Maximise your investment…
Making a video should be fun but it can take time and money. So how can you make sure you get the most out of your investment?
A few pointers…
- Make it useful. We know that most videos are promotional, but think about how to promote your business without simply talking at your audience. Tell them about your business, but inject something useful into what you say. Put your audience first. Make sure it benefits them.
- Make it as engaging as possible. Talking heads are easy and get the job done. But they are not memorable and not likely to get shared. So consider how can you make your message as interesting as possible, and challenge your production company to do the same. This might be as simple as writing some humour into the script, but it may be considering totally different options such as using presenters or actors or another approach like animation.
- One film, many uses. The majority of production companies will charge production and post production at a day rate. It’s the industry standard. So consider how you can get the most out of that day. Perhaps you could film different versions of the same film on the same day, to use on different platforms or to talk to different audiences. You could even film more than one film in one day. The same goes for post production. The same material can be edited in many different ways. You might consider a long version for presentations, a 2 minute version for the web and a 30 second version for social media.
- Putting it on a platform. Films will look different, depending on where they are viewed. For example your film might look great on a desktop but will it have the same effect when viewed on the phone? You might want to consider creating a phone friendly, vertical video of your film. If it’s going to be viewed on Facebook, then a version with text or graphics that works without sound might be an option so it catches the attention as viewers scroll by. It’s also vital you describe it in a way that will optimize its search ability. The text around including tags and meta-descriptions play a huge role in a video getting found.
- Shout about it! You may want to consider giving your video more chance of getting seen or a longer shelf-life through a promotions strategy that drives new web traffic every week. This might mean a targeted pay per click campaign on social media but you can also embed it into email marketing campaigns, blog about it , and try to reshare it with a link it to news and topical events to keep it current and relevant.