What Is Promotional Video Production?
A form of advertising that can be leveraged to meet any company’s needs, promotional videos offer a unique medium to share information with your audience. Promoting a product, a sale, an event, or your brand has never been easier to personalize, as the opportunities are limitless when it comes to video production.
While promotional videos always have the goal of “promotion,” the actual format can take many different forms, including TV commercials; 15-, 30-, or 60-second videos for social media; documentaries; live streams; and more. Additionally, after choosing the type of video you want to use in your video marketing strategy, you can decide on the style, tone, and content that will be most effective for your brand. For example, your tone could be dramatic, humorous, energizing, informative, or beyond. The video style and format you choose to produce will determine the audience you reach with your video, so it’s important to consider all of these elements as you plan your video’s production.
Prioritizing the production is essential for creating a promotional video that will offer a high ROI. Promotion is the intention and purpose, and production is the “how” — how the video is designed, filmed, edited, and distributed. Without focusing on each step of the production process, it can be easy to lose sight of your overarching video marketing strategy. As a result, the videos you publish can lack the cohesive branding that comes with executing a well-thought-out plan.
Why Is Promotional Video Production Important?
As social media usage continues to rise, video is increasingly the way to reach your audience. Video has become ubiquitous and is increasingly expected of brands by their customers and potential customers. If you aren’t already using video production in your marketing campaigns, you’re missing out on potential customers. Fortunately, it’s never too late to get started with a video marketing strategy.
While it can be tempting to stick with blog posts and status updates, it’s important to branch out into different forms of messaging. Video content is more likely to catch the attention of consumers as they are scrolling through their favorite social media platforms. By creating scroll-stopping video content, you’re more likely to attract potential new customers.
Not only is it more likely to catch the attention of consumers, video messaging is also much more likely to be remembered by a viewer, meaning it can be much more effective than written content. One of the reasons that video is so memorable is that it’s an excellent medium for storytelling, and story is a powerful component of advertising. Humans connect to stories and by including stories in your marketing video production, you’ll help your audience feel more connected with you and your brand. As a result, they’ll be more likely to remember you when the time comes to make a purchase.
By keeping these tips and strategies in mind while you produce your promotional video content, you can maximize the ROI you see from your video marketing campaigns.
Important Questions To Ask About Your Promotional Video Production
Successful video marketing requires an intentional plan, also known as a video marketing strategy. As you establish your corporate video strategy, it’s essential that you thoroughly consider goals, audience, and more. Asking yourself tough questions is a great way to frame not only your overall strategy, but also the execution of your individual videos — maximizing the return on investment of your promotional videos.
It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the creation of a video marketing strategy, let alone remembering to step aside and analyze it. Consider the following questions to ensure each video you create and publish will get you one step closer to your goals:
What Is Our Goal For This Promotional Video?
Having a clear objective for corporate brand videos is necessary for ensuring your videos are successful. Possible objectives can include increased awareness, audience engagement, increased leads, increased sales, and increased customer retention.
When it comes to marketing video production, your objectives should be informed by your overall video marketing strategy. Creating a video marketing strategy will help you understand how each individual video plays into your overarching marketing strategy and will force you to keep a consistent brand identity and message across all of your videos by allowing you to see the larger picture.
Your strategy will dictate what kinds of video marketing, including promotional videos, are necessary, while also ensuring you’re able to find ways to get the most use out of each video shoot. For example, repurposing some or all of your promotional videos can be accomplished as long as you’re clear on your goals and overall strategy in advance.
What Story Will We Tell In This Promotional Video Or Series?
Story should be incorporated in all aspects of your video production: initial concepting, storyboarding, and script writing. Storytelling can be used in many ways:
- You can use video to share the story of your brand or product(s) by showcasing the history of your company, sharing insider information about the production process, or giving your audience insight into your corporate values and/or mission. Each of these examples is a form of storytelling that will offer a deeper connection with your brand.
- Videos are also a great way to showcase the story of a customer or client through testimonials or reviews. When consumers can see how you and your products/services have impacted other customers, they’ll have an easier time visualizing how your offerings can impact their own lives.
- A fictional narrative can be created to make your promotional video like a TV commercial. The impact of this can be similar to that of customer or client testimonials, as this video style will also give the viewer the opportunity to place themselves in the shoes of those on-screen.
Each of these styles can be incredibly impactful when used correctly. Consider your goals and your audience to determine which type of storytelling will prove most successful for you.
How Can We Maintain A Consistent Brand Identity With This Promotional Video?
Staying on-brand in promotional videos is necessary for creating a consistent, recognizable brand. To do this, you need to stay consistent with brand elements such as production values, colors, tone and voice, and visual elements such as logos and animations.
It’s important that you stay consistent within a single video, as well as from video to video. Without this consistency, your video marketing strategy is less likely to succeed, making it one of the most important things you can do to set yourself up for success. By prioritizing consistency, you’re taking steps to ensure your audience is not only able to recognize your videos immediately, but also remember them as yours. As a result, they’ll be more likely to return to your page and recommend you to their own communities.
The constraint of staying on-brand requires creativity and could be one reason to work with professionals. If you aren’t feeling confident in your ability to stay consistent in your branding while also making each video feel fresh and unique, you may want to consider outsourcing your video production to a partner agency.
Who Will Produce Our Promotional Video?
There are two options when it comes to social media video production: you can either do it in-house or hire an external video marketing production company. It may seem like a good idea to create all your corporate brand videos in-house to save time and money, but it can actually cost less to outsource video production than attempting to create your own videos without the resources to do so.
This is because video production comes with extensive equipment costs and labor costs, as well as a steep learning curve — resulting in time spent away from the core of your business. This is time you could be spending selling products or services, or working on other elements of your business. Alternatively, professional video production companies have economies of scale, are experts at video, are more efficient, and are here to help you create videos that can achieve your goals.
The Benefits Of Professional Video Production
Branded video content is a powerful tool for any company or organization. When done right, including promotional videos in your marketing strategy will make a huge difference in your successes. In fact, if you aren’t using video, you’re missing out. However, for your videos to succeed, you need to prioritize the quality of the video itself, as well as the content. Publishing consistently successful videos is a time-consuming undertaking that requires in-depth planning, various resources, and a specialized skill set.
Charter & Co is here to ensure you can still achieve these results even if you don’t have the necessary resources available in-house. If you find yourself in this position, and you want to pursue video marketing, reach out today!
