Ready to design a brand video?

If you can, hire a videographer, who can take the technical burden off of you, because video is full of technology, theory, and can, if done well, overwhelm someone who isn’t used to working with video equipment day in and day out. And this goes for editing as well.

Trends are changing with video, and social media, and YouTube has brought the average level of production WAY down, which is good and bad.

The bad: it is harder to stand out amongst all of the video content being published, which is 500 hours every minute!

The good: you don’t have to be Spielberg to make good content anymore! We are seeing more and more incredible content creators every day and video is an AMAZING tool to reach your audience.

If hiring a videographer is too expensive then at least consider hiring out your editing. There are places (cough: UnifyMyVideos.com) where you can upload your raw footage and we will take it and edit it for you. This can save a TON of time in front of a computer when you should be working on creating content, not editing it.

Your brand video will be embedded within the landing page of your website. It is a quick overview of essentially your brand script and will start to humanize your brand and make your buying process easier to understand for the viewer.

You want to highlight the problem that your viewers have, then show off your solution, the process of buying your solution, and a direct call-to-action. Humor goes a long way in keeping people’s attention. But if nothing else, be clear and concise. Using music and motion will go a long way as well as making your video entertaining.

A good brand video is:

• Educational
• Entertaining
• Humorous

HubSpot reports that 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day, proving that video is a valuable tool to reach people where they are.

Casting

When casting your video, whether voiceover or on-camera talent, don’t default to using the owner of the company as the face of the video.

If you have employees or can hire a professional on-camera person, it’s worth pursuing. Because the whole goal is to be clear and concise, sometimes the business owner isn’t the right person for the job (although I’m sure you would be excellent narrators!) If you have the chance to use a diverse group to help communicate your story, that sometimes is the best way to accomplish an entertaining video.

Outline

A quality video begins with a quality outline. Define your filming location, cast, props, wardrobe, and any other elements DAYS before you shoot.

Lighting and audio

The clarity of your picture and sound matters. You want people focused on your message rather than distracted by a grainy visual or background clicking. Lighting and clear audio are more important than the camera you use if you can believe it?! We, as a society, are much more forgiving of a bad picture than we are of bad audio.

An obvious example of our tolerance of poor video and audio being a necessity is that we can use a cell phone with audio only but we can’t do Zoom on mute. People freak out, right?! Dude, you are on mute!

Our cell phones have good enough cameras to be clear, but only under great lighting, especially inside.

Why not then go outside, you ask? Well, because of noise pollution. Unwanted background noise can sabotage a good video.

You don’t recognize it until you are watching a video that has a leaf blower going on next door, or a trash truck drives by, all obliterating the audio. And the tiny pinhole mics just don’t cut it and are usually too far away from the person’s mouth, so investing in a mic you can attach to your camera and then to the person talking, will be clearer to understand and less distracting to the viewer.

Background

Do your best to make sure your background in the video isn’t distracting. You don’t want to have a mirror on the back wall that shows in the reflection your camera, video light, and the back of you talking to the camera. You also want to make sure you don’t have something distracting “poking” out of your head visually.

Length

33% of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds, 45% by one minute, and 60% by two minutes. (AdAge)

Your video should be only as long as it is entertaining. If it can hold your attention for 5 solid minutes then let it run, but generally, 90 seconds to 2 minutes is a great length video, especially one featured on the front of your website.

Once you are done with your video, post it to a video streaming platform like YouTube, Wistia, or Vimeo, and then make sure it is “embedded” into the front page of your website. When you embed a video, it will play right there on your webpage, and not take you to another website to play. We want to keep your viewers on your site and not direct them to other attention-grabbing websites like YouTube.

You can get the embed code once your video is public, by generally going to the “share” button. Being able to “embed” a video on your site is standard across most platforms and should be as easy as copying and pasting the code into the proper text box to have it appear.

Download a copy of our free team marketing worksheets here. Want to learn even more? Check out our book and video course, Unify Your Marketing.