Businesses large or small can greatly benefit from promotional videos,  but for many businesses starting their online video marketing strategy (especially small businesses)  – the quality isn’t where it should be. In the past, businesses could get away with lower quality production value, but those days are long over. Viewers won’t accept low quality video, and  if you create poor looking video, then your competitor will have an answer – higher quality!

A good promotional video can do wonders for a business or organization, but a poorly-made video will often do more harm than good to a business and brand. Audiences judge an organization on its marketing efforts, and a poorly made video reflects poorly on a business. As a professional video production and marketing agency, we’ve created this in-depth guide with three simple steps to make creating successful promotional videos easy to understand for anyone. It will also help you   understand what goes into making a promotional video and how to make one that will do a great job of promoting your business.

Step #1 Creative Brief

Most businesses often struggle with understanding where to focus their energy in making a good promotional video. The first step to create a successful video is to begin planning how your promotional video will perform its magic. When hiring a professional video marketing & production agency, it all starts with the planning process – or as we call it, the “discovery session”.  The planning process (“discovery session”)  uses tools and tricks of the trade to discover what your video will need to actually do in order to be a success before you distribute, edit or even begin filming! A creative brief asks a series of questions with the aim of discovering the target audience, their wants and needs, and how your promotional video will  best motivate viewers to action.

Step #2 Call-to-Action

Now that you’ve completed the creative brief, you need to figure out how your promotional video will compel viewers to action. Keep in mind, promotional videos are unique in that they have a persuasive goal – by the end of the video, the viewer should feel compelled to a course of action or think differently about a topic. Your video should offer a particular  solution to the viewer’s problem with the goal of persuading them to act, whether it’s fill out a form, make an online purchase/inquiry, or pick up the phone to call.  Without a proper goal and call-to-action, then your video will serve no actual purpose, and the results will be poor (or perhaps even worse, no results at all).

Step #3 Hire a Pro or DIY

This topic of hiring a professional video production company vs the DIY approach is usually heavily debated. Sure, there’s lots of info and tools out there today that could allow you to take a DIY approach to making your promotional video. When consulting with prospective clients, one of the popular knee jerk reactions we get is ” we can have a staff member do it in-house for less!” Surprisingly enough, we’d actually be very likely agree this statement. But, do you want cheap or do you want results? I equate this to the following scenario. Have you ever attempted a DIY home improvement project after doing a little online research, and thinking this will be an easy task to tackle? What result do you usually end up with? Well, in most cases these prospective clients are usually reminded of the many dollars and hours wasted when they attempted the DIY approach.

Most successful business people know when a project is better suited for a professional who has a greater level of experience, tools and training for the desired results needed.  Thus, you should strongly consider hiring a strategic partner skilled in the art of video production and marketing, and knows the tricks of the trade so to speak. This is the best route to getting a successful promotional video for your organization. It’s too time consuming and expensive for the average business owner to learn the technical skills, or to pay a staff member to learn, and it’s even more costly to create a poor quality video that produces no results. For this (and many other) reasons, it’s far more cost-effective and economical to hire a pro. The bottom line is quality video production is affordable, but it does cost money. It should be viewed as an investment in your brand and one that is well worthwhile. Remember,  DIY (do it yourself) is far from free, and often times can be even be more costly in wasted dollars, wasted time and lost potential sales.