In the last 20 years, video marketing has gone from being reserved for large blue-chip companies with huge budgets, to a key part of EVERY organisation’s marketing strategy*. From Sole-Traders and start-ups, to high-profile SME’s and Conglomerates, video has become THE most effective and powerful method of engaging with and communicating directly to target markets.
But how do you ensure that your videos achieve a good Return on Investment, reach the right audiences, and become a consistent and reliable source of engagement or leads for you organisations?
Below are our Top Tips for how you can transform your marketing objectives through professional video production.
*Fun Fact: When we formed Reels in Motion in 2004, we not only had to convince organisations that we were the right production company to produce their video, we had to convince them that a video should be produced in the first place and would actually deliver the results that ‘traditional’ methods would not.
Gone are the days where an organisation produces a single 5-minute promotional video that is used for years to come. Modern audiences (and modern platforms) want and need regular content. Monthly, weekly or even daily video releases will increase engagement, brand awareness and enquiries significantly.
So, when planning your video campaign, don’t just think of just one main video, try to plan in as many video deliverables as possible. Even if the priority is to produce a single longer video that covers the bulk of your key messaging, work with your video production supplier to plan some supporting video releases. These could be short testimonial interviews, specific product/service videos or even shorter segments from the longer video.
By planning these ahead of the filming, it can be a huge budget saver as well. From just one day’s filming, you could easily capture the footage required to deliver monthly videos for the entire year.
Developing ideas for potential marketing videos is an exciting & creative process, but it can be easy to get carried away with the idea and not the result. By focusing on the end product and, in particular, WHERE the end product will be seen is essential to successful results. For
example, if the main platform for release is LinkedIn, your video will have a very different style, messaging and tone to that of a video whose primary release platform is Instagram or TikTok. Is it being released across multiple platforms? If so, your video will need to be adaptable and broad enough to ensure it matches your audiences’ expectations of that platform. A short, quirky, informal video may fit perfectly with Instagram audiences, but may not represent your brand well on your website or at an important event.
As with all marketing campaigns, make sure you have a clear and specific understanding of who you want your video to connect with. Knowing who will watch the viewer should inform every decision then made when producing the video. From your choice of cast or voiceover artist, to location and costume, and most importantly, the language and tone of how you deliver your key messaging, EVERYTHING should be led with the end viewer in mind. Wherever possible, trying to create an individual persona of viewer will help massively. Even on campaigns where it is a broad audience or a general public awareness raiser, always focus on making decisions that will make your video as appealing and suitable as possible.
At Reels in Motion we always ask our clients the same question at the beginning of a project. On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being pure information (e.g. an essential Health & Safety video that could save lives) and 10 being pure emotion (e.g. an advert for a sports car with beautiful people in beautiful locations but zero messaging about the engine or fuel system), where would your video sit?
Identifying a number between 1-10 helps inform how much screen-time needs to be spent on informing viewers of key messaging, and how much screen-time is spent on the winning of hearts and minds. It then becomes very straightforward to produce a script (and subsequently the finished video) that hits exactly the right balance for your audience.
Many marketing strategies have clearly agreed budgets, KPIs and ROI targets, yet for many reasons, video campaigns often aren’t subject to the same monitoring and defined parameters. If you were carrying out a PPC campaign, it would be standard to have all of these targets set and agreed prior to the campaign launching – either through your inhouse team or with a supplier – but with views, impressions, and CTR on videos, it is often neglected.
By setting your productions budget and communicating it clearly to your video team, they should not only be able to come up with an engaging idea and high-quality end product, they should be able to design and deliver it for the agreed budget. Setting ROI and KPIs for your video campaign also helps to understand how successful they’ve been and how, in future videos, they can be improved upon.
With the availability of cheaper high-quality video cameras, it is now possible for many organisations to deliver good quality video in-house – particularly short, snappy videos for social media or testimonials from clients. However, with so much video content out there now, audiences will only engage with this type of content so much. More and more organisations are realising that the cheat-code for video marketing is in storytelling and how you deliver your messaging.
The real skill of effective video marketing is how you do this and how it is translated into video form, and this is where outside expertise should be considered. For example, an in-house Videographer may be excellent at capturing shots and content on an arranged shoot or event, but do they have the expertise to encapsulate your messaging, company values, and the uniqueness of your organisation into an idea, script, and storyboard?
By working with a specialist video production company, with a long track record of excellence in delivering wow-factor videos, your chances of successful video marketing campaigns will be increased significantly.
To produce a powerful, engaging and successful video takes time. To put it in context, our average project time just on pre-production (scripting, scheduling, casting etc.) is 4 weeks. When producing client testimonial videos, it can sometimes take that long just to secure a date in their diary! Of course, it is possible to produce videos quickly and deliver in them days, but will they be as targeted, clearly communicated and ultimately as engaging as they could possibly be to achieve successful video marketing outcomes?
By planning ahead, it allows you to integrate your video marketing into upcoming campaigns for 360 marketing implementations and tie in with other events, campaigns or milestones. If you’ve paid attention to Tip No 1. this could involve several teaser or social media releases prior to the release of your main video to maximise your budgets and reach.
It will also allow your video team the time to properly formulate the best approach and delivery of the videos. It will also be much less stressful for your marketing team to have the videos approved for release ahead of time – there is a reason why John Lewis film their Christmas adverts in summer!
Thank you for reading our top tips. Video marketing is genuinely here to stay, and will only become more and more essential for organisations to get right. If you need any advice or to take advantage of our FREE video marketing audit, get in touch with Reels in Motion today.
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