Efficient Ways to Make a Video with a Marketing Agency

Without a doubt, video is the most prominent and effective form of advertising in the modern era. Every social media application has fully transferred to a video-focused strategy to induce doom-scrolling in their audience. The problem is making a video can be difficult and time consuming, especially if an entrepreneur or business is not experienced in videography, cinematography, and video editing. Luckily, marketing agencies have sailed with the winds on this one and most offer some form of video production service in their marketing efforts. This insight will take you through each step of the video production process and highlight the areas where even a business with zero experience can provide support to a marketing agency while making videos, and how to save yourself some time and money. These are efficient ways to make a video with a marketing agency.

Define your objectives clearly. You know your business better than anyone, and you know the areas you want to improve. Take some time to think about the exact goal you have for these videos. Do you want to increase sales? Are you trying to gain a larger social media presence? Do you want a video to show to perspective investors? Write down some ideas and narrow them to one or two main points you want to focus on. You might want to make a showcase video of a new product and spotlight your new online store you have recently added to your website. Those go hand in hand and have a symbiotic relationship. They would fit well together in a three-minute video.

Have a clear message for the video. Piggyback off the last paragraph and give a two-sentence description of the intent of the video, and how you want your business to be shown. It can be as simple as, “Show off the benefits of this new product while in use. Direct people to the online shop with a video of the website.” This is incredibly clear and produces a natural flow to the story. This will clear up any ambiguity in the brainstorming session with a marketing agency.

Create a persona for the target audience of this video. This might require another page of that pad of paper you got out. Really think about catering to an existing audience, building a new audience, or broadening the demographic of your audience. You might have a product that does well with 30–40-year-old suburban women, but you might want to extend it to 20-year-old-women, or a more rural demographic. If this requires more in-depth analysis you can work with the marketing agency to find out your target audiences. Tools like SEOptimer and Google Search Console are great at showing your placement in search engines for specific keywords. Social listening is another tool many programs like Sprout Social and HubSpot include, and they can tell you what kinds of people are viewing products or services like yours.

A script or storyboard can go a long way, and they do not have to be very in-depth. You can work with your marketing agency to flush something like this out, but I guarantee having a simple bullet list will help guide the entire process to completion much faster. Here is an example for a business that makes industrial seals:

1. Show advantages of our new seal
2. Display what industries could benefit from that seal
3. Interview with a designer and engineer on the functions of the seal
4. Contact and socials somewhere in the video, the end or we mention them in the interview?
5. Have some light corporate music in the background

See? This list is not anything crazy at all, and it will help your marketing agency determine a good route for each of those bullet points. This saves you time and money to get to the actual production and get a few more hours on the editing or animations. (That is if they bill hourly)

Set up a preliminary meeting at your business, or wherever you want to film. Scoping out a setting will help your marketing agency build a shot list and to-do list to take care of trivial things like moving garbage cans out of the shots or determining places to set up the camera equipment. This is also a great moment for you to point out specific parts of your business you would like to be filmed. If an agency knows YOU like something they will take greater care in getting video of it.

We here at Acclaim recommend shooting entirely new footage for everything, if possible, but sometimes you may need to gather up all the previous videos you have collected over the years. You have made videos with other collaborators in the past. Reach out to them if you do not have the raw files and get a hard drive to put them all on. Once you meet with the marketing agency, you can hand it off to them and point out the specific videos or shots that you liked the most. You can go one step further by creating a word document that points out the specific time stamps of the specific video files. This is a godsend for video editors, and it saves everyone time and money when a video editor does not have to go on a wild goose chase through two terabytes of footage.

The biggest thing a business owner can do to save time and money is schedule the shoot. In video production we have something called “batch shooting” where a team is sent to film many different scenarios in one fell swoop. If you want a video to have shots of your facility, interviews, and a drone shot you will need to reserve a room for the interview, clean everything that will be on camera, and make sure you have a suitable open area for the drone to take off and land. Having these things reserved and scheduled out will increase the filming efficiency by a significant amount

Create a wish list of shots. If you have ideas for other videos, it is extremely easy for a camera operator with a gimbal to film a little bit of something for future use. Even setting up the camera and tripod for something only takes a few seconds. Just remember to ask when the production is in that stage of filming. You will not be able to steal the camera operator in the middle of an interview for an outside shot of the building.

The more cinematography you want, the more time and money it will take to film. A cinematographer with a gimbal can take some good shots of facilities or machines, but planning out an elaborate drone flight through open windows will take a lot of time to plan and will rack up your bill significantly. Keep it simple. A simple shot with an effective message will give you the best return on your investment.

You will want to limit the number of graphics and animations, as these take much longer to create and edit versus traditional camera shots. Color correcting is important for films, but it will never take as long as creating animated lower third plates for names or titles. Also, asking for custom 3D graphics and animations will cost much more than filming the actual products. Now, it may be necessary to create a 3D rendering for a planned idea, but it is costly.

Make sure to reuse and repurpose footage you have taken from previous filming sessions, and plan to use shots in your current filming session in future videos. A sizable portion of your budget will go to having a crew setting up cameras, lights, microphones, etc. If you can utilize previous footage in future videos, it will save you plenty of time and money overall.

An effortless way to get the most traction from the videos you have made is vertical repurposing and sectioning a longer video into shorter one-minute clips. Cameras have gotten much more powerful over the years and most modern cameras can shoot footage in 4k resolution. This means you get twice the pixels to work with on the screen. This makes it quite easy to turn a horizontal video into a vertical video. Doing this will decrease the quality, but if you start with 4k footage it will not be as noticeable.

Evergreen content is always a promising idea. What does “evergreen” mean in this scenario? It is a video that can be reposted in the future and still holds the same value. An overview video is a perfect example. Displaying your business and its objective will not change for a couple of years into the future. Humorous videos are also evergreen. Putting touchy subject matter aside, a video of someone saying something hilarious or a mistake that can be laughed at is an amazing way to humanize your business. No one likes a business that takes themselves too seriously. Other types of holiday videos, pride month support, or veteran’s support videos will always have a place in the years to come.

Tracking performance of your videos will help you utilize these evergreen videos as well. Knowing where your audience is located and when they are active on platforms like Facebook and YouTube will help you nail down the best times to post, and where to focus your video ad campaigns. Meta, Google, and TikTok all have adjustable demographics for their ad functions.

Working with a marketing agency can expedite your video production process, and when you head into filming with one in the future remember:

• Establish a goal before your first meeting
• Compile ideas for messaging before filming
• Utilize previous footage you’ve taken
• Plan for using footage you take for future projects
• Unless necessary, keep the filming and editing simple
• Saving time and money comes from the extra work an agency does not have to do, like cleaning before filming
• Ask for data on the video’s performance or monitor it yourself to plan for future video posting

Hopefully, these tips have helped you gather your thoughts and plan for a productive filming session with your marketing agency. If you ever have any video production questions, feel free to contact us here at Acclaim anytime. We love talking about video marketing, and we love helping small businesses succeed in the world of video marketing.