Why Is Knowing Your Video’s Purpose So Important?

Knowing the video’s purpose is critical because it dictates:

• where the video will be hosted
• what kind of call to action you put in your video
• your distribution strategy
• how your content is presented

Knowing your videos intended purpose also serves as a lens and increases the chance that you’ll get every single one of your intended videos in front of the right section of your audience.

Although there are many different types of video you can make, from the point of view of intended purpose it boils down to just three choices.

Three Types Of Video From The Perspective Of Purpose

The end result – the purpose – of your videos should fall into one of these three categories:

1. To attract people to your website.
2. To persuade people to buy your products or services.
3. To help people who’ve brought your products or services actually use them.

These three types of video correspond to the three stages of the Sales Cycle: attraction, conversion, consumption.

The Attraction Video

The Attraction Video is the video equivalent of a blog post – it’s something that you send out into the big wide world and its job is to send traffic to your website.

You want to get as many eyeballs on an attraction video as possible – so it gets posted to YouTube, to your blog or website, in Forum answers, on other people’s blogs or websites, in iTunes.  Basically anywhere you can post it where your audience might find it.

The purpose of the Attraction Video is to get people to your website – so the Call To Action should reflect that.  You should direct people to go to your website – and give them a compelling reason why they should.

The actual content of the Attraction Video should serve the purpose of attraction – whilst there are several ways to do this, a great way is to provide solutions and/or information to your target market.

Get your attraction video strategy right and your videos will send targetted traffic to your website 24/7.  When using video in Content Marketing, the attraction video is the video type you will make the most of.

The Conversion Video

The Conversion Video is a sales video.  It’s the kind of video you send your subscribers to when you’ve got a product or service to sell.  The copyrighting ‘goo-roos’ all claim that good Sales Videos outperform good Sales Letters by a factor of anywhere from twice as much to ten times as much. The Call To Action in a Conversion Video is simple – it’s buy my stuff!

Conversion Videos done right have the potential to increase your sales – the production values and time invested in making these videos should dwarf the values and efforts spent on either attraction videos or Consumption videos.

The Consumption Video

The Consumption Video is designed to assist those folk from your tribe who’ve brought your product or service to actually use it.

The easy way to create Consumption Videos is look at the FAQs you get for every product or service that you sell.  Answer each one with a video – live action or screencast or hybrid of the two – and you have consumption videos.  And you’ll stand out from your competition because few people do it.

If you sell any kind of software and/or plug ins Consumption Videos are an absolute must.

The Call To Action for a Consumption Video is to send people to a central page where they can access more videos that address common problems.

Summary

So before you create your next video ask yourself the question:

What is the purpose of the video I’m making?

Once you know what purpose you want to fill, it clarifies the whole video making process and makes your finished video serve your business more effectively.

(Content borrowed from Paul Wolfe)