Video marketing is one of the fastest-growing forms of marketing, one widely used across every industry worldwide. To adequately make use of this new-age marketing technique, businesses must pay attention to their marketing video production.

A business that does so can rapidly drum up attention. Compared to older forms of marketing, videos can capture your brand’s message clearly and with more flexibility. You can produce creative works of art through video, showcasing your brand and its message in ways your audience is sure to remember.

The most effective marketing videos are impactful. Through careful use of humor, emotion, and good storytelling, your audience will be left with quite the impression. As a result, your brand will be more visible, your traffic will be boosted, and ultimately, your sales will increase.

What is video production?

Video production is a term that refers to the process that goes into creating videos, regardless of their purpose. Marketing video production (the focus of this article) focuses on the creation of videos for a specific purpose – advertising brands and increasing traffic.

Video production can be quite a difficult task. An awful lot goes into the process, including art, animation, narration, sound design, and more. Many businesses opt to outsource the job to a professional video production company.

Although this option comes at a cost, it may provide your business with higher-quality videos, especially if you lack the skills and equipment to produce videos in-house. Instead of grappling with a project outside your area of expertise, you can focus on planning your marketing strategy. Video production companies may create excellent videos, but they often can’t use them well in a marketing context. By merging their video-making talent with your business’ marketing vision, a path to success is forged.

Production stages

There are three main steps to video production. Each step details the stages of development, starting with planning and ending with editing and post-production support. If you outsource video production, the specifics of each stage may be slightly different depending on your chosen company, but they will follow the same throughline.

Pre-production

Pre-production is the first step of the video production process. It mainly involves planning and laying the groundwork for the job ahead. In this stage, scripts and storyboards will be created. The script will detail each specific point to be made in the video, setting the tone based on the content of the narration. Depending on your preferences, this may be done by a sole writer or a larger group to achieve a more varied selection of ideas.

Once the script is complete, a storyboard is next on the agenda. The purpose of a storyboard is to act as a guideline for the main stage of production, providing an idea of what should happen and when. Also included in this stage are scheduling, gathering props and equipment, and the initial development of graphical assets.

Production

The production stage is when the process begins in force. In this stage, the foundation provided by the previous stage must be built upon to produce a video that adequately portrays the intended message or idea.

Different styles of video will require different work to be done. Animations, for example, will focus on developing graphical assets and animating them on-screen. However, a live-action production will require crews to work lighting and camera angles alongside a host of other factors. Ultimately, the main job here is to gather as much usable footage as possible to realize the video’s intended goal.

Post-production

Post-production marks the final main stage of video production. It primarily centers around editing and polishing what was produced in the previous stage, providing quality assurance, and ensuring production went according to plan. Additionally, this stage includes combining the audio and visual portions, assuming they are both up to scratch. Once any imperfections are ironed out, the video is then prepared for release.

Once your video is complete, the next step is to distribute it to the public. How you do this is up to you; some businesses would release it on television, on their website, but more recently, some opt for social media.

Social media has benefited from growth at breakneck speed, with billions of users spread across various platforms worldwide. In addition to the features that make for high engagement rates, it makes social media the primary choice in video marketing. But, with so many to choose from, which platforms could be a good fit for your brand?

Youtube

Youtube is naturally at the top of the list when discussing social media video marketing. It boasts an unrivaled audience of over 2 billion active users, making it not only the most popular video hosting platform but one of the most popular sites in existence. Considering its size and emphasis on video content, Youtube can be an effective tool in video marketing, to say the least.

Twitter

Though not exactly an equal to the video hosting titan Youtube, Twitter can still be a good choice for the results of your marketing video production. Youtube might be a good fit for both long and short-form content. Twitter hones in on anything short and sweet. This makes for a more competitive battleground, as you’ll be pitting your snappy attention-grabbers against those of many other businesses. However, Twitter is much more social than Youtube, providing more methods of directly communicating with your audience. Good content and clever use of community interaction will bring success on this platform.

Facebook

Our third-social media exemplar is Facebook, another of the industry’s reigning kings. Although its audience is of an older demographic, Facebook still boasts a daily user base of roughly 1.9 billion. Indeed not a platform to overlook. In addition to its enormous audience, Facebook offers a significant amount of audience engagement options, in addition to being quite open in terms of content types. Images, text, video, and more can flourish on this platform.

While by no means an exhaustive list, the three pillars of social media listed above provide your videos with a never-before-seen level of reach. In addition to the merits of other social media platforms, posting your content to social media will make your marketing video production budget stretch farther than ever.

The benefits of marketing video production

Marketing videos provide businesses with a host of serious benefits. An ever-growing number of people are turning to the internet for work, education, and entertainment, meaning businesses that cling to older forms of marketing embark upon a fool’s errand. That said, what exactly are the tangible benefits offered by producing marketing videos? Let’s discuss a few.

Drive Traffic

Investing in your business’s ability to create marketing videos, alongside posting them to relevant platforms, will result in increased traffic. This is due to the fact that more people rely on video formats for entertainment and to inform their buying habits. By creating video content, your business will be more visible to the billions of people that turn to the internet. By choosing the correct platforms to build a presence on, you can focus on marketing to your target audience. This combination will result in increased brand awareness, and therefore, increased traffic.

Increase Sales

As a direct result of boosting traffic, marketing videos will also increase sales. The reasons behind this are twofold. Firstly, with more people visiting your site, the odds of at least one becoming a customer increase. Secondly, and more importantly, is the content itself. Video is a much more engaging form of media than any other. You can better portray your message to your audience through careful use of music, humor, and stellar visuals. This ultimately results in a better marketing attempt, which is often reflected in increased sales.

Marketing videos mean deeper engagement

Compared to other forms of marketing, video content can help foster a deeper connection to your audience. The medium makes it much easier to convey your brand’s identity and message, establish your business as a credible entity, and strike a chord with your audience through the portrayal of what matters to them. Engagement will benefit even more so from audience interaction, something facilitated by social media. Audience interaction isn’t inherent to video content, it’s more than possible through text and other means, but a combination of engaging visual content and social media platforms certainly makes the task easier.

Although marketing video production and distribution takes a considerable effort, the rewards are more than worth it. Creating high-quality content for your audience, content that means something to them, can be pretty fulfilling. Moreover, it helps you build your brand’s visibility and massively grows its value. There has never been a better solution than marketing videos to connect with your audience and grow your business.