Video is more important than ever for your online marketing. It offers a fantastic way to connect with your audience. It can make you and your brand relatable and more “human.”
It’s also easier than ever to create a video. And to create a quality video. That means you can’t just throw something together. It’s not too hard to make it look good, so your audience will expect a certain level of quality. And you can achieve that with some simple video editing tools.
We’re not going to discuss those tools today. Instead, we’d like to give you some simple tips on preparing and posting your videos.
Know Your Audience
Of course, it’s important to know who you’re addressing. What’s the profile of the person you want to reach? In marketing, this is known as the persona. And you want to be sure that all your decisions are made with that persona in mind.
Sure, you want to express yourself. But more importantly, you want to connect with them.
Tell A Story
Your goal for a video may be to make a sale, raise awareness of your brand, or teach. But the best way to do any of that is with a story.
Telling a story grabs the viewer’s attention and makes them want to see how it will conclude. No one wants to get beat over the head with a sales pitch or data. But when you make that part of a story that unfolds over the course of your video, you can subtly work on the real goals.
Know Your Platform
While some of these points may be obvious, this one is easy to miss. But it’s crucial to understand the platform where you’ll publish your video. Your style and content may vary depending on whether you’re publishing on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, your website, Twitter, Instagram, or elsewhere.
Of course, that’s partly determined by who your audience is. Each of those platforms has a certain demographic. They also have their unique styles.
Be sure that the platform matches the message and the style of video you create. Or tailor the video to the platform. That might even mean producing different videos for different platforms if you want to publish it in multiple places.
Plan
Once you have the story you want to convey, plan it out. There’s no need to turn on the camera and start shooting.
In writing and directing, they use “storyboarding” to plan out how things will unfold. This includes the setting, background, movements, and more.
Sure, you may have a short video filmed all in one place. Or you may have a couple of locations. Take your time to figure out the action and words that will go with each part of your story. Even your own movements matter! So does the backdrop, the furniture, and other elements. How will it look and relate to what’s being said?
Create a script and edit it, too, so that you know exactly what you want to say to convey your message.
Practice
“Practice makes perfect”, they say. And while you might never get things 100% the way you’d like, you should practice your video before turning the camera on.
Walk through the whole thing several times. Get used to the rhythm of the script. You might even find some sentences that are easy to read on paper but hard to speak. Then you’ll just need to touch it up a bit.
Make It Look Good
Two elements go into making your video look good: the scenery and the recording equipment.
Be sure that everything is in order and clean. Keep any props in the right place.
Lighting can be tough to get used to, and you won’t really see how it works until you do a sample recording. From there, you may have to move lights around a bit so that you don’t create unnecessary shadows.
Of course, you also want to have a quality camera to do your recording. Some cell phones do shoot great movies, but that’s hardly universal. Ultimately, your video can be a lot worse than your camera quality, but it can’t be any better. You’ll want to invest in a decent one to start and move up when you can.
Make It Sound Good
At the same time, you want to have good-quality sound in your video, too. It can take a while to develop the pacing and volume you need. But you also need a quality microphone to pick up your voice.
This is an area where cell phones fall short. Even the best ones are designed to have you talk right into them. Most likely, you don’t want to have a phone up to your face while you’re making the video.
You’ll have to choose your mic based on what your video will look like. If you’ll be sitting at a desk, you can get by with one on a stand. But if you’ll be standing or moving around, a boom mic might serve you better.
Provide Closed Captioning
Not everyone will be able to hear the audio of your video. Some people may have hearing difficulties. Others might be watching it in a place where they need to keep the volume turned down.
That’s why it’s important to add captions. Most social media sites will let you upload a file and sync it to the video.
Many services can caption a video for you. YouTube will even create captions automatically, although it’s often better to manually create your own to avoid errors.
Don’t Host It On Your Server
Finally, if you’re uploading the video to your website, it’s usually best to host it elsewhere. Shared hosting in particular isn’t optimized for playing video, so the viewers might get stuck with jumpy playback as it tries to buffer.
Instead, you could embed the video on your site. Host it on YouTube or, better yet, Vimeo or a similar service. Paid services on these platforms let you add your own logo in place of the platforms. They’re also designed specifically for smooth video playback.
Conclusion
We’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg, and there’s a lot to learn about editing the audio and video of your website. But these tips will help you get started in creating marketing videos that will lead to business success.