To Video or Not to Video?

I’m not a minimalist, but I am a “do I need it?” kind of person. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing a whole lot of “thou shalt create video” in terms of business and marketing. But why?

Well, for one, to get the point of the video you have to watch to at least almost the end (even if it’s on 2x speed 😬), unlike skimming an article. Ok, I get that, but is some of the hype around video based on marketers tracking views as an ROI? Maybe; at least that was one of my takeaways from the hubspot data in their most recent State of Video Marketing from HubSpot. It’s not really clear how marketers are tracking the numbers of leads and sales that result from video, but there does seem to be an increase in leads and sales being reported from prior years. 

One bit that wasn’t surprising from the report: "96% of marketers agree that videos have helped increase user understanding of their product or service." As someone who has onboarded faculty teaching online and teaching with new technologies - video was a lifesaver. In many ways it was also a time-saver (FAQs became videos). 

I can’t praise video walkthroughs enough as a way to close gaps and improve understanding. I used this for students and faculty training for well over a decade, and those types of videos gave the audience power - they had the power to stop and catch up or replay points where they couldn’t find the button or the next click step.

Ok, ok, so it seems like I’m talking myself into using video here.

Regardless of the benefits, I dislike being told what to do and following what everyone else is doing without fully knowing if something is going to help me reach my goals. Video is time consuming. Strike that, good video is time consuming. 

In fact, I already have video in my courses, but as I’m starting to delve into the world of marketing for the first time (full disclaimer, I withdrew from my undergrad marketing class), I’ve been trying to decide where video might fit into my plan (I almost said my brand, but honestly, it made me throw up in my mouth a bit). 

To do that, I’m first outlining my goals. My goals with my marketing are much like everyone else’s: make people aware of and wanting to buy something from me. However, I hate sales and really just want to put out good content so the interested show up and the uninterested just keep moving along. 

So I’ve gone back to my academic roots and pulled in some instructional design tactics by working backwards from goals and problems. 

1. What are my goals? – always start here, no matter what you’re thinking about doing. Write those out; seriously. In a list, ideally even a table.

2. Go through my goal list and for each goal ask the question: will video help me reach this goal?

1. How?

3. What problems do I need to solve? – Write this out!

4. Go through your problem list for each issue and ask the question: will video help me solve this problem?

1. How?

If I answer all “No’s” to 2 & 4, then I don’t need it. 

I have several goals and problems, but I’ll focus on just two for this. 

Goal/problem	Will video help reach/solve?	How?
Goal: Education	Yes	Video can help deliver complex content within courses. It’s also a good method for making sure content is universally accessible.
Goal: Brand awareness.	Yes	As a new kid on the block, people need to get to know me, realize I’m not full of it, and trust me. I can do that in writing, clearly, but the occasional short video can have a big impact.
Goal: Value rich content for my audience (how am I doin guys?)	Yes & No	Offers value on certain topics It won’t add value for certain topics because the text based or image only based media is easier to process.

Yup; “yes & no” isn’t helpful in that second row but it’s also realistic because that goal is large and messages and mediums (^McLuhan) are too closely connected to give a blanket answer. It would mean I know everything I want to say. Half the time, I don’t know what I want to say until after I’ve said it.

This means that I’ll need to ask myself these questions each time I develop content. I asked myself this question for this blog - would this be better as a video? 

Ultimately, I decided against it here because:

1. Everything that I wanted to say would make the video too long

2. I wanted to be able to give an example of what the table might look like with just one goal that could easily be returned to

3. I frankly didn’t have my *ish together - a video would have been rambly or I would have needed to do a significant amount of planning to then realize that the video was going to be too long.

But I did answer yes in those first two rows. 

Row 1: Videos are powerful in courses, though no course should just deliver content in a video and be called a course, but I digress and will come back to that in another post. It might even become a series.  

Row 2: Short videos that need images and words and voice to be effective are going to help you get to know me, so I’ll be throwing some in now and again. The key, for me, is going to be that I don’t want to be able to say “could’ve been written” about a video, and visa-versa.