How To Plan Promo Videos For Maximum Engagement

Promo videos often have a lot of information to deliver. Whether you’re using them to launch a product or to promote your business as a whole, you’re probably under pressure to pack in lots of brand messaging and the risk is that you fall into the trap of talking AT your audience.

This severely undermines engagement, so the way to avoid it and to keep the audience focussed on your content, is to not only think about what you’re saying, but HOW you’re saying it.

Here are a few approaches to make sure you’re not only delivering your messaging, but that you’re giving your audience what they want.

Be Slick

Being slick isn’t about being too clever, its about disciplined execution. Cut down on any unnecessary repetitions, pauses or hesitations to keep up the pace of your video and make sure you give it the required rehearsal time.

Consider adding a visual hook which delivers pretty standard corporate messaging, while the one-shot approach takes the audience a visual ride.

Be Impressive

Video is an innovative area of technology and new production approaches are popping up all the time, many of which are available to relatively low production budgets.

If you move fast you can take advantage of the novelty value of augmented reality, 360 filming or aerial footage to to wow your audience with something they’ve not seen before.

Make Us Feel Something

There’s research that suggests that marketing on functions and features can increase the perceived benefits of your brand by 21% which isn’t bad, but if you tap into something emotive, the bump could be more like 42%.

Whether you’re making your audience laugh or tugging at the heartstrings, emotive scripts benefit from having a focussed creative vision.

So, assign script writing responsibility to your most talented writer (or engage a pro script-writer), give them plenty of rope and protect them from interference from elsewhere in the business.

Embrace Metaphors

Finally, I wanted to share an example of a promo video we produced for software platform Jaggaer One.

Knowing the complexity of their product would be difficult to explain literally in a few short minutes, the client embraced the idea of featuring a visual metaphor to quickly communicate the value of the platform.

Presenting the gymnast on the pommel horse at the beginning gave the audience something unexpected to kick off the video and kept them engaged, before easing them into the specific benefits of the product.

The key to a successful promo is to excite your audience; inspire them with a vision of how their future could be if they were to reap the benefits of your offering. If you know your customer and you never lose site of what they want, you can’t go wrong. Good luck!

If you would like to discuss how Dead Ready Productions could help you to further enjoy the benefits of video for your business, please get in touch via the button below or by calling +44 (0)208 339 6139.

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The Importance Of Quality Audio

As a video production agency, you’d be forgiven for thinking that 100% of our attention is on the creation of dynamic and engaging visuals for businesses, but the truth is that audio is every bit as important.

This was highlighted for me recently when Dead Ready partnered with the Sick of Health Podcast and for the first time, produced media that didn’t contain any visuals at all!

If you’re a marketeer, the chances are that you’ll need to produce media to feed your content campaigns, so this recent experience led to thinking that you might might be interested in some brief tips around audio recording.

There’s very little that can be done to improve poorly recorded audio, in the same way as there’s not much you can do to save out-of-focus visuals, so whether you’re producing your own vlog, shooting an interview or recording someone speaking in any context, make sure you think about audio, just as much as you think about the visuals.

We recorded Sick of Health in a purpose-built (if not quite finished) studio in London where Dead Ready supplied the appropriate microphones and recording equipment. This was a bit of a challenge as although the studio was sound-proofed, the three presenters were all in the same space, meaning that although I’d mic’d them all up individually with personal radio mics, every mic would pick up every voice to a lesser or greater extent.

This was a bit of a shame, as I was hoping to be able to edit each voice in isolation, balancing the audio levels for a perfect mix afterwards, but this level of precision is rare to achieve and not normally something you need to worry about when producing content for your campaigns.

Ideally, you’d want to put each speaker in a separate space, where they can hear (through headphones) and see each other (through glass or a screen). This wasn’t an option for us, so we might as well have used a single mic and ensured that each speaker was equal distance away.

Being close to the microphone is essential to record quality audio, so no matter the value of your mic, make sure your subject is as close as possible and make sure you do a test recording to check the quality. If you hear any distortion or buzzing when people speak loudly, don’t move the mic away; instead, reduce the sensitivity of your recording device.

If you’re recording into a phone or similar device, the mic sensitivity will probably be controlled automatically, but doing a test recording and listening back is the best way to be sure.

We really enjoyed the being part of the Sick of Health experience and found it a really well-researched and entertaining listen, so check it out here.

The latest episode on immunotherapy went up this week, and the other episodes are all worth a listen as well. I personally found the episode on the woman who could smell Parkinsons particularly fascinating!