Producing a video for your business can vastly aid in sales and branding, but how should you ensure that you are fully utilizing your video’s capabilities? Here is a list of 5 things you should take note of when producing a video.
No matter how powerful your concept is, remember that videos can never be a one-size-fits-all solution. If your campaign is targeted at different groups of audiences, your content, style, and messaging must be altered to attract each distinct group. Of course, there may be some exceptions to this. However, this still holds true for majority of the marketing campaigns. This is a major mistake to avoid as the considerations go way beyond just the video itself. Different groups of audiences are active on different platforms. And the platform on which you choose to deploy your video significantly affects the style of the video as well. In order to get the most out of your powerful content, you must ensure that you have clearly defined your target audience group(s), and create content ideal for the differing platforms.
This pitfall is one of the most apparent in today’s media campaigns, and it is such a pity. After all that creative and top-notch visuals, a vague or even worse, missing call-to-action, leaves viewers hanging and confused. Cliff-hangers may work in movie endings, but definitely not when it comes to corporate or marketing videos. In video production, cliff-hangers are only good if the objective is already clear, or if your company already has garnered significant brand awareness.
Just like how a smartphone is essential to today’s business people, no video production shoot can take place without proper equipment and gear. No matter how packed your schedule may be, always make time to conduct routine equipment maintenance and checks on your equipment. If you are renting equipment, do not skip thorough tests and checks before leaving the rental centre. You do not want to be held liable for faulty equipment, and most of all, the last thing you want to happen on your shoot is having faulty equipment, which renders your shoot almost impossible to proceed. Rescheduling shoots is not only a costly endeavour, it is also time consuming and leaves a bad impression on your team. Often times, it can turn into a deal-breaker for clients.
In video production, the project does not end when editing is completed. Where you decide to deploy the video plays an important role on the video’s success. In fact, planning for distribution resides within the marketing strategy and should be done even before the production stage as different platforms may require a change in style and format. Adding on to this point, it is important to monitor and track the performance of your content. Two very important metrics to track would be view-count and share-rate. This helps creators and marketers analyse their content and gauge its effectiveness. It also brings insights into areas of improvements for your next campaign.
Speaking of future campaigns, one of the greatest shortfalls of many creatives and marketers is the perception of the longevity of the video. It is common-practice industry wide to perceive videos as a one-off marketing effort, when in fact, video marketing should be a part of a bigger overall strategy. The options are endless. Your follow-up campaign does not necessarily need to be another video. It could well be a print advertisement or out-of-home media. Videos are very effective forms of digital marketing. And if you do not ride on its success with a subsequent campaign, its virality will fizzle out in no time.
With that being said, what’s most important is to ensure your content is relevant to your target audience. It is definitely not a difficult task to avoid the above common oversights. In any case, should you need professional advice on how to produce an effective video, talk to us below!
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