Video Production Tips For Marketing Your Start-Up Business

As a new startup business, educating consumers about your brand new product or service takes time. Through implementing an effective video marketing campaign with an experienced video production company you’ll be able to propel your business to the next level, increase conversions and quickly grow your client-base.  However, money can be tight when starting a new business and video marketing can be expensive, therefore we’ve produced some tips to ensure that your startup video gets  results and  maximises your return on investment.

Simplicity & Focus

Be Authentic

Chances are that if you’ve just set up your business most people won’t have used your product or service before, establishing a trustworthy brand can be really important in converting new customers for the first time.

A startup video is a great way to gain trust of new customers, be authentic and translate your passion for the business – let your consumers know why you started the company and how it;s going to improve their lives.

Planning

Planning is one of the most important parts of the video production process, not only is this going to ensure that your video delivers all of the necessary information in the best possible way, but it’s also going to keep your costs down by minimizing the number filming days and re-edits. Put yourself in the shoes of your consumers, what information would you need to know to make a purchase or enquire about your service. Also, think carefully about how you want your brand to be represented in your video – this will be many people’s first impression of your company – how is your brand going to separate itself from the competition?

Investment

In recent years the cost of video marketing has dropped significantly, however it can still be an expensive process. Deciding upon the right amount to invest in video marketing your startup can be difficult, spend too little and you may end up with a low quality video, spend too much and you might not see a worthwhile return on your investment. To find the right balance between quality and budget, it’s important to do your research – take a look at the video production company’s portfolio and how it compares to their video production prices, just because one company is charging more doesn’t mean you’ll end up with a better video. Also enquire about the other services they may offer to add value to your video such as video seo, online distribution support and multiple edits for different social media platforms. It’s also worth considering keeping back some of your video budget to help with distribution, whether that be through paid advertising or purchasing the right hosting to maximise those video SEO benefits.

Video SEO

To get the most out of your marketing video it’s important to correctly SEO your content to generate more organic traffic to your startup business’s website. The easiest way to do this is to use a video host that supports video SEO for your website’s embedded videos, Wistia is a great example of this allowing you to quickly add SEO information such as Video Titles, Descriptions, Tags and other metadata. To keep the costs down, with some technical knowledge it’s possible to do this yourself by creating a video sitemap and self-hosting your content, alternatively ask your Video Production Company if they can offer support with this part of the process. For help with this you can refer to my Simple Guide to Video SEO and Distribution.

Share, Share and Share Some More!

Think about the platform in which you’d expect to get the best results from sharing your video content and will be able to target the demographic most likely to engage with your brand. You can then use this information to tailor your video content to focus on this platform – whether it be through video length, resolution, call-to-action options, multiple videos etc. Spending time thinking about this in the planning stage will give your  corporate video production the best possible chance of success. In terms of getting the most out of your budget, it’s worth running through the editing options with your video production company – they may be willing to provide you with addition social media videos from the same footage for little extra cost. Regardless of where you’ve decided to host your video it’s always worth uploading it to Youtube and Facebook as well. Generating views on your video may take time, be consistent and experiment methods of sharing to see which results work best for your brand.

Eye-Catching Thumbnail

Choosing the right thumbnail for your video can significantly impact the number of views your video gets – remember this image will be responsible for whether or not a potential viewer decides to watch your video. An eye-catching image that sparks the interest of a user and reflects the high quality of your content is likely to draw in a much wider audience, as opposed to a blurry or boring image that is easily scrolled over in search results and social media timelines.

 Make sure that your image is correctly sized and design your thumbnails to be the same size as the video (most HD videos are either 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720), if you’ve had to scale an image for your thumbnail ensure that it is the correct aspect ratio to avoid it becoming stretched or skewed.  Adding text to your thumbnail can be a great way to catch the attention of a user – make sure the text is clear and easy to read when scaled down for mobile users and the background is out of focus to direct viewers attention to the contents message.

Another thing to remember is that changing your video’s thumbnail is a really quick & simple process on most video hosting websites, therefore testing out different thumbnails and analyzing their performances can seriously impact your play counts.

The Shorter, The Better

The best advice is to make the video as long as it needs to be to achieve the desired outcome – whether that be educating a viewer about your business, sending them to your website, purchasing your product or even getting someone to like your facebook page. Try to keep your video message clear and concise, think about creative ways to deliver the information – perhaps a shot of someone demonstrating your product in a certain environment would give your viewer an instant understanding of it as opposed to having your designer try to explain it. You should be able to pitch your product or service to potential consumers in under 2 minutes, remember you don’t have to include absolutely everything about it in your video, just the key benefits and enough information to guide the viewers into the next part of the conversion process.

With so much information in news-feeds, it can be difficult to compete with the vast number of distractions around your embedded video and studies have revealed that social media users are much more likely to engage with shorter videos than longer ones, getting feedback from as many individuals as possible is a great way to cut the unnecessary content that is going to lose the interest of your viewers.

Calls to Action

Well positioned call-to-actions and interactive elements in your video will encourage viewers to take that extra step and engage with your product or service. This can make all the difference, growing publicity around your new brand is fantastic but converting new viewers in paying customers is even better. Make the enquiry or purchase process as simple and user-friendly as possible – again experiment with the timing and positioning of your calls-to-action to ensure your video reaches it’s maximum potential.