Video Strategy Is More Than Just Video


April 8, 2015

video strategy

A common question I get concerning video and the Internet is, “Where do I post or share my videos once they’re done?” I hate to tell clients “It depends,” but where and how to post your videos is a much bigger question better addressed before the video is even created. Let’s take a closer look at this.

A good video strategy can be broken down into two main areas: the video itself and the context in which the video will be used. The same video can have two different meanings or outcomes based upon the context in which the video is shown. For instance, a video testimonial that works great on your website won’t work as well in a noisy tradeshow booth.

I recently came across a great video example from cloud storage backup provider, Backblaze. Let’s first break down the video and then we’ll look at the context of how the video is shown.

Why is this a good example of corporate video?

1. Short and Concise

Backblaze immediately poses a simple question at the beginning of the video. For the remaining 90 seconds, the video answers that question in an easy-to-understand and straightforward manner.

2. Faces! Action! People!

Videos seem better with people and faces, right? In this video, we see Backblaze employees in their environment, solving the same problems the preceding question posed. Following those visuals is Backblaze Chief Technology Officer Brian Wilson narrating the question and laying out the Backblaze solution.

As a whole, the video makes the people and technology stand out as cornerstones to the company — the reason for Backblaze and their success is the people and technology.

3. Visuals Tell the Story

A smart man told me early in my career that he would proof his video work by watching it with the sound muted. Why would you do something like this? Isn’t the interview and information important to the video? Think back 100 years. Did you have sound in movies? Nope. Could people understand the story? Yup. People understood those silent movies because they told the story through pictures. The above video from Backblaze tells the same story in pictures as it does with the audio.

4. Audio Matches the Pictures

Well, duh, right? Any audio should match what the pictures show, right? Watch the video again. Close your eyes. Do the words paint a picture? Do you still understand how Backblaze works?

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This is one of my favorite strategies when I’m proofing narrated stories or interviews because a well-shot (ah, squirrel!) video can distract you from a poorly written script. Close your eyes and you can more clearly see how your audio, and therefore your video, flows and tells a story.

5. Not the Whole Enchilada

This is where the video meets the context of your digital strategy. Are you an engineer? Specifically, are you an engineer who actually understands scalable cloud storage architecture? Then this video probably raises more questions than it answers. But you’re in luck! Backblaze wrote an article to accompany the video, which goes more in-depth than the video does. Video is probably not the best place to put information like this:

With Backblaze Vaults, we wanted to be able to do maintenance on one pod in a vault and still have it be fully available, both for reading and writing. And we weren’t willing to have fewer than 2 parity shards for every file uploaded, for safety. Using 17 data plus 3 parity drives raises the storage overhead just a little bit, to 17.6%, but still gives us two parity drives even in the infrequent times when one of the pods is in maintenance. In the normal case when all 20 pods in the Vault are running, we have 3 parity drives, which adds even more reliability.

But that type of information is perfect in a written article. Think about what works in your video and what might work better elsewhere.

The Bigger Picture

This Backblaze video is only one part of a much larger marketing strategy for Backblaze. The company knows that the video serves one purpose on its own, but in the context of their overall digital strategy, the video becomes part of a much larger whole.

I found out about the video and blog article from the Backblaze customer newsletter. Clicking on that took me to the blog, where I saw the video at the beginning of the article. Did I continue to read the article after watching the video? Nope. Does it make me glad to be a Backblaze customer? Certainly!

Count the marketing touches: email, blog, video. There’s different information, a different purpose, a different outcome to each of these touches. Neither one is meant to convert a prospect or customer on their own but together they paint a more clear picture of who Backblaze is and how they can help you or your business.

Photo via Flickr user hunnnterrr
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is a strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World and Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. He is the Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, an educator at the University of Iowa, and host of the On Brand podcast. More about Nick.