Creating a Content Strategy

Calendar Compressed

Don't let the time slip by!

A new year typically brings a wave of personal excitement, thinking about the possibilities of the year ahead and its potential. Unfortunately, the optimism usually wanes when we realize time is passing and we haven’t made the progress we hoped we would have. While we can’t help you fulfill all your goals, we thought we would share a couple of tips from our wheelhouse of video production to help you get the most of your marketing content this year.

1. Look at your big goals.

With a critical eye, take a look at your big goals for the year and brainstorm ways video might help with those goals. It’s important to note that content — videos and photos — is only a tactic that supports your strategy. In other words, don’t make “more photos and videos” a strategy for growth. With that said, here are a couple ideas.

  1. Is it your goal to increase sales? Think about creating videos that answer some of the common objections a buyer might have, or create videos around your sales team to introduce themselves. Client testimonials are also a great way to drive sales.
  2. Is recruitment your goal? Think about creating some short videos highlighting key employees and why they like working with your company.
  3. Is training one of your goals? Think about creating some video modules to onboard new employees, standardize processes, and ensure consistency.

With these (or other) goals in mind, ask yourself how videos and photos can be used to get there!

2. Make a calendar.

This is a very important step in making sure your don’t miss out on hitting your targets. After looking at your goals and thinking of ways that video or photo content could support your work, make a calendar of when you would want to role out your content. Depending on your industry, you may have specific dates throughout the year that just make sense for scheduling — but even if that’s not how your industry operates, you should still make a content calendar. It can be all too easy to let our ideas fall away as we get busy in the day-to-day. The practice of specifically scheduling your content allows you to stay on task and keep moving forward.
Start working sooner rather than later!
Whether you are capturing the content yourself or hiring someone like ourselves, always start long before you think you’ll need it. Trust us on this one. We’ve been in business for 15 years now and time can of slip away.  Start early!

3. Shoot on a regular basis.

Shooting photos and video regularly allow you to have plenty of content to draw from when putting together video projects, sharing on social media, or updating your website. Capturing footage regularly also means that your less likely to miss something that you’ll later wish you had video and photos of.

Capture more than you think you might need. Especially if you are using your phone to shoot, edit, and make reels, shoot quite a bit. The mundane can become a lot more interesting when you set it to music and cut several shots together.

4. Build a library.

By shooting footage on a regular basis, you begin to build a library that can be used in all sorts of ways. But before you can get to the fun part of putting your footage to work, you’ll need to make sure you have an efficient and safe way to store your video and photos long-term. When you need your footage in a future project, you want it to be easy to access and ready to use.
Warning about backing up on hard drives

Hard drives fail all the time so make sure you have backups – restoring failed hard drives is very expensive and doesn’t often work. If you have a solid state drive that fails, everything on that drive is totally lost. Have at least two hard drives with your library of footage on it.

We archive on a tape-based system that has a 30-year shelf life for just this reason.

Next, be sure to get most of out of your footage that you possibly can. Beyond the main project, how can you use what you have? Edit videos into shorter cuts for social media. Keep your website up-to-date with fresh images. Make a reel for your social channels … the list goes on. Brainstorm, be creative, and don’t let anything go to waste!

We hope this has been helpful! Here at 2355 Productions, we’re wishing you a strong finish to 2023 and an even better 2024. If we assist you in any way as you take on your video and photo strategy in the new year, please don’t hesitate to reach out — we would love to help make 2024 your best year yet!

Ready to get started?

We’d love to help you with your content strategy for the year. 

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