A step-by-step guide to managing an animated video project for your organisation.
Success is impossible if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve…you have to know where the goal is before you can score in it! If you are considering starting a video project - be it animated or filmed footage, or any project for that matter, your first port of call is to define your objective - the WHY?
Here are three steps to help you do this:
1. Drill down to the bottom line with lots of “Why?” type questions!
Before defining your video’s objective, it is useful to think about your organisation’s broader goals and how the objective fits within that.
Visualise the scene, a client comes to us and wants to explain the features or functions of what their app does, and we would ask:
“Why do you want people to know what your app does?”
“Because then they’ll understand that it is better than any of our competitors!”
“Why do you want them to know that?”
“Because then they will choose our app over others.”
“Why is that good?”
“Because then it will drive more downloads.”
“Why do you want more downloads?”
“Because then we will get more revenue.”
“Why do you want more revenue?”
“Because then we will get more profit.”
AH! Now we’re at the bottom line!
Now your bottom line might not be your financial bottom line, you could be a not-for-profit wanting to raise awareness with an app, so rather than increase downloads, you want your users to know your app is better than the competition and download it and start using it. Do make sure this is communicated with those involved in your video project - it will make a huge difference to the decisions made and yours within it.
2. Make it measurable
Many of us are aware of Peter Drucker's quote: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” So taking that on board - how could you measure the success of your video project? Sometimes our clients have clear quantitative measures - so an increase of X% on the number of sales made, Y amount of sales leads generated etc but often measures are qualitative such as raising brand awareness or a functional know-how or a mixture of the two and can therefore be tricky to measure or can be based purely on a feeling. Where possible though it is important to measure the results so that changes can be made to improve upon the outcome - if you have put your video on Youtube but disappointed about the view metrics then can there be other ways of getting people to watch - different methods of distribution or a combined approach etc.
3. Create reasonable targets.
Creating reasonable targets is important - make sure they are ‘SMART’ - remember too that if your landing page needs work or the email template you are sending your video out to your database on isn’t well designed then this could impact your video project effectiveness. So ensure you look at the whole delivery cycle as a whole and at the early stages of the project and throughout too.
By following these steps you should have a video objective that is:
specific
connected to broader organisational goals
and measurable with time and performance targets.
Now you are ready to tackle other strategic issues - so do head over to the next blog post in this series - “How much should you spend on your video project?”