Here are 10 of the essential questions I always ask my video marketing strategy consulting clients, before we start brainstorming ideas.
Before brainstorming any individual ideas, be sure to lock down your video marketing strategy foundation, which ensures you understand your audience’s psychology, the specific goals of your campaign, and how it fits in your organization’s existing sales/marketing processes.
Once that is complete, you can begin brainstorming by asking these questions:
1. How Will Your Video Enrich the Viewers' Lives?
As I explore in greater detail in my post on storytelling essential principles to creating engaging videos, most stories entertain, educate, and/or inspire.
Most viewers won’t take the time to view your video, let alone make your desired action, unless they first perceive that they will be enriched by viewing it.
What one or combination of these three benefits would speak to your audience the most? Rely on your existing knowledge of your audience and the typical day exercise for guidance.
2. What is your Personal, Industry, and Institutional Risk Tolerance?
What is your personal and institutional tolerance for risk?
Before exploring different story ideas, you need to know how much your audience and you will tolerate deviations from the normal stories your industry tells and the forms they take. This tolerance may be relatively rigid or extremely flexible, depending on your industry and how established your brand already is.
For example, on the one hand, you likely won’t want to craft a more ‘on the edge,’ unconventional story if you run an insurance business, unless you’re trying to highlight a disruptive element of your practice. On the other hand, if you run a coffee shop that is frequented by freelancing millennials, you may have more latitude to experiment with a variety of tones and subject matter.
3. What Tone Will Attract Your Audience?
With this deviation tolerance level in mind, what is the overall tone that might best resonate with your audience? Comedic? Empathetic? Authoritative?
You can often determine this by knowing their primary driving fears and aspirations, as well as the types of content they already regularly consume. It would clearly not make sense to have a comedic tone when advertising funeral services. However…
4. Establish Your Story's Relationship with Genre Conventions.
It can be helpful (and a lot more effective!) to make a video that subverts genre expectations.
Most industries rely on set genre conventions. For example, accident/injury lawyers tend to create videos that depict a terrible crash with a voiceover, and then they enter looking sympathetic but strong, wearing a suit and telling you what you deserve. We know the message of the video before it’s arrived.
You can often help your story stand out by subverting these expectations simply by looking at what is expected/normal and brainstorming ideas around their opposite–whether in tone, narrative, or any other element.
5. Populate the World with Engaging Protagonist/s
Who is the subject of your video? Do you have a protagonist or is this an ensemble piece? How do these characters represent your target audience? Do they share the exact problem of your audience? Or are the more emotionally and thematically connected? (this offers more options than the often-tired “problem solution” approach).
As a guidepost for selecting a subject, typically, audiences are most engaged by people they would be friends with in real life. More specifically, this means you want to create characters who are like them or how they aspire to be.
Lastly, brainstorm options for different objectives your protagonist may be trying to accomplish. This could be a literal narrative with a beginning, middle, and end and concrete goal, or it could be an overall objective as simple as “trying to have fun.
6. Use the Environment to your Advantage.
How can you enhance the story’s effect by matching or contrasting the environment with the protagonist and their goals/actions?
Every environment will assist or interfere with your subject’s goals. Depending on the desired dramatic or comedic effect, you can adjust the environment to enhance it.
For example, a clown in a funeral home (why are they on the mind) would likely present a more precarious (and funny) contrast than having them performing in a circus ring. The contrast of subject and environment can create an instantly engaging situation that an audience will want to know more about.
7. Adapt to Available Resources & Leverage Them.
As you’re brainstorming what world, tone, and genre elements your video will contain, keep in mind your available resources to execute the video.
Adapt the tone, subjects, and environment to fit what you can film well, and you’ll be much more likely to make a great video.
For example, you may have determined that you want to create an entertaining top-of-funnel video to create interest in your skateboard-loving audience. You’re comfortable with living on the edge, in terms of tone, and you’ve determined that a comedic approach is your best bet. The genre tends to thrive on high-energy lifestyle-oriented stories featuring incredible skateboarders having fun together, but you decided you were going to subvert that convention in order to stand out by following a really bad skateboarder who’s working hard to get better, despite being made fun of every time he fails.
Now is the time to consider, do you have access to an actor who can perform the stunts required to fail on the skateboard? Where will he be practicing (not a funeral home, aha!)? Is there a local skate park? Could you afford extras? That could require permits, as well. Perhaps you could change the environment to practicing in his back yard, while his sister or one friend makes fun of him, instead of a whole crew. Keep adapting the story to fit your resources.
This way, the story will justify the setting, instead of poorly executing on an overly ambitious plan. Keep the story human and emotionally relatable to your audience, and that will create an equally, if not more, powerful effect.
8. What is the Narrative?
Now that we’ve assembled the world to resonate with our audience, what is the exact narrative you want to tell in all its gory specifics?
Is it a montage, theme-driven piece? Or a narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end? If so, what journey does the protagonist go through? What is the emotional payoff that we can relate to or be inspired by?
As audiences, we want to feel a sense of completeness when we finish a video. Make sure the story delivers.
9. Integrate Your Call to Action.
What is your call to action? Is it subtle or overt?
Generally, more awareness & brand-centered stories aim to create an emotional response and align it with the brand/business. But they don’t spoil that connection by asking for a transactional relationship at the same time.
Depending on your campaign structure and strategy, you might create an awareness video with the aim of simply engaging your audience. Then you could retarget that audience with a specific offer or call to action. Or, perhaps the video’s purpose is further down the sales funnel, and you will be building a call to action into the video.
How can you make it fit naturally into the story? Can you have it in the text or accompanying platform elements, instead of in the video itself? Is this call to action overt or subconscious?
Get specific with how you will make sure your story will convert into action.
10. Build Testable Variations into the Script & Production
Lastly, how can you build testable variations into your story?
Despite the best-laid plans, audience responses are rarely predictable. By building several variations into the story & production, you can test multiple opening moments, taglines, music, and many other variables to see which generates the best results.
We’ve seen 30% increases in conversions by simply changing the color palette of the opening moment!
There are plenty of tools to test variations and their effectiveness, from video players to ad platforms.
Bonus Considerations
- Avoid performing too much competitor analysis. We tend to ideate based on what we’ve already seen. The point is not to replicate our competition. It is to stand out against them. The more you analyze them, the more difficult it will be to create an original story that uniquely fits you and speaks to your audience.
- Where/how are you taking a stand? People are drawn, not just to a concrete solution to their problem, but also organizations who exhibit strong points of view– beliefs that align with theirs. Beyond your service/product, what do you believe and stand for? How can you work this into the video?
These questions are just a starting point, and your approach to crafting a story will vary based on many variables, but I hope this gets your noggin churning!
