5 Strategic Video Marketing Skills for Young Professionals

After sharing Technologist Dan Romanski’s blog “6 Must-Have Apps for Video Marketing” a few weeks back, a connection of mine posted the following:

It’s an interesting question. Were this five years ago, I would’ve said, “None! Leave it to the professional videographers.” But as many young marketing professionals already know (and many more will find out), today’s employers expect an increasingly varied skill set to even land an interview, let alone a job. For young marketers, it’s not enough to want to learn about video marketing—you have to bring some basic skills to the job Day 1.

Dan and I are young professionals utilizing our video marketing talents to benefit Kuno Creative and its clients. In this blog, we share a few strategic video marketing fundamentals we believe all young marketing professionals (or any content marketing professional, for that matter) should have.

5 Strategic Skills for Video Marketing

Video marketing is more than hitting “record” and uploading. As with all aspects of marketing, video marketing begins and ends with strategy. In regards to video marketing strategy, young professionals must be able to:

• Understand the Audience or Buyer: One of the main goals of video marketing is to create video content your audiences will want to watch and share again and again. Achieving that goal is nearly impossible if you don’t understand the buyer. I can’t emphasize the word “understand” enough: It’s one thing to be able to ramble off a list of demographics about your audience, but it’s an entirely different thing to know what your audiences care about, how they like to communicate and what drives them to make decisions. See this blog for more.
• Determine the Appropriate Video Style: Interviews, testimonials, documentaries, demos. There are so many different video styles great for content marketing. But it takes more than just knowing your options—you need to be able to assess your project and determine the absolute best video style to achieve your strategic goals.
• Choose Appropriate Platforms or Apps: Similar to the last bullet, young professionals must be able to choose the appropriate platform and apps to achieve their video marketing goals. While it may be easiest to choose well-known platforms (like YouTube) and apps (like Vine), young professionals need to strategically examine all available options to decide which tools will most likely lead to success. 
• Manage Time, People and Deliverables: In inbound marketing, account managers handle most project logistics, but each team member is usually responsible for managing their contributions. If you’re heading up video marketing, you need to be able manage the time you spend in pre- and post-production, the people included in your video and those on set and, most importantly, the final product.
• Optimize for Search: If the video is staying with your team after its completion to be added to websites or uploaded to social media platforms, young professionals must be able to optimize the video for search engines. In most cases, this includes strategizing tags and meta tags and crafting keyword-rich descriptions.

Next week, Dan will expand upon this list to include technical skills we feel are essential for young professionals. Subscribe to the Brand & Capture blog so you don’t miss it!

Known as Hawkeye for her near superhuman copy editing abilities, Lisa Gulasy applies her unique experiences in agency and journalism to manage strategy and day-to-day engagement of client social media profiles and assist in researching and writing blogs, press releases and advanced content. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.