Here are the top recommendations regarding corporate video production you can hear from many professional animated video production companies.
1. Keep it short
The key factor in any promotional video or corporate video for your business website is that your viewer has a short attention span. Anything more than 3 minutes and you’ll start to lose their attention.
2. Concentrate on a couple of key aspects of your company
Remember your video isn’t there to give your potential clients a detailed history of your company but to encourage them to find out more and get in touch.
3. Be clear with your message
What is your company’s USB? Why should people use you rather than your competitors? When you make this list ask yourself whether your competitors would have written the same thing. Everyone says «great personal service»
4. Think about who you want to engage
Many clients have initially approached Clear Blue Productions thinking that the same film we shoot for their corporate clients will also work in just the same way on social media sites like youtube and facebook.
It won’t. If you are showing your video as part of a sales presentation you will have the time to take a more in-depth look at the product and its features. The same video shown on youtube will bore people rigid. Your social media film should be short and sharp – you just want to prompt people to find out more from you in person or go straight to your website.
Carrying along this theme – Don’t think that the same product video you’ve made for your staff would also work with someone seeing your product for the first time.
5. Use testimonials from clients
By far the most effective way to sell your company to a potential client is to put them in touch with people who have already used your services in the past and liked you.
This is where video excels. We are generally mistrustful of the written testimonial, let’s face it, they could be written by anyone. However, when you see a real live human on the screen we start believing.
Client advocacy video’s and video testimonials re-assure your potential clients that you are a real company and that you have provided a great service to people in the past.
It’s also a great way for you to appear on screen or film a short piece with a voice-over saying; how long you have been trading for and the type of businesses you normally work with.
6. Try and shoot to a broadcast standard
As soon as people think broadcast they assume it’s going to be expensive – it’s isn’t.
7. Use a real-life customer experience to sell the story
Giving the technical spec of your product isn’t what people want to hear. They want to know whether your product will; increase profits, make their company more efficient, help them provide better customer service or help their own colleagues work more effectively and take less time doing it.
Use a real-life example of how a client of yours bought your solution and film them telling the tale of how it’s improved their business.
This all re-iterates the client testimonial angle to any sales or promotional film – we are more likely to buy that product if we see other real people telling us how great it is.
8. How to get started with scripting
First of all – think of the key messages, section your video in these key chapters.
For each chapter write half a dozen bullet points.
Think about how you can show these points visually – if that’s an issue think about what questions you would ask someone so they could explain these points.
Perhaps you need to commission some motion graphics to animate a cross section of your product – motion graphics are relatively cheap these days.
9. What’s your budget?
You don’t have to spend the earth. Very often product 2-minute promotional video’s for small and large corporates that merely consist of a montage of their best clients saying what a great company my client is – client testimonials will always be the best way of selling your company is the budget is tight, for instance, $2000.
For a 5-minute video that involves one-day shoot at your offices with a mixture of client interviews, the budget can vary between $3500 and $5000.
Remember that once you have your initial edit that’s been shot to a broadcast standard you can encode this for a variety of outlets whether it’s to be shown at a large event, streamed on youtube, to be played on a laptop for a sales meeting.
Encoding is now really just a case of clicking a button on a computer to create different formats.
10. Always finish with a call to action
You’ve made the video. You’ve kept it short. It includes testimonials from past clients. But don’t forget the reason why you’ve made it in the first place. Even if this video is appearing on your website put a message at the end guiding people towards a contact page or phone number. All of the above is a pointless exercise if the video doesn’t help you with the sales process.