tw-zhuliye: Video Marketing Success Starts with Distribution, says Forrester

Many marketers are underestimating the importance of distribution and treating it as an afterthought, according to a recent Forrester report.

As Samantha Merlivat, Forrester Researcher and author of Branded Video Marketing Success Starts with Customer-Centric Distribution explains, “Producing content before having a clear distribution strategy makes campaign distribution highly inefficient.” If you wouldn’t plan a content piece like an ebook or powerpoint deck without thinking of where it’s going to live and how you’ll promote it, than why would you do so with a video? Video isn’t actually a one-size-fits-all medium even though we so often treat it that way. Different people are on different platforms for different reasons and Forrester argues that your content must align with this.

What’s more, relying on organic traffic just doesn’t cut it any more. Posting a video on YouTube (even if it’s a pretty freakin’ awesome video) is unlikely to generate you millions of views or qualified leads. In fact, for distribution outside of your firm’s owned mediums, Merlivat says that relying on organic traffic is not a smart strategy. Most marketers will need to pay to get preliminary traffic. But that preliminary traffic will spark more organic engagement and growth, in turn so it’s not like you have to pay for 100% of your video exposure.

James Buchanan, Strategy Director at Razorfish, the agency working on some of Unilever’s YouTube campaigns says that their traffic is split 50/50 between organic and paid. But it’s important to note that the threshold for results with paid campaigns has increased in recent years as more an more marketers are utilizing this tactic. “It now costs me 10 times what it cost me four years ago to achieve the same kind of organic lift,” emphasizes Billie Goldman, Director of Partner Marketing at Intel. In the report, Merlivat offers some really unique options for targeting your video campaign that will help you reach your target audience through paid promotion and therefore make the most efficient use of your budget.

In addition, Merlivat provides a framework for what questions you should be answering surrounding distribution for every phase of the video process in this report including planning, production, promotion, and measurement and optimization. She also includes some phenomenal real-world examples of brands who distributing the right way.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, you’ll definitely benefit from some (or all!) of these extremely tactical takeaways. Check out the report here!