In this article, I’m going to tell you the checklist we’ve used to generate hundreds of thousands of views for our Saas clients.
Who we are and why are we writing this article 🙃
Before we do that, let me give you some context on who we are and why we're writing this article.
My name is Heleana from Videodeck. We are a video production service for software companies. We help brands create videos and help them grow through video marketing.
We’ve helped leading Saas companies create explainer videos, product demos, product hunt videos and develop a winning video marketing strategy.
Throughout our experience we've seen more and more wanting to get into video production but without a clear strategy or checklist on how to do that.
So here's our checklist.
Why do you need a video content checklist? ☑
Before you set up, record, or edit anything, you have to start with a video marketing strategy.
Why?
Without a clear purpose, you'll find yourself in a whirlwind of re-shooting, re-framing, and editing. That wastes a lot of precious time.
So, begin the process with a clear strategy.
1. Decide on who you are targeting
The first step in creating a winning video content strategy is finding where do your clients spend their time and the type of content they usually consume.
If you don’t already have strong buyer personas, start creating them now.
If you already have a set of buyer personas, make sure to update your personas to include the type of video they like to consume.
The result may or may not be surprising but here are a few conclusions you may end up to.
1. Your audience is quite young and they prefer the short actionable content or bite-size content like YouTube shorts, Instagram reels or TikTok content. I personally fall under this category.
2. Your audience uses YouTube as their source of news, entertainment and even learning. Most of the Videodeck team actually falls under this category.
3. Your audience likes the live format such as webinars, live interviews and maybe platform specific live videos. Think twitch, youtube lives etc.
These aren’t the only options but from what we’ve seen these are some of the common ones. You can also consider podcasts, video testimonials, video case studies or maybe other video content ideas.
Of course, most of your audience will likely consume all three types of content. It’s just a matter of figuring out the platform where they consume the content that’s relevant to you and your business.
2. Connect with your team to align on a plan for the video.
There are typically a lot of people involved when making a video. How can you ensure they're all aligned?
At this stage, it’s important to agree on a clear set of goals.
Is your video marketing to increase brand awareness? Sell more event tickets? Launch a new product? What do you want your audience to do after watching the video?
Video production has a lot of moving parts. Here is a quick checklist you should follow before producing a video.
- - Decide on who is in charge of the content plan
- - Who is in charge of writing the scripts
- - Find a thumbnail designer
- - Decide on who is producing the video - here you can work with an agency like videodeck, or create it in-house with your own team.
- - Prepare the assets likes screen recordings, stock footage and a general style guide
- - And lastly decide on who is publishing and optimising the video for YouTube SEO.
You can find a detail library of video script templates here.
3. The third step is to set a timeline and budget for your video.
Think of video as a shorter, quicker, and less expensive version of your favorite film.
While a video needs fewer resources to succeed, it can still be a time-consuming and expensive process. You can save time and money with planning and project management.
Regardless if you are building your project in-house or you work with an agency like Videodeck, you need to have clear deadlines and milestones.
As a reference, we produce a video from receiving the script in under 10 days.
In that time we shoot the video in this very studio, we have our sound artist make sure that the video sounds perfect, add graphics and simple animations and send it to the client.
However, before the video production actually happens it takes a couple of days to put together the script and relevant media for each video.
Regarding budget, video production can be a bit pricey compared to producing written content.
For example, we charge anywhere between 1500 and 3000 dollars for a video.
This includes the actor reading your script, shooting the video in a professional studio, creating your thumbnail, editing the video, adding sound design and creating custom graphics.
From our research, other agencies typically charge anywhere from $2,000 to $7,000 for a 2 to 3 minute professionally produced corporate video.
If you produce your video in-house then the costs might vary a lot.
4. Choose the best platform to distribute your video.
Let’s circle back to the discussion about your ideal client and where do they watch video content.
Before you start making your video, think about where you’re going to broadcast it. YouTube SEO is becoming as important as website SEO.
Think about what people on that platform are looking for.
While YouTube is the obvious platform there are more underrated platforms you should consider such as Instagram reels, LinkedIn video, Facebook video, Coursera, Skillshare, TikTok and even your own website.
While videos are often used for advertising, a video doesn’t just promote itself.
Some platforms have built-in vehicles for promotion, while others will need you to put in some time and effort to get more eyes on your video content.
At Videodeck, we are platform agnostic.
We’ve seen our own client videos generate millions of views on TikTok with relatively low effort and also high-production video series on YouTube where they’ve built loyal followership and recurring viewers.
Remember that the platform you choose will directly impact the type of content you should create and its length. This visual illustrates it beautifully.
If you are a software company and you are not sure which platform is best for you you can jump on a quick call with you and we’ll take you through our thought process and the platform we think is best for you.
5. Choose the right types of video that would contribute most to your growth.
There are so many different types of videos you can create but if your resources are limited we recommend you stick with one main platform and one type of videos for your first few videos.
A good way to prioritze them is deciding what would contribute most to your growth.
For example, if your product has high churn because your users are having a had time understanding how your product works you can create a series of tutorials on how to use your product.
These video tutorials are a fantastic way to connect with your audience, put a friendly face in from of your brand and provide meaningful content to your users.
If your looking for something that would contribute more directly to your growth you should consider an educational video series, you check out Ahrefs YouTube channel to get an idea of what a good educational video series looks like.
For example, if you run an email automation software company you can create a video series on how to win at cold outreach and email prospecting. Lord knows we need that as we’ve tried it with poor results.
If none of these two ideas seem good to you you can also produce sales videos, product demos, interviews, company culture videos and other community building videos.
6. Decide which metrics you want to track and how you will measure success.
Before you dive into production, you need to define your video goals and find the best metrics to help you understand whether you've accomplished those goals.
You can default to using the metrics available in your platform of choice. But this can make it difficult to figure out if your video strategy is performing over time. It can also make it difficult to measure the effectiveness of multichannel video strategies.
Instead, choose several key performance indicators that correspond with your video goals. This list of metrics is a good place to start if you’re not sure where to start with tracking your video marketing.
While tracking metrics is super important to measure goals don’t let yourself discouraged by low performance right after kick starting your video content strategy.
As most good things, video content marketing takes time and most efforts have a compounding effect.
So go out there, produce content that your audience enjoys and that helps you reach more people.
And that’s it.
So what do you think about these 6 steps? Was it useful? Did we miss something?
If you want more insightful content like this, make sure you check out our YouTube channel where we publish more content like this one.
Y’all are the best, I’ll see you in the next one.
