In 2022 a shift is expected to take place, marketing and brand teams are prioritising improving their social media video production over a focus on static content.
A recent report from Smartly highlights how the balance is shifting. Last year, 51% of teams said they would be investing in their static content. Now, however, this figure has reduced to 19%, while those investing in motion content has surged to 47%.
What effect does improving social media video production have on your brand?
Essentially, those that aren’t pivoting their content and ad strategies are putting themselves at risk. The reason being, customers are expressing a clear preference for moving, over static content. So, make sure you are investing in improving your social media video production in 2022 to grow your share of audience attention.
To keep things simple, we’ve broken down 7 steps to improve your social media video production in 2022.
Step 1: Define your key moments throughout the year.
The first step to improve your social media video production strategy is agreeing at which points throughout the year you need to generate results. Ultimately, defining a few priority moments will help focus your team’s attention on producing high-performing assets that you can activate when you really need to grab your audience’s attention.
Defining this picture will help you in a few ways, firstly, it gives an indication on project timelines, and when you need to begin planning production days (i.e. don’t leave it until December to shoot your Christmas campaign 😉). Having a schedule like this in place ahead of time gives your creative strategy room to breathe. Once you give it this space, you enable your teams to think more clearly and be more creative in creating engaging moments for your customers throughout the year.
Step 2: Audit your team’s capability and capacity.
Next, it’s important to understand where your team is able to get stuck into the creative process right away, and where they need to collaborate with freelance talent, or with agency partners. A mistake many brands make is overburdening their own teams with the associated tasks of creating motion content for social and advertising.
Marketeers are good, but often they are expected to carry more than their fair share. This situation can be easily avoided with some robust project management that lists where your team’s skill sets lie, and identifies areas where support needs to be brought in.
Doing this ahead of time enables you to take time in researching which skills you need to bring in, and who the right partners are to collaborate with. Once you have your key moments defined, sit down with your team and define what you need to bring each of them to life. Understand who can achieve that, and where you have gaps – filling them early will ensure you improve your video production strategy over the year ahead.
Step 3: Refine your audience insight.
Understanding how your audience is responding to the content you are posting, and what their demographic profiles look like is critical to nailing your content over the year. Make sure you are testing the assumptions you make about your audience on social media, and always remember to avoid the pitfall of thinking you are the customer.
Once you have a clear, up to date picture of your audience you will be able to agree on the creative ideas for your social and ad content. When you have settled on the creative ideas you will be in a position to define your briefs, taking you a step closer to realising your killer new strategy.
Step 4: Build out production schedules.
Production schedules are when things start becoming real. By this stage, you know what you want to shoot and why. Now it is just a case of making it all happen. When it comes to planning your production schedule make sure you cover off the basics, these include:
- Writing a script.
- Creating your storyboards.
- Agreeing on filming locations.
- Defining your equipment list.
- Booking your talent.
- Outlining your shoot timeline.
Not sure what goes into each of these steps? No worries, we’ve pulled together some handy tips in a recent blog which should be able to help with that: Five steps to crush your social media video production strategy.
Step 5: Shoot early!
Now this one is probably a given, but you’d be surprised how it often catches brands out – but get your content in the bag early. Giving yourself the time to work through edits, and understand how the content you shoot can be broken down into various long and short-form snippets for different platforms will make your investment in content work much harder!
It also gives you time to try visuals in a number of sequences, paired with different music, etc. Additionally, it gives you the leeway to handle any of those leftfield requests or challenges that can come your way in the process of producing new content.
We joked about it before, but honestly, it’s never too early to start thinking about your Christmas campaign 🎅.
Step 6: Stay close to your metrics.
Ok, so you’ve navigated the planning and strategy process, shot your campaign well ahead of time and got your edits placed across your key channels. What next? Well, now you’ll want to keep an eye on how it all performs. Keeping a close eye on your engagement metrics will give you an understanding of how your content has been received by your audience. It’s important to pick metrics that link to the goals you set out for your campaign. For example, did you want the campaign to launch a new product, sell more of an existing one, or was it all about brand awareness?
Answering these questions will help you understand what it is you should be paying attention to. Additionally, surveying your audience once a campaign has gone live is another great way to hear from the people that were engaged by the content, and will help you understand where you can improve on your next shoot.
Step 7: Refine, rinse and repeat.
If you made it this far, then congratulations. You’ve successfully navigated a full social media video production. Hopefully, you’ll have come out the other side with some awesome metrics to shout about, or some valuable learnings to apply to the next campaign.
As ever, when it comes to marketing it’s an ongoing process. Don’t be afraid to test new concepts and learn from the successes and failures alike. Doing so will ensure your content strategies continue to improve and deliver real results for your business.
Need help to improve your social media video production strategy in 2022? We Are Even can help with that.
We are a social video production and strategy agency based in London and the South East. Take a look at some of the work we’ve helped our clients with, and get in touch to see how we can collaborate with your teams.
We’d love to work together with you in 2022.
