The video image of your product is like an animated business card. The promotion through the imposition of staff has a compelling appeal for the client. Advertising can serve your brand in a variety of ways:
- Promotion – Advertising expands the idea of your offering. That is the best way to spread the word that you have something exciting for potential buyers.
- Awareness – By an advertising video, you raise brand awareness among your target audiences. It becomes clear what solution you offer for a specific case through your product or service.
- Retention – The advertisement supports the customer’s choice also after the purchase. In this way, you keep customer satisfaction higher and sustain trust in the brand.
But how to impress your potential customers and attract them to buy from you? There are a few steps to take before getting to the essential.
Step One: Vision – What do you want to be the general message of this mini-film, presenting your product or service? The purpose of some ads is to encourage an immediate response from viewers, while others are designed to build a long-term brand image depending on the chosen strategic positioning. Both approaches are meaningful and effective. Specify what you want to emphasize. If focus should fall on the quick reaction, invite them to act, use call-to-action (CAT) to get them to make an order, check a website, or go to the store on specific sales days. In case you choose to go for building a brand, direct the video on recreating crucial information about the positioning, benefits, meaning, and the idea behind your brand.
Step Two: Budget – Practicing movies and TVCs creation, you become a real financial expert in video production. You will look at the numbers and know at an instance what you can and what you cannot do for a certain amount of money. It is not always that easy. Of course, you can also hire a specialized agency to offer a complete solution – from the script and shooting of the video itself, through the editing and processing, to the overall project management of the process. But it is not every case when you have enough resources to choose this option. As shooting without super high requirements becomes more and more accessible these days due to advanced technology, it will not be that hard to find a contractor at a relevant price. Sign a contract with detailed clauses and assure that both sites share a common understanding of its content.
Step Three: Choosing a partner – This should be a person or a company with the same values as yours. The production partner could also support you in making designs, articles, planning, buying airtime as efficiently as possible. Your video creation partner is someone by your side throughout the process to care about placing the ad in the right place, at the right time, by the right people. And care about the ad achieving the targeted effect delivering relevant messages through creative execution.
Step Four: Timeline – The ad depends on campaigns and communication plans. Consider and draw each step onwards – when the ad should start airing, how long it will take to shoot it, and how long you want the ad video to run. Be prepared for possible small changes in this plan, because once the real shooting starts, you will see the risks of a live broadcast. You should try to anticipate possible difficulties and invest some time in eliminating or preparing to solve them.
Step Five: Script – The successful scenario includes the presentation of individual elements of the brand strategy – the vision of the organization, the type of customers you target, what are the advantages of your products or services, what are the values and the style of your brand voice. What will be the plot of the video depends mainly on these factors and on the initial goal. Our advice is to include a dose of humour unless it is extremely inappropriate because of the specific product, industry or stakeholders. If you make people smile, you will provoke their positive attitude including toward your organization. The call-to-action is important for the ad outcome if you have chosen to work on sales increase. Depending on the tactic chosen, tell the viewers what they need to do next: “Call now”, “See here online” or “Buy today” are sample phrases that are trivial, but still work quite successfully. It is significant for the screenwriters, if you use these services externally, to know what type of call-to-action you need to include and how you imagine it delivered to the audience.
Step Six: Choosing people, action, ways of expression – Once the script is signed-off, the production process begins. This includes choosing: a director to turn the script into reality; actors to convince the audience in the ad messages with their presence and voice; music to intensify the script impression. Also, consider whether the video requires any sound effects to refine the story. Also important is where it will be filmed – outdoors or indoors. In addition, you will need a stylist, a wardrobe and props responsible.
Step Seven: Post-production – Once the footage has been shot and complied into the rough cut of the commercial, it will be finessed into the final ad. Make sure the final version works for all intended formats: TV, YouTube, Instagram, etc. Here is the time to pay attention to the various attributes of the picture such as contrast, colour, saturation, detail, which can be improved or adjusted in the post-production process. Make sure the audio works in line with the visualization. Review any captions or visuals that should appear in the movie.
In our next blog post, read our tips on how to shoot corporate videos with your smartphone.
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