Video production is a lot more than just putting together good content. For your videos to really put a dent in your marketing, you need a plan-a strategy of how to create and disperse effective content. Here are 4 things to implement in your video strategy:

1. Establish Your Tone
To begin, define your goals for your video marketing strategy. Create a simple mission statement that determines your tone and what kind of content you’ll make. Do you want to educate your viewers? Or do you want to entertain them? You will also need to look at your audience’s needs. Make sure you know who you are making the content for.
Once you’ve established your target audience, you can then consider what you want them to take away from your videos. What will your videos help your audience do? How should they act? You should know what you’re trying to accomplish with each video, even if it doesn’t relate directly to your products.

2. Outline Your Video Content
Now that you know the goals of your video strategy, you need to decide what types of videos you’ll create. Are the videos for external use or internal use? Which members and departments within your company will use video? Consider breaking your video content into appropriate categories, for example, “Sales”, “Human Resources”, “Public Relations”, etc. Look closer at the type of content you will create. Now that you know what type of video to create, decide how you’ll do it. For example, will you use product endorsements? Training videos? Storytelling videos? Tutorials? More than likely, it will probably be best to use a mix of these kinds of videos.

To get started in making video content, ask yourself, “What kinds of questions does my target audience ask?” You can ask yourself this question many times throughout your video strategy whenever you need to produce new content. Another way to create content ideas is through using old stuff. Go back and look through old announcements, releases, and blog posts that you could make into a video. Find the most popular posts and topics on your site.

Now you’ve got some ideas. Use them to make an outline for your video content.

3. Know Where to Place Your Videos
Determine where you will place your content. Your strategy shouldn’t include just sticking the video on YouTube. While YouTube has plenty of advantages, the disadvantage is that if not placed on your own website, your video isn’t leading to direct conversion.

Even if your YouTube video has a link to your website, you still need to know where your video should belong on your own site. It’s a good idea to place it where your viewers can see a series of related videos. For example, consider creating an entire page or section of your website to media. This will lead to more conversions as you create a resourceful selection of videos audience members at various stages in the buying process.

4. Decide How to Measure Performance
Measuring your videos’ performance is the only way you can know if your strategy is successful. There are several ways to track video performance. Besides looking at the number of views your videos get, you should also look at the duration of your views. How many of your viewers actually watch the video until the end? What are your “drop-off” rates?
Also check the click-through rates to your website, the number of repeat views, and if/how your viewers are engaging with your videos. Collecting this kind of data will let you know if your videos are working.

Having a defined video strategy will keep your videos from drifting off course and will give your business the momentum it needs.