
Feb
So You Need A Video But You Don’t Know Where To Start
If you’re promoting your business online, but you don’t have a video to tell your customers about yourself, you’re not making best use of the opportunity available to you.
With the best will in the world, customers just aren’t inclined to read a lot of text (Hence this post is short, and to the point).
Look at the syntax and paragraph structures. Small pieces of text that stand alone so a cursory scan can tell the reader what they need to know.
This is all because the web has gone video, and text isn’t cutting it anymore. You have, at best, 6 seconds to make an impression the first time a potential customer visits your website.
They have to see a strong call to action in those 6 seconds. Something that invites them to click a button and find out more. This is where video comes in.
You. Need. Video.
Or at least some sort of Multimedia Content. If you’re a large accountancy firm, a buzzfeed “Now This” style facebook post probably isn’t what you’re after – it’s definitely not what your customers expect to see as their first interaction with you. You want something polished, to the point, and engaging.
That goes for everyone.
So what do you do if you don’t know how to make a polished, to the point, and engaging video? How do you keep costs down, and standards high?
There’s a lot you can do actually. Firstly, you’ve to answer three key questions:
- Who are you?
- What do you want to say?
- Who do you want to say it to?
Once you can answer these questions quickly, and to the point, you know 90% of what you need to know for your video. Consider them your digital elevator pitch.
Have respect for the time of your viewers, and make sure you can tell them, and more importantly, they can repeat to someone else, what you do. That’s how you get a video to market your business successfully.
Armed with that, you can start to do a bit of research into what other people in your space are doing. I guarantee there’s plenty of fodder on YouTube. Find it, watch it, and figure out what pieces are going to work for you. Budget is no barrier at this stage, so knock yourself out. Special Effects, Celebrity Endorsements, product placements, imagine you can do them all.
By now, you should have two things:
- Your message
- The bones of a visual style
We’re going out on a limb here, but you might have something else as well: A camera. Be it on your mobile phone, a DSLR, or if you happen to have a high-end cinema camera with cine-lenses floating around, you have the means to start shooting your own footage.
It doesn’t have to be world beating, but give it a go. Figure out what works for you and what doesn’t. If you want a few tips, you can find them here.
Now let’s worry about budget. A point may come where you need professional help, and you come to someone like Acmhainní Teoranta to offer it. If you can hand over a clear, succinct brief that let’s that professional know exactly what you’re after, you’ve already saved a lot of money. If people don’t have to email back and forth to get a clear picture of what you’re trying to do, there’s a saving in billable time, and opportunity cost.
You’ve basically broken the back of the creative work, and a little bit of help and nudging that we can offer means you start almost straight away on the process of assembling all the pieces that make a film, and stitching them together.
If you want to know more about how we can help you deliver top-class marketing materials that tell your story, tailored to your budget and quickly, why not drop us a line, and we can have a chat over coffee?
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