Most Perth businesses commission video the same way they commission print — reactively.
A need arises. A conference is coming up. A new service needs to be explained. A client wants a case study. The website looks dated and needs a brand film. The request goes to a production company, a brief is assembled under time pressure, the video is produced, and the project closes.
Six months later, the cycle repeats. Another need, another brief, another production. Each piece is independent of the ones before and after it. Each is justified on its own terms. And the accumulated investment — across multiple productions, multiple suppliers, multiple briefs — represents a significant spend that has produced a library of assets with no particular relationship to each other and no clear connection to an overarching brand or marketing strategy.
This is not a failure of individual production decisions. Each piece may be well made and useful. It is a failure of strategic planning — the absence of a video content strategy that would have made each production more purposeful, the overall program more coherent, and the investment more efficient.
What a Video Content Strategy Actually Is
A video content strategy is the planning layer that sits between brand strategy and video production.
It answers the questions that individual production briefs cannot answer: what is the complete set of video assets this organisation needs to support its brand and marketing goals over the next twelve to eighteen months? Which of those assets are most strategically important and should be produced first? Which audiences do they serve? Which stages of the customer or stakeholder journey do they address? How do they relate to each other — do they tell a coherent story across formats and channels, or are they standalone pieces?
It also answers the operational questions that reactive production ignores: where is the budget best allocated across the program? Which assets can be produced together in a single shoot, reducing per-unit cost through batching? What is the asset hierarchy — which pieces are foundational and which are derivative? How will the assets be distributed and measured, and what does success look like for each one?
A video content strategy does not mean committing to a rigid twelve-month production schedule in January and executing it unchanged to December. Organisations change, priorities shift, and good strategy is responsive to those changes. What it means is beginning each production with a clear sense of where it sits in the broader program — what it is building toward, what it builds on, and how it connects to the brand story the organisation is telling over time.
How Brand Strategy Informs Video Content Planning
Video content strategy that is not connected to brand strategy tends to produce content that is active but incoherent — a body of work that tells multiple different stories to multiple different audiences without a consistent thread connecting them.
When brand strategy is the foundation, the video content planning process is significantly more focused. The positioning is clear, so the creative territory for each video is defined. The audience is specific, so each asset can be planned with a real person in mind. The messaging pillars give the content program a set of themes to work from rather than starting from a blank brief each time. And the brand narrative gives the overall program its coherent direction — each video a chapter in the same story rather than a standalone piece.
For Perth businesses that have done brand strategy work — through a Brand Master Workshop or a more extended engagement — the video content strategy is a natural next step. The strategy answers the “what does our brand stand for?” question. The video content strategy answers the “how do we express that on film, across which formats, for which audiences, and in what sequence?”
Building a Video Content Program for Perth Brands
A practical video content strategy for a Perth business typically begins with an asset audit and a needs mapping exercise.
The asset audit asks: what video content does the organisation already have, and how much of it is still current, on-brand, and in active use? Many Perth businesses have a scattered library of older video content — some still useful, some dated, some simply forgotten. Understanding what exists before planning what to produce prevents duplication and surfaces assets that may need only modest updating rather than replacement.
The needs mapping exercise asks: across the organisation’s marketing, sales, communications, recruitment, and stakeholder engagement functions, where would video content add the most value — and what is the evidence for that assessment? This exercise often reveals needs that had not been formally identified, and helps prioritise the production program around the assets that will genuinely earn their investment.
From the audit and the needs mapping, the content strategy builds a prioritised program: the foundational assets that need to be produced first (typically the brand film and the core explainer, which establish the brand’s screen presence and are referenced across other marketing activity), the supporting assets that build out the program over time, and the responsive assets that can be planned in principle and produced when the timing is right.
The Production Efficiency Case for Strategic Planning
Beyond the brand benefits, video content strategy makes a compelling operational case on efficiency grounds alone.
Batching production — shooting multiple assets in a single production day or across a coordinated shoot schedule — dramatically reduces the per-unit cost of video production. Talent, crew, locations, equipment, and post-production setup all carry fixed costs that are amortised across a larger body of work when shoots are planned together rather than separately.
Perth businesses that commission video reactively typically pay full production costs for each individual piece. Businesses that plan a program and batch intelligently can often produce three or four times the volume of content for the same total investment — or produce the same volume at significantly lower cost, with the savings available for media and distribution.
Strategic planning also reduces the creative overhead of repeated briefing. When a production partner understands the brand strategy, the content program, and the priorities that govern individual productions, each brief is a refinement of a shared understanding rather than a from-scratch explanation of the brand. That efficiency accumulates significantly across a multi-asset program.
Starting the Video Content Strategy Conversation
For Perth businesses ready to move from reactive video commissioning to a planned, brand-led content program, the conversation starts with two questions: what does the brand need video to do, and what assets are most strategically important to produce first?
Sixteen By Nine works with Perth businesses, NFPs and government organisations on video content strategy that begins with brand clarity and plans production around it — ensuring that every video asset has a clear purpose, a defined audience, and a coherent relationship with the brand story it is helping to tell.
Talk to us about video content strategy for your Perth business today.
Is your video investment building a boyd of work - or just a library of one-offs?
A video content strategy connects every production to a brand purpose and a marketing plan. We help Perth businesses plan and produce video content that compounds over time.
Talk to us about video content strategy today.
