Businesses have never produced so much video content. Social media is full of it, websites are packed with it, and marketing budgets are increasingly being committed to it. Yet, most of that content doesn’t drive any business results. Views and likes don’t translate to increased sales, inquiries, or perception.
This divide between video that engages and video that produces results stems from a lack of strategic intent. Video content produced just because “everyone’s doing video” isn’t nearly as effective as video content produced with a clear business goal.
Measuring What Matters
Video metrics can be meaningless. The content that rakes in thousands of views may not bring a single benefit to the business. Conversely, something that receives only a handful of views can still massively increase revenue or drive inquiries. The difference lies in whether the content was designed with business results in mind or just produced as part of the content marketing machine.
Views and engagement metrics are incredibly superficial. They indicate how many people may have seen the content but say nothing about whether that translated into anything useful for the business. Someone may even watch an entire piece of content and forget the brand minutes later. Real business results show up in metrics that actually matter—qualified inquiries, sales conversions, reduced customer service load, improved hiring outcomes, whatever the specific objective was.
These are the types of results that professional film production companies know how to measure. They can identify what works in digital marketing and what doesn’t. They do so by understanding the difference between entertaining content and content that drives business results, and they ensure that each project starts with a focus on the business’s goals rather than just producing something pretty.
Types of Content That Increase Business Value
Various kinds of video content can increase the value of a business, so there’s a caveat here, the type of content must align with the business objective behind it.
Explainer videos that explain complicated value propositions help move prospects through the decision-making process. Customer testimonials increase the trust customers have in a brand. Product demos answer questions that keep people from buying. Each serves a specific goal in the customer’s interaction with the brand.
The biggest mistake businesses make is using one-size-fits-all brand videos that try to do every job at once. The result? They don’t accomplish anything because they’re not designed to achieve a specific result.
Videos made to increase brand awareness should be made with different structures, lengths, and messaging compared to videos focused on closing sales. When people try to use the same video for multiple purposes, they usually end up with an ineffective piece of content that doesn’t serve any goal.
Training videos might not be seen by customers directly, yet they drive quantifiable business results, so they’re worth mentioning here. They decrease the time to onboard new employees, ensure better compliance with laws and regulations, standardise practices between employees, and reduce the burden on overworked staff who would otherwise have to explain practices repeatedly.
The return on investment for these types of internal video productions might be more measurable than for those meant for customers. Yet they deliver efficiency increases that save companies considerable time and resources.
Production Value Affects Credibility
There’s a sweet spot when it comes to production value. There’s also a level of production quality below which the final product will actively harm business goals. Shaky camera work, bad audio quality, subpar editing—all of this screams unprofessionalism and reflects poorly on businesses.
Viewers will make snap decisions about business credibility based on video quality, however harsh it may be. This means there’s an ideal level of quality to look out for when creating video content for businesses: A strong standard that looks professional but doesn’t waste budget on unnecessary production qualities.
Production quality takes on different forms depending on the industry, product price point, and target audience. B2B technology startups pitching six-figure solutions benefit from high-quality production values that reflect the sophistication of their offering. Local service businesses often enjoy better results with unembellished, authentic video content that prioritises clarity over cinematic prettiness.
Production value affects how viewers perceive a business’s credibility but subpar production quality won’t be forgiven by viewers regardless of how strong or interesting the content is. Understanding this balance separates wasteful video projects from efficient projects informed by solid video strategy.
Distribution Strategy Instead of Volume Creation
Creating great video content achieves nothing if it’s not distributed properly. Many businesses focus on producing great quality videos while paying very little attention to distribution strategy. They dedicate substantial portions of their budgets to producing top-notch video but distribute them haphazardly. A blog post here, an upload on their website there and some posts on social media hoping the content finds its audience.
A distribution strategy involves understanding where target audiences interact with brands and what formats they prefer at different touchpoints in their journey. Detailed explainer videos might perform well embedded on product pages where people are investigating their options for purchasing decisions. The same videos might flop hard on social media platforms as people scroll past single-mindedly looking for bite-size pieces of engaging fluff.
The most effective video marketing strategies create adaptable core content pieces and distribute them across different platforms using different formats that suit those platforms. One shoot can give companies multiple assets. A full-length case study video they post on their website, shorter highlight reels for their social media pages, quotes pulled from these videos as standalone posts, and supplementary material for their sales decks.
Making Videos That Drive Business Goals
Video content works as part of a business strategy when it’s created with specific goals in mind, tailored for specific stages in the customer journey, produced with quality measures suitable for industry (and not overdone), and distributed strategically across relevant platforms for specific audiences.
Content created just to be released as part of a content marketing strategy will generate views but rarely do anything else valuable for businesses. Companies seeing returns on their investments in video content achieve it because they treat videos as tools to achieve specific objectives rather than following trends blindly. They know what results look like beyond views, they create specific content rather than generic fluff, and they measure success using useful metrics rather than vanity metrics.
