We here at Umault recently ran a video campaign for ourselves (yes, we practice what we preach). As our launch date approached, we made a checklist of all the things to do and check before hitting “go.” We found it very useful, and thought you might too.

We’d like to share our secrets.

How to create your next video marketing campaign

Set a clear and measurable goal.

Have the goal set before creating any assets or videos. If you’re planning to use existing assets, does the video match the goal, sales funnel stage, and target audience? If not, the video might hinder your campaign.

Set your campaign to run according to your goal.

For example, if your goal is conversions, tell the platform. Sit back, relax and let it do its job.

Don’t worry about likes if your goal is website visits. Don’t worry about CPC if your goal is conversions. The AI is smart enough to serve your ad to people who will convert, for example, but not necessarily “like” your ad. Focus on your goal and let AI do its job.

Create multiple versions of your video.

Have a nuanced video? You’ll need a straightforward one to hedge your risk. Have an emotion-driven video, have a numbers-driven one to hedge. Make sure you’re using multiple versions so your eggs aren’t in one creative basket.

Double check your backend and tech.

• Is your landing page responsive for desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile? Check it using actual devices! Do forms appear correctly? Do images size dynamically?
• Install and check your tags and pixels. If these aren’t set up properly your ad platforms may not know who’s converting. Without knowing, they won't be able to optimize for what’s working.
• Check your landing page speed. Keep in mind these prospects will give you very little time and will click away if your site takes too long to load. You need a fast experience.

Audit your landing page.

• Does it have a valuable offer?
• Is it clear what you want visitors to do once they reach your site? Is it seamless?
• Does the video and social post match the landing page content?

Audit your content.

• Watch just the first three seconds of your video. Does it catch your attention? That’s how long users will watch before they decide to stop or keep scrolling.
• Is the copy customized to the platform (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)? Avoid using the same copy across platforms.

More video marketing campaign resources

Wondering what videos we ran to advertise ourselves? Check them out.

1. The direct spot that performed best on paid: https://youtu.be/VCPGMjCW0is
2. The clever parody that performed best on organic: https://youtu.be/I2SeBj6R-mc

Once you set your goal, need to know what kind of video best fits your sales funnel? Read our series on top of funnel video ideas and middle funnel videos.

Listen to the podcast episode below.

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You can listen to the episode using the player embedded above, or you can read a full transcript below.

Episode transcript

Hope Morley: Hello and welcome to “So You Need a Video,” a podcast about boosting your business with video marketing. I’m Hope Morley.

Tory Merritt: I'm Tory Merritt.

Guy Bauer: I'm Guy Bauer.

Hope Morley: And on today's show, we are going to be talking about video campaigns. So, based on everything that we learned on our last campaign and all of the campaigns we've run in the past, we put together a checklist for you, it's downloadable on our website. But we want to really go over some of the different things that you can do and go over a few of the key items from that checklist. The full thing, like I said, will be available for download on our website at umault.com.

And the very first thing that we want people to do has nothing to do with the video, has nothing to do with deciding on whether you're going to be doing this on LinkedIn, or Facebook, or Twitter. The very first thing on this checklist is, set yourself a goal for the campaign.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. So, there's many measurements of success inside a video campaign. It could be number of views, number of shares, number of likes, number of webpage clicks, number of downloads. So, if your goal is, we want people to download our lead magnet, you may not get a bunch of likes, and you may not get a bunch of shares. And if your goal isn't rock solid on that, we only care about downloads, you'll get distracted by your lack of likes, or lack of shares, or lack of virality, or whatever. So, your goal has to be very focused. And then, all of your KPIs need to line up with that goal, otherwise, you're going to get distracted and spend a lot of money chasing all the other different metrics of success.

Hope Morley: And once you set that goal too, and make sure that everybody in your company on your team knows what that goal is too because, like I was saying, it's really easy to get distracted by all the metrics that are available to you on these platforms. So, if you set a goal and it's clicks, we want people to go to our website, go to our website you don't want your boss to be coming to you a week later saying, "Why is this video not getting likes? Why are we not getting likes on the campaign?" If you have that goal set and you can point and be like, "Well, we're not getting likes, but look at all the clicks we're getting. This is working, this is hitting our goal." It's something you can point to.

Tory Merritt: And you want to have that goal actually before you make the video, whenever possible, because you're going to make a video based on what the goal is. The creative is based on, for us especially we're in the sales funnel, you're looking to boost conversions that will help you decide what type of video to make. So, if you make a video that's top of funnel, but then you set all your metrics later on as mid-funnel there's going to be a discrepancy between what you were hoping to get and what you're getting in a lot of cases.

Hope Morley: 100%. So, touching on the video a little bit, and something that we found specifically in ours. But when you're running a social video campaign, and this is a item on the checklist, watch the first three seconds of your video and then stop, and see if your attention was grabbed. Because people who are scrolling through any social platform, or who are hoping to just skip through your YouTube pre-roll ad, they are not generous with their time. They're not going to sit there and give you 30 seconds to decide if they want to watch your video.

Guy Bauer: You must be compelling in that first three seconds, either through simply introducing your value prop, or introducing a question. We had two spots in our campaign, and the first spot ... or one of the two spots, I noticed the view time was like two seconds, nothing. The average view time was nothing. And when I looked at it, and we kind of start the spot making fun of normal corporate videos, so the first seven seconds that the spot was making fun of was, actually, showing a corporate video that we're about to then make fun of. And, I guess, what we all are incited, what's the right word? What we all ...?

Hope Morley: Discovered.

Guy Bauer: Discovered. What we all discovered after looking at the insight was that the video was so good at making fun of a normal, boring corporate video that people thought it was a normal, boring corporate video. So, all we did was chop two seconds off the front, so that the punchline comes in at exactly like the four and a half second mark. And what we noticed was average view time went from like three seconds to 25 seconds. So, your spot, especially speaking to a cold audience ... now, if they're on your website, they're going to give you more attention because you've earned their click, so they're going to give you a little more leeway. But if you're speaking to a cold audience, top of funnel, you need to get right to it.

Guy Bauer: And that doesn't mean get right to your pitch, or whatever. You need to get a hook in. Either it's talking about some kind of very valuable proposition, or inciting a question of like, "What the heck is going on here?" And that's exactly what our revised spot did, is we got to the question sooner, we got to the gag sooner, which then boosted engagement.

Tory Merritt: And a good point with that too is, traditionally, a lot of people will say, "Well, the logo needs to be in the first five seconds or whatever." And I agree with that Guy is saying, is it doesn't have to be a logo, it doesn't have to be branding. It needs you to hook something that keeps someone going, but actually throwing your logo in the first couple of seconds may make a cold audience turn it off versus continue, if they don't really give a crap about you.

Hope Morley: Yeah. And something related to looking at your first three seconds is considering having multiple versions of your video. So, not just multiple versions of the posts, or the text that goes around it, or things because you should be doing that regardless. But don't put all your eggs in one basket creatively.

Guy Bauer: Yeah. And this was another thing we learned from the campaign. So, there's a spot that's my favorite, it's my favorite child. And then, there's the spot that's like whatever. And the spot that is whatever turned out to be the best performing spot for paid. Now, for organic, on owned, shared and earned channels the spot I loved outperformed, but on paid the other spot outperformed, one. So, that's where if we had just done the spot I wanted it wouldn't have worked on paid. It would have had very low efficiency and cost way too much money.

Hope Morley: And that's something that you can really get a lot of efficiencies. So, when it comes to video production, a lot of the expense comes from the production day. The actual day that you get everyone together in a room, you have to pay for talent, all this stuff. We still had two videos. We shot them in one day, we had a lot of efficiencies there because it's same actors, it's the same crew, it's on the same set. And we just got two videos out of it.

Hope Morley: So, from a client perspective, when you're thinking about what to do we're not advocating that you do two big productions that you do like a whole big thing. It's just as part of your creative process. Think about and talk to your video agency about how you can get these efficiencies there, so that you get multiple assets out of that one production day.

Guy Bauer: It's really just like good stock market buying too, it's diversification. Here's an easy way to think about doing it, is say you have your really interesting spot that's like 90 seconds, or whatever. The way to think about it is come up with an alt version, an alt 15 to 20 second version, and boil the 90 second spot down to two sentences. And there you go, there's your 15 to 20 second thing. What's next, Hope?

Hope Morley: What's next? So, we're going to move away a little bit from video. So, the thing with a video campaign is that yes, the video is your anchor, but there's so many other pieces that need to go into having a successful video campaign. Having a great video, like I said, it's only one piece. So, our checklist includes things that surround the video, the context around the video, and things that you should be checking and thinking about before you launch the campaign. So, we want to take a minute to talk about your landing page. Once you get your attention, you got them to stop their scroll on LinkedIn or Facebook, they click your link, great. Where are they going?

Guy Bauer: You need to devote as much attention as you devoted to the video to the landing page, in order for the campaign to be effective. You can have the absolute best, smartest people running the campaign, optimizing for cost per click and all that stuff, you're getting a ton of traffic. And then, your landing page isn't optimized for mobile, and your logo is like really huge, and takes forever to load. And the text is all shrunk because nobody changed the responsiveness to fill the page. There's so many things. Your landing page is slow, that was a huge issue with us. We were noticing the bounce rate was really high. So, we started taking off elements that were slowing it down, and we saw the bounce rate go down. So, the landing page is kind of the other half of your video marketing campaign.

Hope Morley: All right so, to kind of sum up everything that we've gone over here, there's a lot of information. So, like I mentioned at the top of the episode, we have a whole checklist that's available for download on our site that really breaks down all these different steps, and different things that you should be thinking about before you run your next video campaign. So, we'd love if you take a look, let us know how it works for you. I'll link to this all in the show notes, but you can find more information, all of our fun things on our website at umault.com, that's U-M-A-U-L-T.com, if you're watching on YouTube, it just showed up on the bottom. And if you liked this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, like us on YouTube, and let us know what you think. Thanks for listening.

Guy Bauer: Thanks everybody, see you next time.