In these digital times, owning a business will require marketing your company through many various avenues, including having a strong visual online presence. Harnessing the power that the World Wide Web offers is a critical step when attracting new customers and retaining your regular customer base, as the majority of consumers now use the internet for their shopping and entertainment needs.
The use of videos allows you the ability to spread brand awareness, educate your customers, and attract new customers by creating online conversations and video sharing through various social media platforms. The marketing video production experts at Pretzel Logic Productions list below the steps required for a successful marketing video campaign for your business.
1. Pre-Production Lets You Create a Plan for your Marketing Video Campaign
Planning out your video prior to starting the production process is vital to ensuring your campaign is a success and to help limit any time and money wasted on ineffective strategies. There are a number of specific tasks to complete when starting your pre-production process, and these will help keep your planning streamlined.
Set Strategic Goals
The first step is to come up with a list of goals for your video campaign. Are you creating an educational video or maybe showing off a new product? What is the end goal of your video, and what do you want your audience to take away from viewing it? It’s vital to answer these questions before you do any further work on creating your video or you risk creating a chaotic mess of a video if you have no real goal in mind.
Identify Your Target Audience
Deciding who your video should be reaching allows you the ability to create a video with your audience’s personalities and interests in mind. Engaging your audience in a way that will grab their attention and keep it is very important when coming up with your creative materials. It will help you ensure your video is effective for the goals you’ve laid out.
Create an Attainable Budget and Timeline
Another important part of pre-production is deciding how big of a budget you want to put toward your video marketing campaign. Since your budget will depend somewhat on your timeline, you will also want to come up with a target completion date and then break down each step into target deadline dates along the way to keep you on track for your final deadline date. Remember that the longer you stretch out your timeline, the more money it will cost in the long run, so staying on task is very important to maximizing your marketing budget.
Choose a Video Type and Style
How do you want your video to look and feel? Do you want your video to be animated or live-action? Do you want your video to be distributed on social media platforms and viewable on mobile devices, or is it mainly for use on your website or a different platform? It’s important to gear your video style to fit your distribution channels most effectively, as the format and look of the video may change based on where you share it. Some specifications, including file format and viewable space, vary depending on how you plan to use the video.
Make a Storyboard to Review Your Plans
Once you’ve made decisions about your goals, audience, and style, you are ready to start the creative process by storyboarding ideas for possible video content. Here you can come up with the look and feel of your video, create scripts to follow, pick music, select locations for filming, and so on. This is where your creativity comes into play.
Decide Who Will be in Your Video and Pick a Location for Filming
Once you have an idea of the story you wish to tell and how you want the video to look and feel, you can choose where you will film and who will be in the video. You can hire professional actors through a talent agency or place an ad and hold auditions. Cast actors who fit the roles you’ve laid out in your storyboard.
2. Video Production Is Where the Magic Happens
With all the hard work of planning in place, you are ready to start creating your video. Filming a video requires a crew of people with various jobs and talents, each person fills an important role in the production process. You will need a director as the head decision-maker and a producer, who will guide the production process. You will also need a few people to oversee the camera crew, lighting, and sound to ensure each is done properly and make any necessary adjustments throughout the filming process.
It’s to your advantage to hire professionals for these positions. You want your marketing video production to be in the best hands possible. Working with a professional production company can help your video be a marketing success.
3. Post-Production Puts the Final Touches on Your Video
Post-production is where the editing takes place. In this step, you will spend time putting all the pieces together to create your final masterpiece. Not only can you edit your video content to include only the best clips, but you can also add voiceovers, sound effects, and graphics to your video.
4. Spread Your Video Far and Wide Using Multiple Avenues
Once you have perfected your video, it’s time to get it online where your target audience will see it. You can share your video on many different platforms, such as your company webpage, trade shows, or as an advertisement. Social platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are specifically formatted for sharing videos.
5. Review Performance Metrics to Determine Success and Make Necessary Changes
Once your video has been spread far and wide and reached your target audience, it’s always a good idea to monitor how successful your video marketing campaign has been. Take a look at the video’s analytics on each platform. The resulting statistics will provide you with invaluable knowledge on what types of communications work well and which will need future modifications to reach your target audience more effectively. Learning which types of marketing campaigns work and which are less effective can help you really hone your marketing presence to ensure you are getting the best value for your money and your efforts.
If you are on the fence about whether you should create a video marketing campaign, consider these statistics about how video marketing can boost your company’s revenue. If you are ready to make the leap and start working with your own professional marketing video production company, reach out to Pretzel Logic Productions to set up a consultation. Your video production will be in good hands with their team of experts.