There’s a real difference between a pretty video and a great video. And it boils down to one important factor – your video strategy. Not every video production company understands this. In fact, when it comes to commissioning your company’s video, you want more than just a video production company. You need a video strategy company that knows how to make a video that will have a positive and measurable impact on your business.

So, what sort of information does a video strategy depend on? As a video company that knows its strategy from its elbow, here’s a list of nine questions the TopLine team asks our clients from the get-go. You’ll soon see that the process is much more complex than just working out the colour palette or choosing the voice-over accent.

1.    What are your video goals? 

Why are you commissioning this video in the first place? For example, you may want to use it to attract new business. Or for internal use to educate or train employees.

2.    How does this video integrate with your marketing strategy?

The video needs to fit in with your wider marketing strategy. A standalone video, no matter how pretty it is, that has no connection with the rest of your marketing activities, is a big waste of time and money.

3.    Who is your audience? 

We want to know their age, gender, online habits, buying preferences, communities – as much information as we can possibly gather. From this data, we create specific personas that help us plot the video strategically.

4.    How do you plan to distribute your video? 

Once your video is made, what is your distribution strategy? How do you plan to get your content in front of your target audiences?  A video strategy company will consider owned, earned and paid media, and determine how these will influence where and how the video is aired.

5.    What are your key messages?

What do you want and need your video to say? Again, refer back to your marketing strategy. This will help us weave your key messages into the video content cleverly and seamlessly.

6.    Who are your stakeholders?

It’s important to know who we’ll be working with. Who is going to support us and provide us with the information we need, who will potentially obstruct our work and who will give the video the final seal of approval. Add all the players to the briefing sheet to help us understand the politics and dynamics.

7.    What results does this video need to achieve – the KPIs?

What does bad, good and great look like to you? How do we measure the video’s success – do we track the view-through-rate (VTR) or the click-through-rate (CTR)? Are you interested in what online discussion forums have to say and how many likes the video gets on social media? Or perhaps you are driven by real world outcomes like changing existing customer behavior and getting more people to walk through the door?

Look at discussions around the video content once it’s released and see if the key messages are being picked up.

8.    What is the production budget?

Be as honest as you can be about what you want to spend. This will ensure a far happier and much more successful production process.

9.    When is the deadline? 

Timelines also need to be clear from the start. What release date are you aiming for and then we can work backwards to plot the production schedule.

Need a video strategy company to help you make great videos that are on time, budget and message? Give our head of production, Jamie, a shout today and we’ll sort you out in no time.