In a recent post on video strategy for nonprofits, I reflected on the first three of ten video fundamentals that YouTube’s Jason Djang recommends to nonprofits. I now share with you another four of his suggestions, #4-7. Jason emphasized that not all of the ten fundamentals must be followed. They are simply strategies to keep in mind.
We’ve all heard the importance of regularly delivering marketing content to our audience, rather than in an on-and-off fashion. Beyond scheduling, Jason also emphasized the value of consistency in the style and format of the videos you share. Do you have the same person, a “host”, who is on camera? Do you usually deliver videos that are instructional in some way?
The concept behind this is to help your audience know what to expect.
Defining your audience is kind of Marketing (and Selling) 101, but it never hurts to be reminded of it. We are clients of Wistia, a video-hosting service. Wistia has a very clear understanding of who their audience is – video marketers. So nearly all of the videos they produce and distribute either help marketers understand how to make their own videos, or how to use their videos better for promotional purposes.
Wistia’s videos also, by the way, satisfy Fundamental #4, Consistency. Most of the time they’re pretty entertaining.
It’s great to be able to deliver videos that people watch, but ask yourself how much can you do. Being ambitious about what you want to accomplish is great, but it’s better to be realistic about your bandwidth and then be consistent in your delivery.
Here, of course, Jason has a bit of an agenda because he wants folks to use YouTube, which he points out is the second largest search engine behind Google. Fair enough. I suppose it depends on what kind of videos are being created, but we are pretty certain that most users who are doing searches on YouTube are more likely looking for “How do I fix my leaky faucet?” rather than “What is a great nonprofit I should know about?”
Our feeling is that, for video marketers at nonprofits, it makes sense to build an audience that will engage with your website, because that is where people are truly going to learn about what you do and why you do it. For us, we embed our videos within our website’s blog, but we also post our videos outside of our site. In each of those outside channels – our newsletter, Facebook and LinkedIn – our goal is to drive traffic back to our site. As a result, our audience has grown incrementally over time.
Part 3, with the final three fundamentals, coming soon!
