Tips To Producing An Effective Marketing Video

You’ve decided to produce a marketing overview video for your company. Video is a high-value marketing asset and can act as the face of your company. Marketing overview videos typically live on highly visible company webpages such as landing pages, homepages and product pages. The quality of the video will reflect on the quality of your company. This is why it is worth the time and money to get it right.

These tips will help you get the most out of your marketing overview video.

You are the content expert when it come to your company and its services. Your content brief should work to get your creative agency up to date on what your company does, its unique selling points and what problems it solves. It should be a high level overview of your company and explain what you wish to achieve with your video.

Things to include in your creative brief should include:

1. What is the video about at a high level?
2. What are the 3-5 benefits that you want to highlight about your company?
3. Who is your audience? What are their pain points?
4. What do you want to achieve with the video: more conversions, brand recognition, or training for example?
5. What is the tone of your video: professional, humorous, emotional, etc.?
6. Give a synopsis of how your company/service works at a high level.
7. Who are your main competitors and how do you set yourself apart?
8. Style references: do you have videos or images that are similar in style to what you want to create. Finding and sharing visual references help communicate what you are expecting visually. It will also help determine production costs and expectations in terms of style and tone.
9. Collect existing relevant marketing materials: brand guidelines, style guides, marketing campaigns, logos and icons for example.

Remember, you are the content expert when it comes to your company.  You know the most about your product, service and how to position yourself in the marketplace.

Pick out 3-5 points to draw out in the video. With 90 seconds to two minutes in length, this is not the place to tell your audience everything about what you do. Pick those main distinguishing selling points that are going to speak to your audience. Don’t just go through a laundry list of features. Remember to emphasize the benefits of your service and how it will address your customer’s pain points.

If you are struggling to pull out the highlights, listen to your customers, your investors or your employees. What questions are they often asking? This could be a great place to start for generating ideas on content that is relevant and meaningful to your audience.

A good creative agency can also help you tease out the main points to cover in your video. But you know your business the best, so having some of this work done before you start will help you save time and money.

This is basic marketing 101. What are your customer’s pain points, and what are they looking to solve? Once you know your audience your message will become clear. This will also speak in large part to the tone of the video. Is it motivational, inspirational, instructive, entertaining, funny? You should include a Call To Action at the end of your video that speaks directly to your audience and motivates them to take some desired action.

We get this question all the time. The answer depends on the purpose and intent of the video. If it is a promotional overview video that is meant to grab attention we recommend one and half to two minutes in length. If it’s a how-to or training video, it can be longer.

We recommend 1-2 minutes for an overview video; longer than this and you risk loosing your audience. This is about getting the attention of your audience and enticing them to learn more, to visit your website, to give you a call. You don’t need to pack everything into this video. Less is more in this case.

You’ve decided to invest in a marketing overview video and you know you need the expertise of a professional, but how do you go about finding the right creative agency?

First, make sure to do your research. Take a good look at each company’s online portfolio. Do they work with other clients in the same industry as yours; have they produced videos in the same style as you are looking for (live action, animation, motion graphics)?

It can be very helpful to send out a Request for Proposal to your potential vendors to see how they would approach your video, what their fees looks like and what their creative approach would be. Once you have created your short-list of vendors, having an in-person meeting or phone call is key to understanding if you’re a good cultural fit and if you feel you will work well together. This is a collaborative process. Good communication is going to be essential moving forward, so make sure you click with the agency and feel like there is a good back and forth dialogue happening from the start.

It is important to stay engaged with your creative agency throughout the entire video production process. This is especially true in the beginning pre-production phase. Making changes at this stage is much easier to do before production begins. Keep all stakeholders in the loop throughout the process. This will prevent slow downs and added costs later on when the production is well under way.

Get a good schedule of expected review dates and deliverable dates. A confident agency will be transparent with schedules and want to include their client throughout the creative process. Reviews are a two way street. Make time to review previews and deliverables from your agency. Ensure that all stakeholders see the previews as they come in. To make feedback easier: combine all feedback into one cohesive document to deliver to the agency.

Now that you have this video, what do you do with it? Where does it go, how do you use it to it’s full potential.

This goes back to your target audience. Where is the best way to reach that audience: social channels, your website, trade shows, all of the above? Is your service catering to other businesses? LinkedIn may be the best place for your video. Are you a retailer that sells directly to the customer, then another social platform such as Facebook might work better.

Once you place your content, make sure to measure your success so you can understand your return on investment and what worked content wise.

Marketing overview videos are a highly effective marketing and sales tool. The ROI is substantial. Once you find a collaborative creative partner to work with, gather your content brief elements, stay engaged and plan ahead for distribution.

Neumatic has been crafting marketing overview videos for companies of all sizes for over the past 10 years. We specialize in the technology sector with an emphasis on B2B marketing for hardware and software companies.