A 5-step Plan for Video Production and Distribution

No video-marketing plan is complete until you know how your company will shoot and distribute that content to your audience of customers and prospects.

Video content marketing starts with goal setting, understanding your audience, identifying topics, and creating a schedule — often in the form of an editorial calendar. I addressed all of these steps in “A 4-step Plan for Video Marketing Success,” a recent article.

Once you’ve completed these first steps, it is time to produce, edit, and publish your videos. As with most content marketing, the aim is to make a connection with consumers.

In some cases, you can create a sense of reciprocity, wherein a consumer will watch a video from your business, recognize the video’s value, and feel a little indebted for your efforts. The next time that person needs a product your store sells, she may be more inclined to buy from your company.

What follows is a five-step plan for producing and distributing videos for content marketing.

A man shoots a video with a DSLR camera. Photo: Stefano Intintoli.

1. Shoot Your Video

Whether you will be recording on an iPhone or a DSLR camera and whether you will do it yourself or use an agency, remember three essentials as you shoot and develop your company’s video.

• Add real value.
• Be consistent.
• Make it sustainable.

Make videos that are useful, informative, or entertaining. They should be relevant to your audience. The viewer should be better for watching it.

Also, produce videos regularly. No single video meets all of a company’s content marketing goals. Rather, video marketing is an ongoing strategy to attract, engage, and retain your audience.

With consistency in mind, how you shoot the videos should be sustainable. Thus, if you have a small ecommerce operation without a lot of money, don’t hire an expensive advertising agency for your first video and try to shoot your second one using an inexpensive webcam.

Choose a video style, format, and production process that you can sustain.

For help with video production, consider taking a few courses on the YouTube Creators Academy. All of the courses are free and, in my experience, offer helpful advice about video production.

2. Edit for Distribution

Edit your videos based on the distribution channel.

For a video on YouTube, as an example, you probably want a 16:9 aspect ratio (i.e., horizontal) at a fairly high resolution. But if you are posting to Instagram TV, you may want a mobile-friendly 9:16 (vertical) aspect ratio. Or, for a video on your website, you may want both a horizontal and vertical version so that the aspect ratio changes based on the user’s device (i.e., mobile versus desktop) or device orientation.

Resizing or reorienting videos may require advanced editing skills. Thus you may need to outsource that task or use specialized software. For example, Adobe Premiere has recently added an auto reframing feature that can transform a 16:9 horizontal video into both a 1:1 square and a 9:16 vertical version.

Adobe Premiere can reframe a video to meet your distribution requirements.

3. Create a Transcript or Article

After you have created and edited your video, consider repurposing it in an article. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create and publish a transcript of the video.

There are many transcript-generation services, such as Rev.com. Transcripts may be unnecessary, however, for scripted videos.

Finally, you could always write an article related to the video, perhaps expanding on one key portion.

4. Publish

You could place your video on multiple platforms, not just YouTube. You could also publish it in different formats, such as a blog post with an embedded video or short clips on social media.

In other words, publishing is not necessarily a one-time event in a single format. Reuse and republish video content for a larger impact.

5. Ask for Feedback

Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. This can be done on the distribution platform, such as YouTube or Instagram, or on your company’s website. The goal is to generate new content ideas to engage existing and potential customers.