Do I need a video production company?

The age of the Internet is, in fact, the age of digital images. If you browsed the Internet recently you probably noticed that the huge majority of all content is visual. Written text makes for only a small portion of what is being uploaded every day. Visual communication is more direct than words, and that is the reason why a growing number of companies chose to advertise their products through videos and photographs. Choosing a London video production company or even a local video agency can be a great way of starting a video campaign if you have a limited budget. YouTube is one of the largest search engines available that gives access to millions of viewers. What’s more, by uploading your promotional videos on platforms like YouTube, the entire world becomes your market. A single branded content video or online commercial can get thousands of views within just a few hours. Something like this has only been possible in the past, if you had enough money to afford to broadcast your visual content on a major TV network during prime time. Digital technology has made the process of producing video content much easier. An iPhone or any digital camera can be used for filming the messages you want to share with your customers. However, there is a direct relation between the visual quality of the video and the number of viewers. A study of video quality and user engagement finds that: ‘As video distribution over the Internet goes mainstream and it is increasingly consumed on bigger screens, users expectations for quality have dramatically increased: when watching internet channels on the TV, anything less than SD quality is not acceptable’. People are more likely to watch a visually pleasing material in better quality, which is why it has never been more important to hire professionals to produce video material for your company. These days you can fit just about any lens to any camera. You can even get gimbals for iPhones.

Is it worth putting an expensive lens on an iPhone?

  Take a look at this graphic to see the difference in sensor size from an iPhone (the smallest size in this chart and a professional full frame video camera with a standard 35mm sensor). Imagine how all that information has to get stuffed into such a tiny sensor. It doesn’t matter how good the glass is when all the information gets crushed into a tiny sensor. An iPhone is great for shooting from the hip, but don’t try to turn it into something that it can not be. But it is not the technology, which is the be all and end all. The most important factor is knowing your market and being true to your brand values. This is why having a professional video company combined with agency creative know how is crucial. The video you post online that you are hoping for great things from, can affect you just as easily in a negative way.

Save time by using effective videos

In our day and age, one thing is for certain, time is a valuable resource. Although you can browse websites and get the information you need, this method is time-consuming and you might end up searching for a piece of information that you can’t find. Embedding a video on your company’s homepage is an excellent way of presenting all the crucial information about your business to the website’s visitors. Promotional videos should be not too long for several reasons. Regardless of how well-crafted the video is, if it is too long the viewer is probably not going to watch it until the end. The second reason why the online ads and corporate videos shouldn’t be too long is a rather practical one. Large video files take more time to buffer and consequentially many viewers might not want to wait or will become disinterested because it takes too long to watch an entire video. A study titled ‘Understanding the Impact of Video Quality on User Engagement‘ found that: ‘The percentage of time spent in buffering has the largest impact on the user engagement across all types of content.’ Using lower quality for longer videos may prove to be counterproductive because as we already noted above, the viewers don’t want to watch the low-quality video, which makes short and concise, high-quality videos a perfect target for a business that wants to increase their online visibility.

SEO and video content

Just posting a video on your website or on any of the video sharing websites is simply not enough. Without a proper search engine optimization, your content will be buried below thousands of other similar videos and the number of people it can reach will be limited. If someone watches your unique ad on, for example, YouTube, they might be interested to find out more about the company before making a decision to use the service you’re offering or buy the product advertised in the video. Although just watching an online advert will certainly engage a certain amount of users, creating a link that leads to the video presentation of your company will increase the number of people who use the services your business provides. That’s why at Beast when we are asked to produce a hero film for the brand website we always tell our customers that the supporting video which is more informative and detailed is just as important and should be planned for and shot at the same time as the main video production. The extra supporting ‘hub videos‘, which can be talking heads or interview videos, as well as little 5-15 second bumpers to post across social media give you an initial spread of content that all dovetails back to the main hero film. Imagine pouring champagne into a tower of glasses. You start with one at the top and if the glasses are all correctly placed the champagne trickles over and each glass is filled. This is how to view your video content strategy. There has to be a clear brand vision and there needs to be a support structure of video content that helps to increase traffic and maintain interest.

How can I get people to see my video?

People like to share videos on their social media profiles because it gives them something to talk about with their friends. A video can create a lot of links for a website, which is why it is essential that the videos you upload get a lot of shares. The bumpers that you post on social media need to be a hook, something which creates a reaction from the viewer, gets them to follow the call to action and then share the content. An interesting recent example is Banksy, he hasn’t posted anything on instagram for over a year. Then a few weaks ago he posted a video of a feather floating. No one knew what it was about until it was revealed that he had just opened a boutique hotel in Bethlehem – The Walled Off Hotel. The visual content you upload needs to offer something more than just raw data. It needs to educate them, make them laugh, shock them or evoke any other kind of a strong emotion. Ultimately the quality of the video is not defined only by the fact that it is shot on professional video cameras and by a professional video production company, but that the messages it conveys is  strong and relevant to the viewers. The emotions you evoke with the visual content you distribute need to be effective enough to inspire people to click the share button, to tweet about it or even write a blog about what they have just seen.

Know your audience

Listening to what your audience has to say about the content you produce may be the single most important factor that means the difference between failure and success. Enabling the comments on your videos will provide you with a feedback that is essential for understanding the things you could be doing better. Any form of interaction with viewers and potential clients is valuable information that can be turned into improvements. If someone leaves a comment, whatever you do, don’t ignore it. Comments mean that your video engaged the viewer and that it has evoked an emotion strong enough to inspire them to leave a comment. Respect that and acknowledge it by taking the time to reply. The quality of the video material you share with the world is in direct correlation with the number of people who will react to it. The technical quality of the footage or the brilliant content is not enough. It is through a combination of technical excellence, impressive content and professionally planned video content strategy that the best results are accomplished. And yet, without the users who share and talk about the visual material you produced all the effort may prove to be useless. In the world where the visual material is taking center place, businesses should be prepared to produce videos that people will be able to find as well as love and remember.