Mastering Video Marketing: A Stories Era Playbook

Step one: split your content by format, not by platform

By 2017, treating “video marketing” as one channel had stopped making sense. Instagram and Facebook Stories, both fully rolled out by the middle of the year after Instagram’s launched in August 2016 and Facebook’s own version followed, rewarded quick, vertical, disposable clips. The main feed still rewarded slightly more polished native video. YouTube remained the place for anything worth finding through search months later. A real playbook assigned different content to each, instead of cutting one video three ways and hoping it worked everywhere.

Step two: build a weekly rhythm, not a campaign calendar

The businesses getting the most out of video in 2017 stopped thinking in terms of occasional campaigns and started treating video like an ongoing production line: a Stories post most days, a longer native video weekly and a live session on a predictable schedule. Consistency mattered more than any single video’s polish, because the algorithm on every platform rewarded accounts that showed up regularly.

Step three: put captions on everything

Sound-off viewing, already the norm on Facebook for a couple of years, was now standard on Instagram too. Every video going into a main feed needed burned-in captions or on-screen text carrying the message, since a huge share of the audience would never turn the sound on at all.

Step four: use live video for the moments that need it

With Facebook Watch launching in August 2017 as the platform’s push into destination video, and live tools now mature on both Facebook and Instagram, live video had a clear job in the playbook: real-time events, Q&A sessions and anything where the audience benefited from immediacy. Everything else, tutorials, product explainers, brand storytelling, worked better pre-recorded and edited.

Step five: measure completion rate, not just views

A “view” on most platforms in 2017 counted after just a few seconds, which made raw view counts close to meaningless for judging whether a video worked. The more useful numbers were completion rate, how many people watched to the end, and the actions taken afterward: comments, shares and clicks to a landing page.

Step six: repurpose deliberately, not automatically

The temptation to auto-post the same video everywhere was strong, but the format mismatch showed. A vertical fifteen-second Stories clip cropped down from a horizontal YouTube video looked obviously repurposed, and audiences noticed. The better move was shooting with the eventual format in mind, or accepting that some content simply belonged to one platform and not trying to stretch it everywhere.

More from the archive: browse the Content Marketing category or see everything published in 2017.