Our (now famous!) guide on how to create killer video content

We’re absolutely thrilled to be featured in Startups Magazine’s ‘Advertising and Branding’ Issue, the first edition of 2020!

It’s an awesome opportunity for us to really dive into how we work with our clients to tell meaningful and impactful stories - and share some of our biggest learnings across the whole process.

Scroll through to read our entire feature here:

Have a brief you want to chat through or you need some desperate help building out your content for the rest of this year?

Email josh@mattr.media and we’ll be in touch!

How to build a water-tight brief for you (and your agency partner!)

Writing a decent brief for both you and your agency partner is massively important. If done well, your brief should act as a touchstone for you both to create actionable instructions out of… it also ensures everyone is staying on course once the project is off the ground.

Trouble is, people aren’t really taught how to brief. So often important details can get left out and details that are supposedly set in stone change halfway through, leading to timely mistakes and costly errors.

This is definitely the case with video content, in spite of it probably being the most effective way to emotively connect with your audiences and educate them on why you exist.

Often video teams are often briefed at the “end” of planning phase… we’ve certainly felt this pain ourselves, and over the years have often had to rewrite briefs with the client to ensure the proposals we come up with are fit for purpose.

So, to save you time, stress and potentially money for when you’re putting your next video brief together, the below are some common details people leave out that are really important for your partners to understand:

1. Communicate your business challenge

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Often brands tell us the communication objective of their video project, but it’s even more important to understand what the underlying business problem is that has led to your decision to create this video.

One time we were asked to create a campaign for a client who needed to raise awareness with a new audience, but when we learnt that they also needed to drive sales once that audience landed on their website, the amount and type of content we delivered was reprioritised vs what we had been asked.

If we hadn’t have dug deep here, perhaps it wouldn’t have been as effective as it was.

2. Write down any relevant audience insights

Any audience insights you have to hand should be shared as part of the brief for the video.

Most briefs explain what the brand wants the audience to “know/feel/do” after watching the video, but it’s just as important to understand their mindset and what their painpoints are BEFORE they watch the video.

Frankly even if you don’t have large pools of research to hand, just informing the agency what these people love and worry about around your brand and the sector you work in is massively important to understand.

3. A deep dive into your budget

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No, this isn’t the point where you should say what budget you have, that should be a given.

However, you should also include information on what resource you have internally that could help with savings. This could be anything from team or customers who you could feature in the films, locations you could make available, team members who could support with anything during production or after.

Basically it’s worth putting down as that way the agency partner should be able to work out how to best spend the budget knowing all the tools they have at their disposal.

“TOP TIP: if the budgets allocated don’t match your ambitions, consider how you can look money together between your teams... ultimately if the content produced can help recruit new talent or sales teams use in meetings, they should contribute towards the project.”

4. Use the brief to think about how you can scale the campaign

What else are you doing beyond this video to drive the action you want? Are you creating supporting content for the viewer after they watch the video we are being asked to create? What about a landing page that stores some of that info you can drive traffic to and capture emails from? Is there a social competition being created to drive further engagement?

When we say we create “scalable” video this is how we think and often the client is thinking this way too, so let your agency partner know...it can spark new ideas and sometimes additional content that can be captured on set to support your plans.

5. Explain to your partner what types of internal resource are and aren’t available

Can't stop, won't stop, please stop

Following on from this, explain to your video partner what internal resource can support their work. Do you have in house pr or paid media taken care of? What about social community management? Graphic design? It’s great to know this can be leveraged and if you don’t your video partner should have its own decent network of partners they work with to help plug the gaps.

There are plenty of other elements to building out a brief. And whilst we can share briefing templates to help you with this, we also run complimentary briefing workshops to ensure absolutely nothing is missed out. If you’re interested in having one, just get in touch with josh@mattr.media

BBB tips: sit down with your customer, use your mission to empower your colleagues & how to acknowledge your competitors

It’s a brand new decade - and what better way to start than to share learnings from the last Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable to add to your list of OKR’s and personal goals for the year ;) 

In this edition, we delve into how to get your customer more involved in your brand journey, why being vulnerable with your colleague will build trust, how to approach bigger competitors in your comms and the holy trio of truths to abide when defining your purpose. 

Take the time to sit down with your customer

A couple of our attendees confessed to getting carried away with what they assumed their customers wanted from their brand, without actually having the data and proof to back it. They also confessed to relying on their analysis of social and digital engagement with their content, which can be easily subjective and interpreted differently from person to person.

Ultimately, meeting your customers face-to-face and eliminating screens is the answer. One marketer found that by bringing together people in small focus groups, they discovered unique audience quirks, commonality in things they worried about all of which the brand hadn’t considered based on digital data.

And if time is lacking, one top tip was to create a quarterly brand health checker to distribute to your community online. Ideally, the survey lists up to 10 questions to understand what your customers love at the moment, but also where they think your brand needs to be in the future. It’s this data that will help you get your comms to be working as efficiently as you need it to be.

Be more transparent to better your company culture

At Mattr, we’re always encouraging our clients to showcase their brand authentically in their external comms. But one of our guests raised a great point that it is just as important to be vulnerable and authentic when communicating internally too. 

We’ve seen that the start-up world is particularly prone to being an emotional rollercoaster, especially as many start up brands today may not be around tomorrow. The conversation around the future of your company is difficult to face, so being honest and transparent with your employees is vital to making sure everyone is fully on board and know how important their roles and responsibilities are to make the mission succeed. Our guest recommended “Radical candor” ( a book by Kim Scott) as a great tool to read when approaching difficult conversations.

Another great approach was to initiate monthly OKR’s to help track the progress of your specific role and responsibilities in terms of the bigger picture business goals. This is really rewarding for all involved and certainly something we’re embracing as a team in 2020.

Taking on bigger companies negatively in your comms isn’t always the way forward

For those who read our content regularly you’ll know we’re all about supporting the challenger brands who are changing the status quo. But doing this successfully in your comms doesn’t need to come from by attacking what’s come before. 

Your product might be disruptive, but displaying an ambushing attitude in your external comms makes your customers think you’re focused on beating the competition and not about addressing the bigger picture about what the future could look like. 

Instead, by empowering your audience to make a change in their habits and spinning a positive light on the future and respecting competitors who’ve come before you, you will earn more respect in the long term.

Know your human truth, organisation truth and sector truth  

This sentiment came from one of our guests who revealed that identifying these truths had helped them navigate a tricky organisation wide re-brand. 

To dissect this into three parts: 

Interrogating their human truth (essentially what their audience thought about them) helped them face their realities of how their products/services weren’t performing, and what they could do better, for their community directly.

Their organisation truth (focusing on what the needs of the internal departments are) opened up conversations with stakeholders at every level of the brand, to establish what needs to change to enable the business to do what it says on the tin. 

And using these two truths finally looking at their sector truth (the position of the brand within their industry vs the competition).

While their re-brand isn’t finished yet, revealing all of these hard-hitting facts and truths has helped break down the brand’s values and purpose into digestible goals for all internal stakeholders, not just the brand + marketing team.

Feel like these conversations relate to your challenges you’re facing at the moment, and want to get involved? 

Join us at our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable in February. Email sunnii@mattr.media or call her on 07772343952 to book a place!

BBB tips: why brand needs to be part of your growth, how to data mine and maximise the value of your current content

Partnership is something we feel really strongly about at Mattr. And living that shouldn’t just impact how we work, it should be something we actively encourage.

That’s why we setup Brand, Bitch & Brekkie, an intimate, no-holds-barred knowledge swap between likeminded senior marketers to help each other navigate the challenges they’re going through.

The latest of these was a real eye opener. Here are some of the golden nuggets spoken about:

Brandbuilding should not be separate to growth marketing

Even if it doesn’t have the same KPIs as more direct performance ads, creative content creates ROI direct marketing simply can’t. Sales teams can use it as conversation starters, HR should see it as tools to onboard best in class talent, and performance teams can make it a means of leveraging data and insights. So factor these in when seeking stakeholder buy-in for your next brand campaign idea!

Never forget the customer

Many comms decisions are based on what people within the business THINK their customer wants. But the trick is really asking them what they actually want. Beyond SEO, Google Keywords and following social trends, it’s worthwhile hosting open office days and regular sessions with your customer service teams to help do this.

Sharing is caring

Utilising communication tools like Slack is a really great way to spark and share ideas when it comes to content planning. From inspiring to funny or interesting stories that people are saying about your brand on social, let your team know about them or otherwise nuggets will get lost in the ether.

Maximising value

Creating content (particularly video) can be expensive. So maximising value is really important. Being able to bank assets on set, re-hash old content with a new spin, or planning campaigns that have lifetime value and can scale, is the key to ensuring you get the most value from your budgets.

If you agree with the above and want to share experiences with like-minded colleagues, why don’t you book a seat to the next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable on 9th October at Riding House Cafe, Fitzrovia.

Email sunnii@mattr.media or give her a ring on 07772343952 for any q’s!