How to actually reach your audience with video
Making the film is half the work. Where it goes, how it is placed, and how the same story is cut for different intent levels is the other half.
Teams routinely spend everything on production and nothing on placement, then judge video on the results. The film is the smaller half of the job. What follows is the plan we would run for a company with one good film and no media budget.
Match the cut to the intent, not the channel
The useful way to segment is by how much the viewer already wants what you have. Someone on your pricing page and someone scrolling a feed need different films, even if they share a story.
- Cold
- They do not know you and did not ask. The job is to make the category problem recognisable in the first two seconds. Short, visual, no jargon, no product tour. Success is a click, not a signup.
- Warm
- They arrived on purpose — your site, a newsletter, a referral. Now the job is understanding: what it is, who it is for, why it is different. This is your 60-second film.
- Hot
- They are evaluating, possibly with colleagues. The job is enabling a champion to explain you internally. Longer, more specific, more product on screen, and forwardable without context.
Own the surfaces you already have
Before paying for reach, use the traffic you have. The homepage hero, the pricing page, the top three blog posts by traffic, your email signature, your onboarding sequence and your sales follow-up template are all surfaces where a film costs nothing to place and reaches people already leaning in. Most companies see more qualified views in a month from these than from any paid test.
Give it a home, not just a post
A social post has a half-life measured in hours. A film embedded on a page that ranks keeps working for years. Publish the film with a written article around it — a transcript, the argument in text, the specifics that could not go on screen — and you get the search surface and the film in the same place.
Practical placement rules
- Upload natively to each platform. Links off-platform are shown to far fewer people than native video.
- Autoplay muted and loop on your own site; never autoplay with sound anywhere.
- Put the film above the fold on the pages where it is the argument, not at the bottom as a garnish.
- In email, use a poster image linking to the page — embedded video in email is unreliable and often stripped.
- Re-cut, do not re-post. The same 60 seconds reposted three times performs worse than three cuts of it.
Give it more than one life
One film should produce a season of material: the full cut, a vertical hook, three 10-second moments, a set of stills for slides and social, and the script as an article. This is not padding — it is how you reach people who will never watch the whole thing but will absorb the same idea in five smaller doses.