So, you want to create a marketing video, but you have no budget left.
Good news: you can still create content worth sharing and capable of drawing in an audience without any outside help.
If you’ve reached this blog post because you’re on the fence about video marketing, check out the following stats from a Hubspot report. In 2018, they discovered that:
Convinced? Read on to find out how you can create video marketing in-house, cost-effectively.
Whether you produce video in-house or via an external agency, three factors remain true:
1) Sound quality is far more important than video quality.
2) A video without a story is pointless.
3) Gear should never be put before storytelling.
Let’s break those down...
If you buy an 8K camera, hire an Emmy Award-winning cinematographer and shoot in the most beautiful locations on earth, the resulting video will be useless if the narration is overpowered by wind noise.
Hit the ‘record’ button without any form of narrative or beginning, middle and end, and very few potential customers will ever engage with your video.
If you spend three days deciding which lens and camera body combination to use rather than working on the story, you’ve thrown away vital marketing time you’ll never get back.
Keep these three things in mind whenever you embark on a video marketing project.
The worst thing you could do now is buy a shed load of video kit.
Don’t.
Instead, work from this list:
That’s it - the only essentials you need.
If you have a bit of cash to spend, consider the following:
It bears repeating, however, that the optional kit above really is that. If you’re recording in a relatively quiet environment and producing simple interviews or product demonstrations, stick with the basics.
There’s two things to take into account when producing video in-house:
Putting some numbers against the above will help you calculate the ROI as you would with any marketing campaign. When it comes to the people involved, think about how much an hour of their time is worth, and add that to the overall spend.
If you’ve spent time researching topics for your blog, you’ll probably know a bit about audience personas and the kind of content yours will be looking for.
Apply those learnings to your marketing video. Once you have the central subject (say, a new product), think about the story behind the benefit it offers your audience.
This is the most important part of your production and could take you down a number of avenues. For instance, if you realise user generated content will work best, approach a client or two. Or, if a simple unboxing to unveil a revolutionary new product suffices, stick with that.
Your video should have a narrative, purpose and clear call-to-action (CTA) at the end.
Once the video has been made, where will it end up? More importantly, can you get more from it than a single video?
Let’s say you have a 90-second product demo that includes a customer testimonial. What if you chopped it up into four snippets and used them to drip-feed your audience with tantalising info on social media?
The distribution method for your video needs to be strategised right from the start. Keep the audience in mind; where are they most likely to reside? Do you need the help of an influencer or partner to further its reach?
Although a few years old now, Econsultancy has a brilliant report on how to go viral with video that’s definitely worth a download.
If you’ve got some budget left to play with and feel like you need a helping hand with your video marketing efforts, get in touch. As much as you can do this stuff internally, we’ll help you get the most from video.