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What is “agile video creation” and what does it involve?

The world agile gets thrown around a lot. Usually by startups, investors, authors, and technical teams at big organizations. But as the methodology becomes more mainstream and people increasingly discuss “agile marketing,” few have really made it clear how this applies to video marketing.

The best way to explain agile: an approach where data is frequently being taken into account and the end product is improved iteratively. For videos, this means incorporating each individual piece of feedback — either from people internally or from your target audience — into the video and measuring the response. For those of you who are focused more on the story than video performance, this post may not be for you. But for the marketers who want to drive results with video, keep reading 🙂

How to do it? There’s no right answer. Here at Sightworthy, we don’t believe in black-and-white thinking. Just as we believe that videos can be evaluated both by their ability to tell a story and perform in some measurable way, we also know that the process of getting there is going to vary. However, there are some basic principles that we typically suggest.

Seeking feedback should be the number one priority. The more perspectives you get, the better. If you want to play it safe, get feedback from your team before involving other internal stakeholders. Make a list of the edits, noting which pieces of feedback were given by multiple people. These are more likely going to affect viewership. 

Next, when it comes to collecting feedback from your coworkers, manager, or executives, trust but verify. Intuition is often right, but there’s a really good chance it’s wrong too. The best way to figure out whether or not video feedback is going to help is through testing. That means that you should give everyone credit for contributing, but you should avoid giving anyone’s opinion more weight than another. (Yes, even your manager).

How do you collect the feedback? Well, either see what people are saying or see what people are doing. Internally, that means sending surveys, asking over email, chatting in person etc. But it could also mean monitoring the video viewership after sending to a coworker, or even observing a teammate watch the video and writing down the reaction. 

With your audience, there’s only one way. Test and learn! Release the video and see how people respond. It may involve releasing one iteration, measuring the response, releasing another updated version with some of the feedback incorporated, measuring response, releasing another updated version… and so on.

By publishing the creations at each stage of the process, you will be able to establish a baseline for performance. You can then see precisely what edits work best for performance. Youtube pre-roll ads are a great testing ground for these videos, though we rarely advise brands use YouTube as the destination for video viewership.

The three main benefits of agile video creation are that it:

  1. Saves you countless hours otherwise spent planning and coordinating
  2. Enables you to quickly learn which changes actually improve performance for videos, and these insights can be factored into future video productions
  3. Surfaces the best performing video possible before putting the vast majority of your ad budget behind it and posting organically on owned channels

If you’re like GSK or Morgan Stanley or the many brands that work with Sightworthy, you can also get the original content created by our network of social video editors. So in addition to the above process, you can surface new, unique ways of telling your brand story that may resonate with your audience.

This balance of creative content generation, testing, and iterating is the future of social video. So, if you want of videos that inspire and perform, definitely go agile. 

Interested in walking through the agile process in the context of your organization? Give me a shout at james@sightworthy.com and let’s talk.

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