Video Production Archives - Page 5 of 6

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.

Uploading Video To Facebook Vs YouTube: Video Best Practices

The platform you choose to upload your video content to will have a huge impact on its success. Important metrics like views, likes, shares and audience retention will all be affected, making choice of platform a critically important aspect of your video marketing strategy.

In days gone by, YouTube was the undisputed king of the video world. However, Facebook’s aggressive push to muscle in on the video scene has now made them a serious player. These two platforms are without a doubt the big guns in video sharing these days, with both carrying their own pros and cons.

So, should you upload your video to Facebook or YouTube? The short answer is both! And when it comes to Facebook, you should upload natively.

Uploading To Facebook

Traditionally, people would first upload their video to YouTube, and then create a Facebook post that linked to it. However, the main way Facebook has curtailed YouTube’s dominance in the video world is by becoming less ‘YouTube-friendly’, with videos uploaded directly to the Facebook platform receiving preferential treatment.

For this reason, you should always upload your video directly within Facebook, rather than link to your video on YouTube.

Videos posted natively to Facebook benefit from larger thumbnail images, the capacity to auto-play in the viewer’s news feed, and greater organic reach. This last point is because the Facebook algorithm (the code that decides what people see on their news feed) favours Facebook videos over YouTube links.

This greater organic reach in turn leads to greater engagement and video sharing. A study by Quintly showed that videos posted natively to Facebook received 530% more comments than those linked to on YouTube!

Uploading To YouTube

So with all the advantages of Facebook video, is there any point in posting to YouTube anymore? Yes! For starters, you’re reaching a whole other audience outside the bounds of Facebook news feeds.

YouTube is considered the second largest online search engine, processing billions of searches per month, so it makes sense to have your video content there.

The YouTube platform may lack the immediacy of the Facebook news feeds, but conversely it tends to outperform Facebook as a long-term home for videos. On YouTube, videos can be discovered more easily long after their original posting.

It’s also easier to share direct links to YouTube videos, which is harder with Facebook videos once they become less active and end up buried under the non-stop stream of status updates and shared news articles.

Optimising For Different Platforms

While it’s important to post to both platforms, it should always be considered how your video content might be optimised for each one. For example, a video posted to Facebook is more likely to be consumed on-the-move on a mobile device, without audio being switched on.

This makes on-screen captions and titles ultra-important. However with YouTube videos, there’s often scope for videos to be a bit longer, since people are less distracted by the surrounding news feed.

We will cover optimising videos for different platforms more in future blogs, but in the meantime please keep posting your videos to both YouTube and Facebook (natively)!

Understanding Your View Count

Is a video’s view count the most important measure of success?

Mike Plenty, Dead Ready Productions Managing Director, demystifies this powerful metric in the vlog above.

Checkout the transcript below:

Hi, today’s video blog is about understanding the view count of your video. When it comes to judging the performance of videos, view count tends to be the most popular metric, and it’s easy to see why:

It’s the most visible measurement, clearly shown on most platforms
It’s easy to make sense of
It can generate some impressive number

But looking at view count alone is a risky way to assess how well your video is performing, for a few key reasons.

Firstly, the view count itself doesn’t tell you anything about who your audience are. You may have 500,000 views on your latest video release, but if those views are all occurring in New Zealand and your target market is the UK, then you probably need to re-evaluate how to reach your audience.

Secondly, viewing numbers aren’t the same as viewer retention. If those 500,000 people are on average only watching 5% of the video, the vast majority of your content isn’t being seen.

Thirdly, it’s important to remember that different social media channels measure views in different ways. As an example, on Facebook if your video autoplays on someone’s feed for 3 seconds or more, you’ve gained a view. But on YouTube, the viewer has to initiate playback and play a minimum % of the video before a view is counted.

For this reason, it’s easier to achieve high view counts on Facebook than YouTube. There are different criteria for other social networks too, so it’s important to be aware of that before assuming that one of them simply performs much better for you than the others.

So if view count is a flawed measurement, is it effectively useless? Well no – but it’s best to think of it as a starting point when analysing video success; a headline figure that needs breaking down before drawing any conclusions. It’s like the turnover of your business, when what you really need to know is profit.

Combining view count with other metrics allows you to make sense of the numbers, and understand what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to production and distribution of your content. And it starts right from the beginning when setting goals for your video – by all means, incorporate viewing figures into these, but know the limitations and be aware that these numbers alone are not a measure of success.

So that wraps up our brief overview of viewer count. Until next time – like our Facebook page or subscribe for more, and share this video to help us boost our view count!

How Long Should Your Video Script Be?

How many words should the script for your video contain?

This vlog gives you a good rule of thumb, and a few tips about how it can vary depending on the type of video you’re making.

Check out the transcript below.

We all know that keeping audiences engaged with your video will lead to more views, interactions and conversions; so making sure your video is no longer than it needs to be is really important. So today I’m going to talk to you about how to make sure the script for your video is the right length.

Setting the duration of your short form video is a job in itself as it will depend on the sort of content you’re providing your audience, but assuming you’ve made that decision, how do you make sure that you write a script that matches? As ever, the answer varies, but there is a good rule of thumb: 150 words equals 1 minute of screen time.

If you’re creating an explainer video that features narrated graphics to demonstrate a product or a system for example, this metric works really well. It works less well when you start to add in the unpredictable – for example sound bites from interviews that you’re yet to shoot, or music-driven montage sequences, but it is a good place to start.

Some videos are inherently faster than others. A piece-to-camera like this is generally delivered quite quickly, with fewer pauses in delivery, allowing for a higher word count. At the other end of the scale, a purely typographic video will have to have half as many words, around about 70-80 a minute as you need to allow people enough time to read your messaging.

Of course, you’ll find plenty of videos that have a far faster or far slower word count, but if you’re not trying to do something dramatically fast or slow, this is a good place to start.

I’m on about 300 words, so if I’m right, this video will be about 1 minute 20 seconds.

Behind The Scenes Video Production: Easy, Effective Branded Content

Engaging with customers through dynamic, branded content has become hugely popular over recent years, but if you don’t have the resources of Procter & Gamble or Toyota, how can you find interesting ways to produce your own branded storytelling?

One easy solution is the behind the scenes (BTS) video. The popularity of these productions is evidenced by the hundreds of hours of additional content packed into every Bluray disc, as audiences love to see what our favourite actors are really like and what really happens on set, and this same curiosity to see behind the curtain can be applied to your brand.

Most modern brands will be producing videos or photographs at some point, which provides a great opportunity to tell a different facet of their brand story through a behind-the-scenes video.

Maverick entrepreneurs messing around between takes of a corporate interview, the precision and eye for detail it takes to photograph an intricate product – these are stories audiences want to engage with and need not require significant funds to produce.

In a lot of cases, behind the scenes videos can be produced by a single highly-skilled camera operator and so the cost of production is often negligible when compared to the primary video/photo shoot – many production companies would even offer a package discount, so you can start to build a video campaign that maximises the return on investment.

Here’s a simple and effective behind the scenes video from a corporate giant:

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By allowing viewers inside access to one of their photo shoots, the McDonald’s Canada brand appears more trustworthy and engaged with their consumers.

Since being released in 2012, this behind the scenes video has been viewed over 11.5 million times on YouTube, and is by far the most viewed video on their channel.

This just proves that in addition to burgers and fries, their customers also have an appetite for behind the scenes video content.

And to round off, here’s a couple of behind the scenes videos we’ve made. You know, for fun!

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