What is marketing?
Before we talk about marketing video production companies, we need to start with the basics. What is marketing? According to Webster, marketing is a) “the act or process of selling or purchasing in a market”, and b) “the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.” This basically means all activities related to the buying or selling of a product or service.
Let’s break this down and look at what is traditionally called the four Ps of marketing – a combination of four tools first published by Professor E. Jerome McCarthy . They are product, price, place, and promotion. If you open any marketing 101 books, you will find the four Ps. These are traditionally called the marketing mix. Can you guess which P is part of your marketing video?
- Product. A good or service, or idea to satisfy the consumer’s needs
- Price. What is exchanged for the product?
- Promotion. A means of communication between the seller and buyer.
- Place. A means of getting the product to the customer
If you are in the marketing field and reading this you may ask, “but wait, there are seven Ps?” Modern marketers have now expanded the 4 Ps to the 7Ps with the addition of people, process, and physical environment. Here is a great article to discuss the 4 Ps’ evolution to the 7 Ps.
Marketing Video Production Companies
We consider ourselves a marketing video production company because we go above and beyond setting up a bunch of camera gear, hitting record, and video editing. By the time you contact a video company, whether it was intentional or not, you already worked through three of the four Ps and now you are in the Promotion phase. Now you need to communicate with your buyer.
Buyer is a general term that extends beyond someone purchasing your product or service. It also includes someone who you want to donate to your cause, and even potential employees you want to recruit into your workforce.
Connecting with your customers through video
With our background in marketing, we partner with many of our customers to help them develop the video messaging of their promotion to help them deliver a clear and engaging message to their target audience. The goal is to understand your audience’s existing worldview. Seth Godin describes this as “…the rules, values, beliefs, and biases that an individual consumer brings to a situation.” The trick is conveying a clear customer value proposition that matches the worldview.
In general, most of our customers have their own internal marketing departments or agencies that handle the promotional messaging. In this event, we take less of a role in message development and focus more on how to best convey their messaging through video.
Once we all agree on the messaging, we discuss what kind of video will best tell the story. We will write more about the different types of stories in a future article, but you can watch a few examples here to see some options. Whoever you choose as your marketing video production company, they should suggest a variety of approaches to consider.
The biggest challenge we face in developing the video messaging is that some companies push a value proposition that doesn’t match the customer worldview. During the story development process our first step is to define who the customer is and what they are looking for and then frame the video messaging to match. This is easier said than done because, in reality, people don’t want to be told their strategy is missing the mark. As an outside party, it’s often easier for us to present alternative approaches after learning more about the company and gaining a variety of perspectives.
