Video is central to online advertising and social media. Incorporating video production content into your overall marketing strategy is a powerful action you can take for your company. However, not everyone knows where to start.
This week we are providing you some pointers on how to start the process of approaching a business video production company to help kick-start the process. There are many questions that need to be discussed and answered that will help with the overall expectation and experience. From high-level strategy such as messaging and branding to more tactical detail orientated discussions such as: timely logistics and important visual components.
You could be trying to: raise funds, attract new customers, recruit new talent or educate consumers. We’ve listed in order of importance what we think you should know before you hire a video production company.
Who is Your Audience?
One of the first questions we ask is who is your target audience? By answering this question is will first help in the analysis of other considerations. If you want a video targeting expectant mothers, that will help with messaging, visual tone and music selection. However, a B2B audience would be different. Likewise, if you want a corporate video production targeting mechanical engineers looking for tools and gadgets, the creative direction would be different. Knowing your audience and who you want to watch your produced video is the key starting point.
How do You Want People to Feel?
After who is your audience, this is an important consideration. When your audience views the video on your website, email or an event, what do you want their action to be when the video fades to black? Whether you want tears to flow and people to grab tissues and a checkbook from their pocket, or feeling motivated to click the ‘buy now’ button. The overriding feeling that your video that you want created, needs to convey the messaging, the visuals and overriding tone.
What are the Key Messages You Want to Communicate?
Every good/great/amazing video has an equal strategy aspect to it. Showing up one day with a camera in one hand and a microphone in the other is unlikely to be the set-up for an amazing video. Once the overall goal of the video has been established, identify the key messages that need to be communicated. This will need to be done in such a way that will help your viewer’s inch closer to your intended goal. As much as it pains us to write it, our human brains can only process soo much information at one time. We are advocates of keeping things simple and videos with multiple messages are unlikely to be: concise, conducive to educating, inspiring, or influencing your audience.
When and What Specific Visuals Should be Captured?
Shot and visual identification comes at a later part of the pre-production process, it’s important to consider any specific events, scenarios, or key talent which would need to be scheduled during the video shoot. An example is if your manufacturing facility is busiest just before the holidays, it would be pertinent to schedule the shoot during the holidays. Likewise, it may be wise it might better to time the shoot during the busy period to show the breadth of work. Moreover, if there is a hard deadline, make sure to plan more time than you think. Just remember, video production takes more: planning, logistics, time budgeting and reviewing than anticipated.
What is Your Budget?
Business video production can be expensive. However, not all produced videos are created equally. The important thing to remember is: time, people and production gear drive up video production costs. If you want that underwater, high-flying, 5 location video, it can be done, just be prepared to have a larger budget. It may be cool to have, but few, shorter, high-level videos on your landing pages can be the perfect answer for your video production strategy. Lowering resource use keeps the costs down. We’ve produced a couple of blogs which can provide you with some ideas for low budget video production alternatives.
What is your distribution strategy?
By now you should be imagining how your video will come together. Don’t stop at the production phase, think ahead! Video distribution is an important part on getting your return on investment. When a video is captured for a specific event, you have a captured and interested audience. Moreover, is a video is created for social media, your goal is to capture and pique interest in your audience. Take full advantage of the produced business video and use it for the aforementioned platforms, but make sure you’re ready to think through promotion strategy and how videos will be produced and edited for each platform. A starter for ten would be to produce a short, high energy ‘teaser’ of the full video on social media to link through to the full video on your website.
How will you know if your video is a success?
As with all marketing efforts, you will need ROI and analytics to defend and enforce the tools being used to drive business and awareness. At this point you should get your team to think through what it would take to make your video a success. Perhaps it’s leads generated, views on Youtube or money donated, or all of the above? Not only does clarification on this help your video production team aim to meet that goes, it also gets buy-in from your internal team when it works. Not forgetting that it also makes you look good.
By taking these steps before hiring a video production company, you’re sure to save time, money and decrease in confusion and create something you and the team can be proud of. Don’t forget to consult your video production team to help you think through these strategies.
Comment below with your thoughts and opinions on this week’s Video Production Jargon Busting blog.
Should you like a helping hand with any video production and photography projects you have, please get in touch.