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January 2016

Business Marketing Lessons Learned The Hard Way: My Tips For Start Ups

By Digital Marketing

Business Marketing Tips For Start Ups

I’ve been running a business producing video for just over 15 years now and over that time I’ve learnt some pretty crucial business marketing lessons (usually the hard way!). So I thought I’d share them here for any start ups or new business owners as I’m sure many of these lessons transcend industries.

So here are a few of these lessons to save you the pain of having to learn them yourself the hard way!

Forget your Ego

Nothing can potentially threaten your business like your own vanity or ego. Over the years the worst business decisions I’ve made have been the ones where my ego has over ridden my common sense. Whenever a business decision is required, do keep this in mind by asking yourself “what would my competition do?” – This is usually a good yardstick for checking your thought process and verifying whether your ego is affecting your judgement.

Evolve

This applies to everything from internal systems to external marketing activity. Technology moves at a frightening pace in video production (as in all industries), but it usually moves on in a good way and provides some real benefits. So make sure you move with it! Getting left behind can be a big problem for any business so evolve with the technology, don’t fight against it

Adapt

The demand for video production (or any service supplied by a business) has changed shape over the years, as has the type of client who requires our service. The way in which we find new clients and market our services has had to continuously adapt to keep pace with our ever-changing client base. Don’t be afraid to adapt your approach if its clear that your existing methods aren’t working.

business marketing

Have a Clear Plan for Scalability

Being able to quickly and painlessly upscale when demand increases is key to growth. We all want to grow our businesses but when that critical opportunity to upsize arrives, you don’t want to drop the ball due to not having a clear plan of how you’re going to meet the increased output smoothly. The worst-case scenario can be that you fail to service existing clients due to internal problems caused by overstretching your resources.

Step Back

It’s so easy as a business owner to become bogged down by the day-to-day jobs and not take time to step back and see the bigger picture. Allowing yourself the time and opportunity to step back from the whirlwind from time to time provides you with a platform to assess what you do, how you do it, and discover what’s not quite working.

Use Expert

If you run your own business you will probably have the mantra that “anything is possible”. With that usually comes a feeling that you can easily “up-skill” to fulfil any requirements that your business develops. However, in our experience, paying for and listening to the advice of experts has been one of the most productive decisions we’ve ever made. This was especially true when it came to online business marketing. Outsourcing is something that a business owner should not hide from as it allows the key people within the business to focus on their strengths and do what they do best.

business marketing

Have Fun

Running your own business can be overwhelming, all-consuming, relationship damaging and slightly depressing (when things aren’t going well), so make sure you remember why you are doing it and also how lucky you are to get the chance! Above all, have some fun. Weirdly enough it may actually increase your success. Many businesses benefit from having a figurehead who displays a joy in what they do as this filters down to everyone who works within the organisation.

Be Honest With Yourself

Another psychological pitfall is kidding yourself that things are working when they aren’t. Being brutally honest with yourself is a key character trait in favour of becoming the business owner you want to be.

People Don’t Care That Much About Your Logo!

Many start ups (me included) spend hour and hours developing their logo when in truth this time could be spent in a much more beneficial and productive way. The lesson I learnt early on was that my logo was NOT my brand. Build a strong brand and instil your beliefs in it, and what your logo looks like will be the last thing a customer cares about. Focus on real business marketing and don’t assume that a fancy logo will do this for you!

I hope some of this may be useful or of interest to you if you’re piloting a start up venture. Above all keep going, I know you’ll have heard this a million time already but the first few years WILL be tough. So keep pushing, keep working and best of luck!

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

How to create a Marketing Video – Timescales

By Video Production Explained

Production Timescale Explained

The first think you’ll need to know about how to produce a marketing video are the timescales involved.

Depending on what your brief requires, production of video marketing can take anywhere between a few days or several months. If the video marketing you’re producing is intended to sit alongside a range of other assets then getting the timing right may be key so you can release your materials on schedule.

Let’s assume that your project follows the lines of a pretty common brief in video production and that you are aiming to produce a 2 minute video highlighting the product, people and purpose. This is along the lines of something we are asked to produce quite often and will usually feature action footage of the product/service/brand in action, talking heads from either customers, staff, or both and maybe a voiceover added on top to tie the message together.

Now all projects are different, so the timings below won’t apply to all but in general they should be a good indication of what you should allow for your production.

how to create a marketing video

So once the brief has been delivered here’s a breakdown of what may happen and the time it will take:

Video Production Company Meeting – 2 hours

The video production company you have selected to work with will (and certainly should) want to visit your location/office to chat to you further and get a feel for your brand. For us, this is one of the most important parts of any video production. Getting face-to-face with our clients allows us to understand them, their brand, and most importantly their customer.

Brief Response – Half Day

Whether the video production company comes to meet you or not, you should certainly expect a full and detailed response to your brief. This will usually take about half a day to produce and should contain all the key information that shows the video production company you have selected has understood the brief. The response should also go into more detail about the production and cover areas such as logistics, film content, tone and style, and scheduling.

Pre-Production 1.5 Days (actual time but this may be spread over several weeks)

Further to the brief response the next stage of the project will be the “pre-production”. The actual time required to complete the pre-production on a typical video marketing project is between 1 and 1.5 days. However, due to the nature of what can be involved, this may be spread over several weeks. This is because pre-production includes elements such as scheduling and logistics, which can depend on responses and availability from 3rd parties to complete. For example, if the video production requires interviews with existing customers to generate testimonial-type quotes then the contacting, scheduling and managing of these interviews will require feedback (on availability etc) from the intended subject. Other parts of pre-production include scripting (for voiceover), shoot day planning and scheduling, and even casting (to find the right voiceover artist or possibly models).

how to create a marketing video

Shooting – 2 Days

Now we are certainly generalising here and there are many variables to this, but a typical video marketing production is usually shot over 2 days. Even a short 90 second film usually requires a great deal of different footage and capturing this footage is not something that happens in a few hours. So 2 days is really the minimum that we’d suggest for most typical video marketing projects.

Editing and Post-Production – 4-5 Days

Again this is a general guide based on the assumed brief we described earlier but we’d usually suggest allowing 4-5 days to get the project edited and mastered. This timescale factors in additional elements that are required in most briefs of this kind such as voiceover recording, making amendments to the initial edit, and mastering/compressing the video for final output (usually to a web-ready format).

So there you have it. Taking the brief described as an example, you will need to allow 9 working days as a minimum for a typical video production project. Although obviously these days will vary rarely be lined up in a row and may instead be spread over several weeks. In our experience we find that the usual timescale that forms a start to finish turnaround time for these 9 day projects is 4 weeks. This is typical of the window of time from receiving the brief to delivering the final project.

If you’d like more information about how to produce a marketing video then please do drop us a line as we’re always willing to share our knowledge.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

Should I use a Digital Marketing Agency or Freelancer for my brands online video?

By Digital Marketing

A Comparison Between Video Marketing Agency and Freelancer Productions

If you need to produce a video and it’s not something you want to do in-house then you really have two options. You could approach a video marketing agency, or you could find a talented freelancer to handle the project. Both come with their merits and drawbacks. Here’s a comparison of the two options.

Cost

Yes, a freelancer will be the more cost effective option. If your project is budget-sensitive then hiring a freelancer to produce it will be the best option. They don’t have the fixed costs of premises and staff to cover and the cost benefit will be passed on to you, the client.

Reliability

If you hire a freelancer and they are unwell or unable to attend your shoot day then there’s not much you can do about it. They may know someone who can stand in for them but this won’t always be the case. If you hire a video marketing agency then they will have backup and crew options should a member of their team become ill and not able to attend the shoot.

marketing agency

Nimble is Good

Any business or company needs systems of work and operation. These systems can slow a company down at times. However, a freelancer can take a much more nimble approach and respond in much quicker timescales to challenges and developments. They are usually much more able to react and adapt to new styles of working and this can benefit your project.

Group Creativity

Many video production briefs require a degree of creativity to ensure that the final product stands out for the crowd. While many freelancers can provide fantastic ideas and creative solutions, they are limited by the fact that all these ideas have to come from just one source. In contrast, a video marketing agency will be able to pool and harvest a larger range of clever ideas and solutions for your video.

Hands on Personal Touch

One of the great things about using a freelancer is that they are a constant from start to finish. They will be also to factor in the key messages of your brief at all stages as there is no risk of any important direction being lost while it’s being communicated through an organisation. Having the same face at each stage of the production is also reassuring for clients and provides a personal touch throughout the production.

marketing agency

Jack of All Trades VS Experienced Experts

Whilst there are some incredibly talented freelancers out there, they still have the drawback of being an individual with limited experience. A video marketing agency will be able to bring a wider range of skill bases and creativity to the table. While a freelancer has to be ‘jack of all trades’, the production company will have experienced experts in each area of the production so that every project can benefit from the services of a specialist at all stages.

Quality & Approach

Many freelancers own and use their own camera on each project they work on. This means that they are certainly experts in using their chosen camera model, and it also means that they tend to use the same camera on every project. However, a video marketing agency will have the financial muscle to either upgrade their cameras more often or hire cameras to meet the requirements of each individual brief. This is what we do. With the advent of 4K ultra HD and the need for businesses to ‘future proof’ their video, the advantages of using a production company are valuable in this respect as they can ensure that your project is shot on the most appropriate format.

So there you have it! Hopefully this is a useful guide, but bear in mind that there will be exceptions to each point made. At the end of the day both routes come with pros and cons so shop around to find the right solution for you, your brand and your project.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

How Can I Make My Brand’s Web Video Clickable?

By Digital Marketing

Web video that viewers can click!

As a business, one of the most important things we need web video and video marketing to do is direct traffic and customers to our site. After all, that’s what we produced it for. However, there’s a small issue here. When maximising the reach of your video marketing by uploading it to YouTube or Vimeo, there’s the possibility that the video may be viewed in isolation on the Youtube or Vimeo page itself. Even if we embed the video on our own website, people should be able to find it independently online. If they do, we’re hoping that the viewer will click through to us (on the URL in the video description that you should ALWAYS include) so that we can receive the desired amount of traffic.

However a better solution is to make the actual video window a live clickable experience. This is very useful if we want to maximise the reach of our web video by embedding the video on numerous other web pages where the ‘info’ section of the YouTube video which would normally contain your hyperlinks won’t be shown.

This is where YouTube’s annotation function becomes very powerful.

Call to Action

Youtube allows us to overlay a text ‘call to action’ annotation containing a live URL link anywhere on the web video window itself. The best example of this would be at the end of a film where we usually have an on-screen CTA, by using this facility we can actually make the CTA a live clickable element providing a great way to direct traffic from YouTube to our own site quickly and more intuitively. If part of the video is asking you to ‘click here’, you’re more likely to do that than go searching for a link in the video description.

Simply upload your video to Youtube, then go to the “Channel Video Manager”. Next select the video you want to add the link to and click the down arrow to the right of the Edit button and then select Annotations. Add your link and then select publish to finalise. Easy!

web video

Limitations

So adding this function to your web video on YouTube is simple, but there are a few limitations:

Firstly, it can take a few days to implement this, as the first stage is to notify Youtube that you are the physical owner of the video. Obviously this is to stop people placing live links over any and all of Youtube’s most popular videos, so you must own the content of film in order to place the live link on it. This part of the process is not instantaneous – Youtube takes a couple of days to verify this, so if you’re hitting a tight deadline you need to plan ahead.

Secondly, the fonts, colours and typographical options are very limited, so if you have very strong brand identification that is linked to your own font or particular colour then you may struggle to create the most “on brand” annotation.

Thirdly, the viewer has the option to turn off these annotations before they’ve even seen them. Some Youtube videos grossly overuse annotations which can turn many viewers off the idea, so make sure they’re relevant and not overused.

 

web video

That being said, the benefits to this are clear and until now this has been the missing element in many web video campaigns. Allowing users to interact with your content in this way provides engagement, credibility, and most importantly points the customer directly to your brand.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

How I got my small business marketing wrong (Part 2)

By Digital Marketing

When Small Business Marketing Goes Wrong!

As any business owner or director will confess that much of what we encounter in the daily working life requires a degree of adaptation and the ability to learn as we go. This is especially true in the case of small business marketing, and as I’ve explained before, this has caught me out on several occasions. But what happens when we get it right? When all the efforts we put into marketing our businesses pay off?

This is a short account of how we got our small business marketing right and also how this nearly caused us a problem that threatened to send the company into meltdown.

Firstly I should start by noting that if you ever wanted proof of the importance of digital marketing then this story should be testament to its power and effectiveness.

As video marketing experts it goes without saying that we employ video as a significant part of our marketing strategy. However we also have a robust marketing mix and utilise a wide range of ways to bring new clients to our door. In early 2013 we embarked on an ongoing campaign to attract as much new business as we could. We used a diverse spread of digital marketing techniques and allocated time and resources to the campaign on a monthly basis.

small business marketing

Small business marketing

We understood from the outset that successful small business marketing requires a slow burn effect and I’d therefore committed us to the campaign indefinitely. Right from the start our online visibility increased significantly due to initial SEO activity on our site, as well as our blogging and newly updated social media pages.

New customers slowly started to appear and we retained ones we already had (hopefully thanks to the quality of our service!). We stuck to our marketing plan and regularly updated our site, we blogged, posted video and also employed more traditional methods such as face to face and telephone marketing.

I should mention here that after 15 years of running a successful company, I possessed a degree of scepticism about the volume of new business we would attract. This led me to take an organic approach to growing our staff and my intention was to increase our core personnel once I’d seen a steady increase in business.

Demand For New Video Content

However what had initially been a steady trickle of new business quickly turned into a tidal wave with multiple new enquiries landing in my inbox daily and existing customers increasing their demand for new video content. The demand created by our digital marketing campaign had gone from a gentle start to an overwhelming surge in a short space of time.

As with many sectors, recruitment in video production is a lengthy process and because this surge in trade demanded all of my time to manage, I simply couldn’t find time to bring more helping hands on board.

small business marketing

This started a process where the business very nearly spiralled out of control, as our volume of work increased to the point where we couldn’t upscale to meet the demand. We were working literally day and night 7 days a week for a six-month period just trying to keep our heads above water.

To be fair, as business problems go this isn’t necessarily the worst, and it’s always better to have too much work than not enough. But the danger we faced was that the quality of our work would suffer as a result of running way above our natural capacity for an extended period of time.

Digital Marketing Does Work

The mistake I had made was to implement a robust digital marketing strategy but not put in place an internal growth strategy to ensure we could meet any new demand created. As a business we got close to meltdown through this period and ultimately the growth in sales we achieved could have all been for nothing if we had lost both existing and newly won clients by not providing the quality control aspect of our service due to stretched resources.

So there are really two messages to this story.

Firstly, yes, digital marketing does work. Very well!

But secondly, if as a business owner or director you commit to a robust digital marketing strategy you also need to commit in turn to a well-timed and considered process of increasing your resources to meet the increased demand you desire.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

5 reasons why video marketing and website videos can drive sales

By Digital Marketing

Website Videos – Why are they so powerful?

At the end of the day all businesses need to drive sales. They need to retain existing customers and engage and attract new ones. However (and as we all know), successfully achieving this is no mean feat. Here are a few key factors on why website videos have had such a great impact on driving sales.

1- Customers Trust Video

Even though customers acknowledge that all sorts of digital trickery can be achieved with video today they still implicitly trust video and in particular website videos. That’s because video is able to display raw emotion from real people.

Humans depend on emotions to make decisions, and this is especially true of purchasing decisions. Video and video marketing are without doubt the most effective way to convey emotion to your customers.

2- Customers Can See You

Wouldn’t every business love to have a one-to-one with each and every potential customer in the world? Businesses and brands can use video to form a connection with the viewer instantly, it enables them to look customers in the eye and say, “this is who we are, and this is what we believe”.

The power of what we see is so strong that if we experience a positive emotion from what we hold in our eyes then we also form a bond with what it is we are seeing.

website videos

3 – Google Loves Video

Fact: if you have website videos you will instantly have an advantage over any of your competitors who do not. It’s that simple. Google ranks like for like sites much higher if they feature video and customers will also spend much longer on your site.

Having video on your site will not only make it easier for customers to find you on Google, it will also make them more likely to actually click on the Google link (especially if the customer has searched specifically for video about their chosen search term.

4- Video Strengthens Your Message

Website Videos are at their most powerful when they ‘show and tell’ effectively. A well-produced video can use footage, graphics or stills to highlight a product or service, while a voiceover or commentary can highlight the benefits it provides. This fusion of visual and audible information happens in seconds and provides your customer with a much more compelling reason to give you a call that words or even pictures alone can ever do.

Nobody really wants to read pages and pages of text, but YouTube has taught us that everyone wants to watch video.

website videos

5- Your Customers Want to Consume Video

People today may interact with a brand’s video at any time of the day, especially if your target market includes international clients who may be in a radically different time zone. Gone are the days of videos needing to be scheduled into expensive TV advertising slots – video is now available online and on-demand.

Your new customer could have encountered your video marketing on their tablet or smart phone during their commute to work, over lunch, or in the middle of the night. Any website now that doesn’t feature video always feels a little flat or lifeless, and also gives the impression of being somewhat dated. Online traffic records reflect this: customers tend to gravitate to sites that include online video.

So there you have it: five simple reasons why video marketing is an invaluable tool for your campaign.

And if you’re a business-to-business brand then now is the time to steal a march on your competition! Despite all these great reasons to use online video marketing I’ve just outlined, at the moment only 24% of B2B companies are actually doing this, so getting ahead of the curve now will be hugely beneficial.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

How to cast a voiceover for your company website video

By Video Production Advice

Website video advice – The Key to Casting the Perfect Artist

Finding the right voice for your business’ corporate video or website video is essential. All the creative effort you’ve gone to in producing great footage and images can be wasted if the voiceover or narration doesn’t connect with your viewer.

Tone & Style

So, taking the time to identify the right candidate and voice will prove beneficial and create a website video that suits your tone and style and also allows the viewer to identify with your brand.

The first step should be to establish how the voiceover should be delivered, i.e. should it have some pace to it, should it be dramatic, gentle, reassuring etc. This will provide not only a good casting guide but also direction notes for the voiceover artist when they are recording the vocal.

Secondly, an additional set of notes should be devised to summarise the nature of the brand or product featured. These notes are the starting points for establishing what character the voiceover should have, i.e. young, old, male, female, age etc.

website video

Target Audience

Finally, some notes on the target audience for your website video should be added. These should reflect the target demographic and the most suitable tone to communicate with them.

By now you should have a very clear picture of the sort of voiceover artist you need and how their voice should sound and feel.

So how do you go about casting them?

Voiceover Agency

Well, there are two distinctly different options when selecting a voiceover artist. The first route is to approach a respected voiceover agency, a wide selection of which can be found easily online. The key advantage of using an agency is that they will be able to instantly send you a range of casting options (in the form of MP3 showreels or samples) that suit you brief. You can then select your artist from the casting shortlist and the agency will then arrange the recording studio and sound engineer to record the script.

Your director can attend the recording to provide direction or sometimes you can listen into the recording by Skype or other means. The recording quality of the script will be top notch and the file delivered back to you for editing the same day. Here’s the drawback: this kind of service doesn’t come without a cost and although the agency route provides ease, choice and quality, it’s not the most cost effective option.

website video

Freelance Voiceover Artist

The second route you can go down when casting a voiceover for your website video is to use an independent or freelance voiceover artist. They usually have their own recording facility, which although not as high-end as the ones used by the agencies, still gives you high enough quality sound for online material.

There are lots of them across the country and you should be able to find the exact voice you’re looking for at a much lower cost than an agency artist.

The great thing about freelancers is that they will often record you a few lines of your script so you can see exactly how they will sound when representing your brand (you wont get this nice little bonus free of charge from an agency).

However the main drawback is obviously time. You need to spend a fair bit of it finding and getting hold of multiple independent artists if you need a good range to choose from, which means contacting them all individually.

In practice we use both routes depending on our needs and clients budgets. We’ve found that after a while, our contact list of independents offers a wide enough range for some of our clients and the obvious cost benefits they provide are always welcome.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

How can I make my corporate video web friendly?

By Digital Marketing

Harness The Power Of YouTube For Business

Maximising the impact of your video marketing and making your corporate video web friendly is crucial to realising its full potential. The easier it is to find, view and share, the better your chances of it creating impact and allowing you to grow sales or awareness.

So here are a few tips on where exactly to place your video marketing and get the most out of your corporate video web marketing.

Embed or Host?

In terms of where your video lives online there are two options. The video can either live on your website and server and play out directly from your website, or you can embed the video on your site while it is hosted on either Youtube or Vimeo.

If you host the video on your own website then you have the advantage of immediately benefitting from the traffic it directs to your site, and you also have control over exactly where the video is seen. However there are a couple of downsides. Firstly the viewer’s ability to play the video depends directly on what playback software you’ve built into your own website. Customers access content on such a wide array of devices today so ensuring that a self hosted video can play back on everyone’s device or computer can be a challenge. You may even need to spend money making it available on mobile devices. So much thought goes into presenting a positive image of your business during the video, but someone wants to watch your content on an iPad and it won’t even play, straight away a negative image is presented.

That’s one of the key reasons many businesses choose to harness the power of the enormously capable playback software on Youtube and Vimeo. By uploading your video to these sites and then embedding the video on your website you effectively hijack the playback capability of these hugely powerful sites. That means your video will be immediately playable on pretty much any device out there.

corporate video web

How to Embed a Video

If the concept of embedding is new to you then let’s briefly explain how it works. Once you’ve uploaded your video to Youtube for example, a small piece of code can automatically be generated. This code can then be pasted into your website page (you may need your web guru for this part though) and the video can then be played on your site. The viewer need never know where the actual file is hosted and to be honest, they won’t care. What they WILL care about is not being able to play your video, so using Youtube in this way is our suggested route for online video marketing.

Now, even though your video is embedded in your site, you’ll want to maximise its reach and discoverability to attract new customers to your brand. After all, Youtube is the worlds second biggest search engine, so capitalising on this is vital.

Correctly tagging, titling and describing your video on Youtube and other places your video lives is important to ensuring that people can initially find your video, and then use it to click through to your website (after all, there’s no point in them engaging with your video if that’s where the story ends. We need them to be able to get to your site easily so that this engagement can develop further.

Giving the Upload a Title

As you upload, Youtube and Vimeo allow you to title your film. Use a title that will grab the attention of a search engine rather than a simple description of the film. A title that is a questions works well in attracting viewers.

Tagging

Add lots of tags to your film (you can do this when uploading). Separate all the tags with a comma and ensure you include key search words from your sector AND also your URL as a tag.

Film Description

The most important element of adding the description to your film is ensuring you include your URL. This is the key area for helping drive traffic using your corporate video web presence so its essential that you include this.

Finally regardless of whether you embed or not ensure that you upload each of your films to multiple sites rather than sharing one upload across all your social media pages. For example rather than uploading to Youtube then sharing the Youtube link on Facebook etc, do multiple uploads of the same film to ensure that a standalone copy of it exists on all social media platforms. We suggest uploading to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook (and also Pinterest).

This way you’ll make you corporate video web friendly and and in turn maximise the inbound traffic to your own website.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

How John Lewis won our hearts with video and viral advertising 

By Digital Marketing

Article originally written in December 2014

Changing perceptions with video marketing and viral advertising.

OK, let’s be frank here. Very few businesses have the budget that John Lewis does to chuck at video marketing and viral advertising. There, we’ve said it.

However, the way in which John Lewis has used its video to drive sales is a good case study example and actually there’s a lot that we can take away from it to help ourselves.

Arguably John Lewis’ greatest successes with online video have been their Christmas TV advertising campaigns, which have almost become as big as the brand itself. For the past few years they’ve tugged on our heartstrings and made us feel all warm inside with these highly anticipated adverts, usually featuring a child, a present, and a small cute creature (you choose).

viral advertising

By tapping into our seasonal goodwill and desire for traditional warmth and togetherness, John Lewis brings out our collective emotions in a way that forms a long lasting bond. We all know the saying “a dog is for life not just Christmas” but you could also apply the same rule to John Lewis adverts. Yes, they will probably appear in any end-of-year ‘Best Adverts Of 2015 Compilation’ type of programme, but more importantly they have successfully established the brand in our hearts and created powerful emotional connections with us that will far outlast the festive season.

Cast your mind back a few years to a time before the advent of the retail chain Christmas advert and viral advertising war. What was your perception of the John Lewis brand? I bet you a cuddly penguin that you didn’t perceive the brand as being current, warm, clever or thoughtful. In fact I’d be surprised if you had any firm opinions about John Lewis at all. For a few years it seemed that they were losing business to retailers that displayed a little more brand personality.

Now that’s not to say that they’ve come from obscurity and transformed themselves into the rock ‘n’ roll king of department stores, and that’s not what we want from them. They have however become a brand that everyone not only knows and gets talking about every year, but has an opinion of as well. For the most part this is due to the impact of the Christmas advertising campaigns combined with skilful viral advertising and their effect on us collectively. They are a brand that is now firmly on our radar, which is exactly what they intended.

The power of video to control our emotions in this way is something that, with creativity and determination, any and every brand, business and organisation, whatever its size, can harness.

To find out more about us and our services, please click here.

 

Why Does Production Quality Matter in Company Videos?

By Corporate Video Production, Video Production Explained

A Guide To Good Production Quality

Well production quality is important as it will influence that instant snap judgment that viewers make about a brand the second they start watching their company videos. When it comes to video marketing it’s essential that you cut straight to the chase in effectively representing your brand values right from the first few seconds of any video you produce.

Like it or not, we all form instant judgements about brands the second we encounter them and these opinions can be so strong that if we make a negative assumption it’s a very difficult task to change our mind. Such is the power of video.

However, get this right and you can gain the trust and enthusiasm of potential new customers right from their very first encounter with your brand.

Below is an example of various interview shots that we’ve produced over the years. The difference in what they communicate about the quality of the brands they represent is instantly apparent.

high-vs-low-production

Many of the elements that boost the production quality of a promotional video are relatively unseen. Your viewers will probably not exclaim “that’s a beautiful dolly shot!” or “this interview has been wonderfully lit”.

However all these elements will be subconsciously perceived within the viewing experience, and will be key to what our general opinion of the brand represented is. It’s these subtleties that provoke an emotional response from the audience and therefore they are powerful factors on creating that all important first impression.

Remember that if you are maximising your reach with a promotional video then you’ll probably be uploading it to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter etc. When a viewer watches your video on these channels they will more than likely experience your brand with none of the other quality marketing collateral that would surround it on your own company website.

All the time and effort put into making your website a truly wonderful experience and brand ambassador is great for adding extra firepower to marketing items placed solely on your website, but lost when embracing the power of social media channels as these video sites won’t mirror the branding, messaging and design of your own site. Effectively your video has to be strong enough to be seen as a standalone element that can deliver your message isolation.

So making sure that your promotional video or corporate film champions your brand values and ideals is essential in allowing you the option of spreading its footprint as far as the web will allow.

Ensuring you produce a film with the highest production quality isn’t always directly related to video production costs. However budget does go a long way in providing the equipment and experience that this sometimes requires. There’s a common saying in the production industry that goes – You can produce video that’s good, fast or cheap but not all 3. This is mostly true but there are some ways to increase the quality of your company videos without needing a mortgage to pay for it.

company videos

So here’s some areas where companies can enhance the way they present their brand by maximising the production quality of the company videos they produce;

Crew

Finding a good Producer/Director is one of the most essential elements in realising great visuals and high quality production while keeping a lid on the budget. There’s no substitute for experience and a good pro will know exactly how to squeeze every penny’s worth of video production quality out of your budget.

Camera

Unfortunately this element comes down to cost. Using a higher end camera for your video marketing has obvious benefits and will create an instant impact on the visuals you distribute.

Lights

It shouldn’t cost the earth to make sure that any interview content you include in your video is nicely lit. You don’t need additional crew for this as any good cameraman should be able to light a simple talking head shot effectively themselves.

company videos

Sound

DO NOT cut corners on sound recording. This is the one aspect above everything else that if done badly can undo every other element within your video. What we hear when watching video content automatically over rides what we see so capturing beautiful images is pointless if your interviews sound like they’ve been recorded in a toilet!

Grip (moving camera shots)

This is one of the key factors in increasing the perceived production quality of your company videos. Using shots that gently track, jib or dolly is one of the most effective ways to elevate the general overall feel of a video to new heights and give it that Hollywood feel. Again it doesn’t cost the earth and many of the available options don’t require extra crew.

There will also be producers/directors out there who suggest that they can add the “wow factor” in post with some funky editing and graphics. However a general golden rule is that if you haven’t capture quality in camera (ie whilst on the shoot) then no amount of digital alchemy is going to lift the video further.

So our advice is always aim high, because if the quality of your company videos doesn’t match that of your customer’s expectations you may be doing your brand more damage than good.

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