Goal-setting is a crucial task for every professional and every brand; it’s what keeps the business growing and succeeding. Using the S.M.A.R.T. method to make video marketing strategy is a simple, tried and true way of approaching future steps toward success.
The acronym S.M.A.R.T. serves as a simple guide to setting goals and objectives in any business area, from employee training to personal sales goals to optimizing your company’s video marketing strategy. Being that the latter is our particular area of expertise, read on as we review how to specifically apply S.M.A.R.T goals in a video marketing strategy.
What are S.M.A.R.T goals for video marketing strategy?
If you’re unfamiliar with this mnemonic device, the letters stand for 5 best criteria for identifying goals worthy of pursuit. That is, you should focus on goals that are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Let’s take a look at how to these steps can be applied in relation to video marketing strategy.
1. Specific Goals, Specific Videos
Clarity is the first, perhaps most important, step in setting a goal. Ambiguity will only confuse you as you move forward in trying to execute and measure performance.
When it comes to producing video content for your video marketing campaign, the concept of being specific is also essential. Each piece of content should have a very clear topic or message as well as clear, specific intent for its performance.
For example, your specific goals could be:
- Boosting brand awareness on social media
- Enhancing brand image with regard to environmentalism and sustainability
- Getting more people to purchase one of your top-performing services
- Drive viewers to a website landing page to sign up for a seminar
It’s worth mentioning here that one of the most effective things about video is that you can achieve multiple things at once.
For example, your video can deliver a message via scripted dialogue or on-screen text while simultaneously representing your brand image and identity via the choice of imagery, sound and creative elements like pacing, shot-style, music and more.
This is why Forrester Research is famously quoted with, “A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words!”
But this additional layer of creative can be added once you identify specific, strategic, measurable goals that relate to your business performance, as you’ll see in the following steps.
2. Measurable Goals, Measurable Video
Measurement is key to determining progress, success or where more work and improvement may be needed.
If you’re using all of the tools available to you, your video will be highly measurable. With video, you can measure the following goals based on the KPI’s (key performance indicators) that are available through various hosting platforms or methods of observation.
3. Achievable Goals, Achievable Video
In general, goal-setting should use increments of achievable goals. This helps facilitate accomplishment, motivation but also allows you increments to evaluate and navigate your way along the climb to success.
In video marketing, it can be quite easy to get overwhelmed by everything that can be created with video production techniques. It can also be easy to get carried away and visualize a video concept that quickly explodes outside of your budget or other practical means.
At the same time, it is entirely possible to create high-quality, effective, performance-driven video content in a wide array of budgets or time constraints.
While it’s true that professional video production can be an investment, there are advantages to having expert help in developing concepts and plans for execution that fit these budget and time constraints.
And at the end of it all, it’s worth it to have the pros on your side, helping you craft a video production strategy that is achievable, that is designed to also achieve your video marketing goals.
4. Relevant To Your Business, Relevant To Your Viewers
Being “relevant” is such a crucial aspect of approaching your strategy, in more ways than one:
First, specific goals for your video marketing content and campaign need to be relevant to your over-arching business or professional goals. Otherwise, why bother putting all of that time and energy into production and execution if not to support your main goals?
Next, the most successful video content is that which is genuine, authentic, original and relevant to the intended audience. Today there are so many platforms with settings for demographic reach and analytics, all of which can be leveraged to create better, more relevant content designed to engage your targeted audience.
5. Time-bound Production and Performance
Timing is critical, whether we’re talking about the time of day, week or year your video content is being seen OR the amount of time you have in your plan to create and execute your video marketing strategy.
When crafting your S.M.A.R.T goals, make sure to mark out on the calendar when your content will need to launch (this may depend on your choice of platform, campaign dates, product release dates, event dates, etc).
Make sure to allow yourself the time needed to properly execute your video marketing content and all steps in your strategy, as well as follow-up time to evaluate, modify or improve content moving forward!
Working backward, it might look like this:
- Evaluation and ongoing improvement
- Video content goes live
- Upload video content, test playback, links and destinations
- Finalize video content and campaign landing pages, advertising copy
- Post-production – editing (1-3 weeks depending on the project
- Production Date(s) – filming, audio recording and more
- Pre-Production – preparation, scripting, scheduling and more
- Budgeting and Creative development with a video production team
- Crafting your S.M.A.R.T goals
Get Help Achieving Your Video marketing Strategy Goals
If you’ve worked on your S.M.A.R.T goal ideas, you should have a full-picture view specific goals you’d like to achieve with video, how long it might take, how you can specifically leverage your video content to achieve the goals you have set forth and how you can measure it for ongoing use or improvement.
We know how overwhelming this process can be. There are a lot of moving parts to a video marketing strategy, and it can be tough to know exactly where or when to start.
An experienced video production company can help you navigate the entire process – from understanding your goals, to creative development, production, launch and analysis, to ongoing updates or improvement.
A company focused on creating performance-driven content like this can help make your video marketing strategy a success. Reaching out to them to get started just may be the SMARTest thing of all!
