Digital video strategy checklist for publishers

Drawing from the best practices detailed in this Strategy Study, here is a checklist of factors to help you tell if your news organization is taking all the right steps with digital video.

How many of these 17 best practices can you check off for your organization?

Leveraging partnerships and sales

• Have you increased your available video content through partnerships with other news outlets, aggregators or distributors?
• If you’re a small-to-medium sized publisher, are you focusing on small to medium-sized businesses in your community for advertising?
• Do you have a programmatic ad-sales partner?
• Are you protecting your premium video advertising inventory by distinguishing it from how you sell other tiers?

Monitoring audience behavior

• Do you know how your customers are consuming your video content?
• Do you know your audience habits, such as when video usage spikes?
• Do you use audience data to guide your video strategy?

Producing good content

• Are you advancing beyond poor imitations of TV video conventions?
• Are you able to “find” the appropriate video angle to a story?
• Have you developed styles of video content unique to your organization?
• Do you build video content or versions of it that is device-optimized or at least, device compatible?
• Are you actively experimenting with new forms of video storytelling?

Adapting your organization

• Is the role of video clear in your organization’s structure and jobs?
• Does your organizational structure reflect video as a priority?
• Is your workforce flexible and capable of carrying out different multimedia tasks if needed?
• Is your staff literate in what makes for good and bad video?
• Do you have a thought-out strategy for how to distribute video after you publish it?