Managing and Organizing Your Growing Video Library

Remember going to the library as a kid: strolling through the book racks neatly organized by subject and author until you found a stack of books to bring home and read? Now imagine if that library wasn’t the organized masterpiece the librarians spent countless hours maintaining. Goosebump books sitting next to AUTOCAD manuals. Richard Scarry’s Busytown beside Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Not exactly the most inviting reading experience, right?

Now take a step back and imagine your video library. The best content in your marketing toolkit. How is it organized? If you needed to find a demo video you put together two years ago for a product that is undergoing a huge UI change, can you find it? If you want to grab that thought leadership interview from last year’s conference, and you search the speaker’s name, will it be there?

As content libraries grow, organizing your content is one of the most important actions you can take to ensure your video content remains accessible and easily searchable. It pays to get this right from the beginning, as updating thousands of videos to a new organization scheme is a chore that nobody wants to go through. Here are some tips on how to keep your video content as beautifully organized and easily referenced as a small-town library.

Tagging Your Content For Easy Reference

Tagging isn’t a new concept, your blog probably has categories and tags so that readers can easily find related content, and your blogging software may actually use these tags to offer recommend content to readers already. Many companies don’t put this same effort towards tagging their video content, as video frequently lives within a blog post anyway, so why bother?

Tagging your content on the back end has the same value as tagging blogs on the front end, but the rewards benefit your viewers and yourself. Tagging videos, even just by the type of content, makes them easy for you to search and find in your video platform, and allows you to group content together so you can quickly find all videos that match certain criteria. Consider tagging your content by type:

• Webinar
• Thought Leadership
• Product Demo
• Product Launch
• Culture Content
• Event Video

And by persona and funnel stage:

• Top-of-Funnel
• Middle-of-Funnel
• Bottom-of-Funnel
• Marketing Buyer
• Sales Buyer
• Corporate Communications Buyer
• Etcetera

This makes it easy for you to quickly find all the product demo videos you have and update them as needed. Plus, it enables your sales team to find specific content like all middle-of-funnel video assets that are product demo videos focused on sales buyers.

Tagging your content properly from the beginning means it’s easily accessible to everyone on your team, but only if you share your tagging system with everyone on the team that is uploading content. Make sure your videos all follow the same scheme, and everybody wins.

Knowing What Content to Refresh

Did you know that libraries don’t keep books around forever? If you’re thinking it’s counter-intuitive for a library to get rid of books, think about this: when’s the last time anyone checked out the power-user’s guide to Windows 3.1?

The same line of thinking should be applied to your content, no one needs out of date content. But then again, not every video needs to be thrown away. Sometimes a quick update is all you need.

We wrote a post recently that covered how to decide which video content needs to be updated. But before you can decide what needs to be refreshed, you’ll need to have your video content organized well enough to know where these videos can be found.

Most video marketing platforms will allow you to segregate content by date, so finding old content isn’t difficult, but what if only some parts of your product have changed? Consider adding specific products to your tagging or organizational scheme, so that if have six products and update two of them, you can easily find which videos need a refresher, and get that ready before the old interface is in the wild for too long.

The same goes for thought leadership videos. Making sure you tag your content with the speaker name. That way, if a speaker leaves their position, or requests that the video be changed for whatever reason, it’s super easy to find.

Consider having your video team adopt a similar strategy in their raw video editing projects as well. There’s nothing worse than knowing where the video lives on your website, but not being able to find the original video files to make the necessary updates. Tagging and organization is just as relevant behind the scenes.

Performing a Content Audit on your Organized Content

The beauty of having your content organized so you can search by funnel stage and buyer persona is that your sales team can easily find any asset for any persona, if it exists.

While you may not need to perform a full video content audit, consider doing some cross-searching every now and then to see how your funnel stages line up with your personas. Using our examples from earlier, imagine I search for middle-of-funnel content for the corporate communication buyer and no videos show up. I would know that there’s a glaring hole in our video library that we can address as part of our next quarter video goals. Similarly, if I do the same search for the sales buyer and find that there are hundreds of videos targeting the same audience, that can be an indicator that we’re producing too much content for one persona, and need to diversify a bit if we’re going to have an impact in our other markets.

Organizing your content makes it easy to find the videos that are relevant for your communications, but it’s also a great indirect tool for finding out where gaps are in your content strategy. If sales is using your search criteria properly to find content and coming up empty, now you know where to align your content plans moving forward.

Organizing Your Content in a Video Hub

While most of this post has discussed keeping your content organized from a back-end perspective, tagging and categorizing your videos has huge implications for presenting your content to prospects and customers. We built video hubs to allow our customers to easily present relevant content to their audience, especially when watching videos of a certain type. But all of this power is predicated on organization!

A great place to start with organizing content in a video hub is event videos. If your event is anything like Advocamp this year, you’ll be walking away with dozens of new content pieces, from keynote talks to panel discussions, to the promo content you put together to get people excited. Influitive did a great job organizing their content from this year’s Advocamp. They organized videos by which day of the conference the talk was presented on, and what the topic was, giving viewers several ways to find the videos that are relevant to them. Check it out here!

Your categories can be anything you want them to be, if you want to show off all of your product demo videos, all of your thought leadership content, and all of your fun campaign videos as separate areas of your hub, that’s easy to do when you’ve categorized your content properly. And, coincidentally, how we organize our own video hub.

If you want to organize your content by personas so that marketing users can see all the content relevant to them, and sales users aren’t watching videos that don’t matter for their jobs, you can do that too. The possibilities are endless – as long as you’re keeping up with your video tagging and categorization, reorganizing your content into meaningful, curated collections for prospects and customers is easy.

Bringing it all Together

As businesses are expanding their libraries of video, the next big challenge will be keeping that content fresh, relevant, and easy to find. By adopting a comprehensive tagging and organization system from day one, you can ensure that any new videos added to your library are easily accessible for both your prospects and your team. There’s nothing worse than having the perfect piece of content to send out to a prospect that will close the deal today and having to navigate a poorly labelled pile of content to find it (or … not find it). Organize your content. Your next deal may depend on it.

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