around them?
- Who are they influenced by?
- Where do they spend time online?
These questions will help you build out a more detailed picture of who you’re trying to reach, which is great knowledge to have as you go about developing marketing content that resonates with them.
Identify Your Audience’s Main Problem
To make your message resonate with your audience, you need to understand them. Not only who they are, but what problems they face and what aspirations they have. You need to know what they dread and what they aspire to.
One of the most common mistakes marketers make in this process is basing their strategy on assumptions. But by doing so, you risk creating messages that are at best perceived as “meh,” and at worst, perceived as entirely irrelevant.
Luckily, getting this part of your video’s production strategy right is as easy as picking up the phone or getting on Zoom and talking to your customers. Ask them to tell you, in their own words, why they chose your product, what problem it solves for them, and what they love about it. Then try to stay as close to what they say as possible when you create your video messages.
Explain How Your Service or Product Solves This Problem
Once you know what problem you’re solving for your target audience, it’s time to start ideating around the actual content. How can you best illustrate this transformation that you can help your target persona achieve? It’s often a good idea to aim for a “show don’t tell” method, where you let the customers or results speak for themselves.
When you start crafting the messaging and content ideas, trust and authenticity are two words that should always be top of mind. People today are flooded with marketing, and thousands of videos are uploaded online every second. To stand out, your content needs to come across as something that potentially will add value to your customer’s life.
Focus On Your Core Message and Don’t Be Afraid to Repeat It
A common mistake in video marketing is trying to jam too much information into one piece of video content. What happens then is that you create an information overload, and your prospect will either tune out completely or forget half of the content as soon as your video is over. It’s usually better to focus on one message at a time, starting with your very core message. And don’t be afraid to use the same core message in different video productions repeatedly; it’s through creative repetition over time that strong brands are built.
Related reading: 4 Tips On How To Avoid Information Overload In Your Videos
Watch Your Competitions and Identify Your Differentiators
The last thing you want is for your video content to sound and look like everybody else’s. It’s way too common to draw inspiration from competitors, and it’s easy to understand that it may feel intuitive to look at them. And yes, you should look at them, but only to figure out what not to do. In a saturated market where attention is the hard currency, the first thing you need to make sure is that your content stands out. This goes for all aspects of your video production: messaging, design, how you tell your story, and the way you make your audience feel.
Use the Disney Method To Ideate, Brainstorm, and Innovate
As always, when it’s time to get creative, it’s best to start with as few limitations as possible. Begin without thinking about budgets, locations, and restraints. Instead, set your fantasy free and just brains storm all ideas, good and bad, high and low. You can draw inspiration from many sources, such as TV commercials or content from industries completely different than yours.
To get your creative juices flowing, the Disney Method is a great framework. Film producer and innovator Walt Disney broke down the ideation process into three chunks: the dreamer, the realist, and the critic.
The Dreamer. This stage is for free, unbounded fantasies where the craziest and most absurd ideas are allowed. No filter, just childish creativity. This stage is all about “what if…?”
The Realist. In the next stage, ideas would be reworked into more practical concepts. This stage is all about “but how…?”
The Critic. In the third stage, it’s time to question your concepts and troubleshoot. This is the elimination stage. This stage is about “what’s wrong with this..?”
By compartmentalizing the stages like this, you avoid letting reality get in the way of creativity too soon and missing out on the truly great ideas.
Related reading: Creating A Story Arch For Creative Storytelling
Partner With An Experienced Video Production Agency
If going through all the steps above sounds like a lot, we’re here to help. Covalent is a full-service video production agency working with both B2C and B2B brands. We excel at creative video content with an authentic vibe that helps brands stand out from the competition. We can help you through every step of the video production process – from ideation and strategy all the way to the finished product. Reach out to us to explore the opportunities!