Brief Check
The first step before you spend a cent on your first marketing video.
Part of the Catharsis Method, frameworks built from real projects, not theory.
Most people already know video matters for their business. So the first move is always the same: "let's make a video, hope for more traffic, more revenue." What gets missed is knowing exactly what you need before you start. You don't know what you don't know.
This is five questions. Not the version you've seen before. Answer these honestly and you'll know more about what you actually need than most people do before they spend their first dollar on a video.
A regular client runs an annual charity fundraiser. Every year they came to us wanting the same thing, one hard hitting, stats driven video that could work at the ballroom dinner and online.
Running them through these five questions surfaced the real problem. The dinner crowd, half distracted by networking, is not the same crowd scrolling their phone the next day. And a video built for a big ballroom screen does not survive being cropped vertical for Instagram.
So we picked one focus for the night itself, timed to land right before donations opened, when people were actually watching. Then we built a separate cut for online. One video trying to do both jobs would have done neither well.
Most people skip this because they think they already know their audience. They don't need a personality, they need a target. Keep it at the level you'd use to set targeting in an ads platform, not a personality profile. If you can't describe your audience this simply, that's the actual problem, not a step to rush past.
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