The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing…And How Experienced Video Pros Can Help
We use Hubspot here at Henninger to keep track of our clients. It’s a great CRM tool. Hubspot also publishes tons of eBooks and guides on topics ranging from buyer personas and social media to A/B testing. The resources section of their website includes great tools for any marketing professional.
Recently, they released a pretty comprehensive (exhaustive, even) guide to video marketing.
It’s lengthy, taking readers through all of the following subjects:
- Why brands need a video marketing strategy
- Why 2019 is the perfect time to get serious about video marketing
- The 12 types of marketing videos
- The video production process
- Writing a creative brief
- Scripting your video
- Understanding your camera(s)
- Setting up a studio
- Prepping your talent
- Shooting for the edit
- Organizing your footage
- Editing
- Choosing music
- Hosting your video
- How to use video throughout the flywheel
- Defining your goals and analyzing your results
If that sounds like a ton of information to absorb, it is. The production process alone involves buying and learning a significant amount of gear and software. In fact, learning every step of this process could take someone months or even years and that doesn’t take into account things like getting company approval to turn your conference room into a video studio. It’s a great guide to all the things that go into the making of marketing videos, but if you’re looking to get up and running fast you should consider enlisting some professionals to help, at least to start.
Let’s imagine you’re a marketing person and you’ve been tasked with putting together a plan for an initial video rollout. Working with a Producer during planning can help you realize economies of scale and make production easier. Working with an experienced crew can ensure that the money and time you spend capturing footage for the first few videos is well spent. The audio will be good, the framing and lighting will be flattering, etc. Perhaps you’re comfortable editing the piece up to a point, but you’d like a more experienced editor to take the piece across the finish line and give it some polish, like great lower thirds or some animated sequences. These are all great ways to involve professionals, even if your ultimate goal is to be able to do everything yourself.
The number one complaint we hear from people who are doing video themselves is that it is very time consuming. If you have other duties, video production can either take over your whole work life until a project is over or it can take a very long time to complete. If you’re under the gun to deliver videos soon (and you don’t have a background in video or months to learn how to produce them yourself), working with professionals for various parts of the process is crucial. And if you’ve been tasked with creating multiple videos, perhaps for an event or another hard deadline, then bringing in pros to help can ensure you meet that deadline.
Working with video professionals WHILE learning how to create videos on your own is probably one of the best ways to accelerate the learning process. You can learn a lot from an experienced Producer when working on the creative brief, the two-column script or the planning of production. Being on set will give you a clearer idea of how jobs are typically divided between crew members, how lighting is set up, and how to get what you want from an interview subject. Working with professional editors will help you understand how best to organize your projects and how to shoot for the edit.
We have a number of long-time, experienced clients who write, produce and edit pieces themselves and still come to us for narration recording, mix and color correction. As you grow in your video journey, you may find there are processes you simply don’t enjoy or that take you or your team a long time when it might take an experienced professional only a couple of hours. And as your organization’s need for video grows, having established relationships with seasoned pros can be very nice to have when you need them.
Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash