Top five downsides of hiring a video agency

You're ready to start your first video campaign and suddenly, there's a niggle at the back of your mind. Did I hire the right agency? Has my brand been properly represented? Will my audience engage? In short, you're thinking: what are my risks? The 2020 Gartner report on the new sales and marketing relationship reveals just how much the marketing landscape has changed lately. Knowing is everything.

Know the Risks, know the fixes

Below are the top five risks of using a video agency.

1. The risk of working forwards (backwards smashes it)

An agency that doesn't listen or hasn't understood your brief is the highest risk of all. You may well come to the table with a high expectation of publishing videos which will generate a high response. This is not unreasonable. Your agency, however, may lack the skill in delivering the response.

Perhaps a polite way of saying this might be that you have selected the wrong agency.

When you choose an agency, it's your responsibility to ensure that it has the ideas, the awareness, and the capabilities to think backwards. In other words, to work from audience response back towards messaging and audience understanding.

Don't make the mistake of buying creativity for its own sake. Choose your video marketing partner wisely.

2. The risk of expecting audiences (you have to build them)

Videos need to be seen. To be found, to be discoverable, visible in streams, groups and wherever your audiences are. It's known as placement.

So this risk is found in two places. The first is inside your video agency. If you choose a production partner who lacks the skills in deployment and placement, your video project is going to struggle with the important aspects of being seen and generating response. That's huge.

The second place is inside your marketing team. Dare it be said, on your desk. If you're not thinking about response, and what it takes to elicit that response from the word go, you're setting yourself up for a beautiful project that will never be seen.

Think positively about the kind of response you would wish for, even if it's simply from what you might consider to be 'branding' videos. If people have understood who you are and what you're capable of, the all important question is: what do you want them to do about it?

3. The risk of hitting-and-hoping (split-test hard)

Committing to a huge project without really knowing that it's going to work, or having any contingency for revision, is a big risk. Because video tends to be more expensive than many other forms of content, the temptation here is to see video as an unchangeable format and a kind of content.

That's not really the reality. If it's entirely possible to shoot multiple endings for movies, it's entirely possible to shoot multiple calls to action and multiple variants of the videos which you launch with.

Viewing video as a trial-and-error medium is a good practice. And, while the fundamental truths and stories that you have to explain to your audiences don't vary, the endings and calls-to-action (particularly the endings of those stories) can be changed easily and republished. You can move to an optimum when the analysis starts to flow in and proper learnings can be applied to audience behaviour and response.

This is critical for slowly improving your video campaigns effectiveness. There's only one platform that really helps you here and that is Vimeo. YouTube will simply not permit you to update videos in a convenient or split testing kind of way.

4. The risk of hiding the real you (you're better than you think)

Historically, many financial and knowledge firms have developed a tendency to hide their expertise by simply writing about or illustrating their capabilities. The logic is false, yet it feels so right - to protect your unique knowledge and insights from competitors. However, that's literally putting competitors before clients. Is that the kind of priority you'd advise any other firm to take? To put clients second? Thought not. And if that's you, and you're pivoting to something new, we hail you. Your hope now might be that by producing new videos, you will reveal more. Shine brighter.

So don't hide your intellectual property, or talk in general rather than specific ways, or mask your key processes, beliefs, or strengths from competitors. Unless you have a wholly patented and totally original process, this kind of hiding is dangerous.

Video gives you an enormous opportunity to express valuable proofs to your online audience. And that's where they expect it now: online. Not in a meeting or a Zoom call.

Besides, your competitors almost certainly know what these so-called secrets really are. Look at your own knowledge of your competitors; you have a pretty good idea of how they differentiate, and what processes or unique aspects of their business they claim. If you already know that, they almost certainly know it about you.

The risk here is investing in video while still wishing to hide your key advantages - this dilutes the messaging and the efficacy of your video campaign.

5. The risk of limiting video to reputation and leadgen

The greatest return on investment (ROI) in business video often comes when you migrate video effort to further down the pipeline. Towards supporting sales initiation, nurturing, development and closure.

Sales teams are simply unaccustomed to the idea that they might have videos to support them in their work. Yet, sales videos that strengthen their case can have an enormous effect on the desire of a prospect to come on board.

Examples include films that deal with objections, demonstrate products or services, and explain clearly the client experience, whether that's onboarding or right the way through the year.

Ignore these kinds of videos at your peril. The remedy is to plan for videos which support the attraction and development of leads, and also support the sales and closure processes.

Already got this covered?

If you already have professional videos and they're not generating response, there's much above that will help you improve their performance. But what would be even better than your current professional videos?

One-minute Improvers

• Cross-check all your professional videos largely follow the above suggestions, or deviate for good reasons
• Ensure you've used on-site CTAs which match your buyer journey moments
• Ensure your social videos, articles and posts have off-site CTA's that match your buyer journey
• Check your professional videos match the messaging your audience needs to hear
• Check viewing behaviours - if audiences aren't watching to the end, revise your video


What's at Risk here? A one-minute test

The risk of doing something wrong always hinders us as decision makers. And equally, the risk of doing nothing lurks behind that too. Both carry the risk of failure. So why not delay - deferring looks safer. Like a Whitehall mandarin. Is that the kind of decision maker you want to be? Thought not. So here's a helpful checklist for wise decision maker inside you that's aching to be heard.

The One-minute Decision Checklist

1. Do buyers want to know what you're like?
2. Do buyers want proof of your success?
3. Should you provide buyers with the information they want?
4. Do buyers want a sense of what will happen to them if they buy from you?
5. Do buyers need to find you easily via search and social media?
6. Do you need to be seen as relevant and modern?

If the answer to any three of these is yes, you should almost certainly proceed with this. Or at least be questioning why you have so many no's.



Conclusion

Video agency risks are largely offset by undertaking a modest amount of thinking:

1. Selection: choose an agency that can work backwards from your goals
2. Insufficiency: choose an agency that can place videos, not merely make them
3. Rigidity: choose an agency that can split test your videos, and optimise conversion
4. Hiding: choose an agency that has interviewers capable of really finding the good you do
5. Opening: think of sales as well as marketing when you define your project

The very process of assessing risks will generate more ambitious thinking. It's not hard to think, just hard to find the time. When you do, you'll be helping your marketing, finance and sales directors all at once. And your project will succeed.

So, now you've de-risked hiring an agency, you've moved towards your goal. Time for a chat about success with video?

Book a Video Marketing Demo