Video Marketing Agencies: Everything you need to look for when picking a partner

As we've pointed out here before, we're currently living through a golden age of creative marketing. The playbook is being rewritten on a near-daily basis, and marketers are helping brands devise whole new ways to connect emotionally with their target audiences. Video has been central to this phenomenon: through apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels, people are consuming more video content than ever, and opportunities for brands to make a genuine impact have increased drastically in just the last few years alone.

Of course, as video becomes more a part of our daily lives, it becomes harder and harder to break through the noise. To give you a sense of the scale: 981,000 videos are said to be posted to TikTok every hour, and 700,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day—enough to keep a person watching for 80 straight years. This is why finding the right video marketing agency is so important. The right video marketing agency can help clarify your objectives, narrow down your target audience, and craft concise, to-the-point content that makes an emotional connection and lingers in the viewer's mind. Video marketing is an investment, and the right video marketing agency can help ensure that it pays off.

Marino is continually leveling up in the video marketing space, helping a diverse array of clients—from non-profits to advocacy groups to B2B businesses and beyond—connect in a meaningful way with precisely the people they're trying to target. In doing so, we've learned a lot—about what works and what doesn't, how to maximize video marketing dollars, and how to inspire real action in viewers.

Video marketing agencies: red flags to look out for

When looking for a video marketing agency, it's important to pay attention to any red flags. Video marketing is a real investment—you need actors, writers, camerapeople, crew, post-production staff, etc. The stakes are high, and the rewards are, too—a successful print ad might move the needle a little bit but a successful video can garner stratospheric results. At the same time, a failed video campaign can really sting both your brand and your marketing budget. You want to make sure, well in advance but also throughout the process, that the video marketing agency you're working with understands your essence and knows the best way to communicate it to a wide audience. To that end, some red flags to look out for include:

1. Lack of communication: Some agencies like to project an image of untouchable brilliance—they know what's best for a given brand, and if the brand doesn't like it, they can leave. Our advice? They probably should—because when video marketing isn't collaborative, it’s dead on arrival. 
2. Emphasizing irrelevant vanity metrics: There's no question that numbers are important; if you sink money into a video, you want it to be seen by as many people as possible. But there's a difference between a video being seen by a lot of people and a video being seen by the right people. Let's say you've tasked a video marketing agency with making a video for your upcoming fundraising event to be held in New York City. If that video gets millions of views, but the vast majority of them are people with no relevance to your organization either behaviorally or geographically, it’s just not going to help you very much.
3. Lack of expertise in given subject matter: The ability to make an engaging, technically proficient video is an important skill, but in a video marketing context, it needs to be coupled with knowledge on the subject matter in question. If the agency you're considering seems overconfident about their ability to deliver despite not having done work in a similar field before, you might want to pause and reconsider.

What makes a video work

So we've established what video marketing looks like at its worst—now it's worth laying out what video marketing looks like at its best. Here at Marino, our video marketing team isn't siloed off from the rest of the business—we regularly interact with our colleagues in social, creative, PR, and advertising, getting a diverse range of eyeballs on each project and ensuring that each individual video is set up for success.

1. Clearly-defined objectives: A brand video that gets a ton of views is great—but only if it's in the service of clear, previously-defined objectives. Long before the cameras start rolling, the agency and brand should collaborate closely on certain key questions—not simply 'who are we trying to reach' but also 'what do we want them to do, once we've reached them.'
2. Baking multiple platforms into the process: Again, videos are an investment. You want to make sure in advance that what you're shooting has lasting value—that it's (if possible) relatively evergreen and flexible enough to be recut for multiple platforms. The idea is to wring as much value out of each individual shoot as you can.
3. Getting emotional: The advantage of video as a marketing format is its immediacy—if you run, say, a nonprofit that helps underprivileged children, actually allowing viewers to see and hear from those children makes a major difference. You can show viewers firsthand what your mission is and why it matters—you can forge the kind of emotional connection that leads to real action on the viewer's part.
4. Staying on top of trends: As mentioned, this is a golden age for creative—new storytelling modes are being invented on a seemingly hourly basis over on TikTok and even traditionally stodgy B2Bs are loosening up and having more fun with their campaigns. At the same time, advances in AI are providing video marketers and brands unprecedentedly granular insight into what their audiences want. By harnessing this new wave of creativity and tethering it to tangible data, video marketing agencies can help brands 

This golden age doesn't seem to be coming to a close any time soon—if anything, brands are just starting to scratch the surface of what's possible in the mobile-video era. The viewers are out there, and they're ready to be moved—and the right video marketing agency can help you reach them.