Video is the best way to communicate online. Everyone is so time and attention poor, a well-crafted video can reach out of the screen and stop the viewer in their tracks. This leads to more engagement with your brand, more shares, and more actions. Whatever you’re promoting - a new product, a new brand, or a whole new company - a professionally produced video - or videos - should be the centerpiece of your campaign.
80% of people will consume all the content on a webpage when it is shared as video vs. only 20% if it is text only. This means that if you have information you need to share, video is the best way to do it.
Dynamic and colourful, video makes almost any webpage or conference booth more compelling. A professional video increases dwell times on and offline, giving you and your team more opportunity to build a relationship with your audience.
An expertly crafted video has the effect of compressing time, allowing you to hone the exact message you are sharing. The added benefit of being able to demonstrate the message either literally or metaphorically helps to make your points clear and accessible.
You can’t get your product into the hands of everyone who might purchase it, but you can show them how it works, what it does and why they might want it. You can slow down action, focus in on intricate functions or use animation for additional clarity. User interviews or testimonials allow you to build trust and further your audience’s understanding of your products or services.
The most powerful companies in the world have made our attention the most valuable asset on the planet. They do that by making it really easy to share the content that you love. You’re doing it and so is your audience. Quality video productions are super sharable, helping your message to get the attention you deserve.
For $20,000, you could have 40,000 brochures which go out of date almost immediately, or an expertly crafted animation which you can use and repurpose for years to come. A study by Google/YouTube found that over 75% of a marketing campaign’s effectiveness comes down to the quality of the creative messaging. The better the content you create the easier it will be to promote.
Your audience’s need for quality content isn’t going anywhere. If you make an investment in a team to film in your offices, or an animator to design some assets for your business, they can be cheaply and easily repurposed again and again. All the material becomes part of your company’s library which you can use whenever you need it in the future.
The reason video works so well is that our brains are hardwired to feel the emotional impact of the events we witness in the world around us. Our stone age brains don’t see the difference between events in ‘real-life’ in front of us, and on the screen. If you understand this, you can use it to make your communications even more memorable and impactful.
Learn more about why video content marketing is such a powerful tool in this blog post that unpacks the emotional power of video.
Brand building focuses on creating a positive emotional connection with the brand. These are the associations and beliefs that make the customer more likely to buy from one brand over another. This requires repeated exposure to consistent messaging, slowly building a compelling image of what that brand represents, produces and stands for. While this takes time to achieve, the effects are deep seated in the audience and lead to the best long-term effects.
The consistent nature of brand building has the additional benefit of creating followers among people who might not be in the market for the brand’s product at the time of exposure. This is important because the audience are not looking to purchase for the majority of the time. Video’s emotive power makes it an extremely valuable tool because it is so much more memorable.
Adobe’s Create channel is well worth checking out for its breadth of creator centric content. We’ve been lucky enough to create a range of projects for them over the years, but we have a real soft spot for this film with Entrepreneur, Designer and Potter Jonathan Adler. We love the way that Jonathan’s engaging character jumps out of the screen. This is one of the most effective uses for video production - capturing and sharing human character and emotion. From a marketing perspective videos of this nature give the brand the opportunity to align with the nature of the featured profile, which is why video productions of this nature work so well for a brand like Adobe. Share the stories of cool and interesting creators and then bask in their reflected glory.
Sales activation is targeted at those who are likely to buy in the very near future. This aims to encourage the buyer into making a purchase and aims to make the purchase as frictionless as possible. These include discounts, vouchers, special offers, unique experiences, seasonal sales and are far more targeted to the individual than the broader nature of brand-building content. The more bought into your brand your audience are, the more effective this type of content will be. This is a great opportunity to further strengthen your follower base by offering them favourable terms if they are a subscriber to your channel.
Sales-activation messages take advantage of the positive brand associations that you have built up in other areas and with your other communications. The effects of sales-activation approaches cause a short-term spike in purchasing intent, which drops off rapidly. Because of this, the two approaches are best used hand in hand, with the IPA’s 2017 Media in Focus report recommending a 60:40 split of brand building to activation as the optimum ratio.
This is not technically a sales activation film, but it does have a very clear call to action, and is designed to drive a very specific action from the audience. This is a relatively simple treatment but the access to the call centre, including footage of responders on the phones to real clients, complemented by real experiences really help to land the emotional value of the service that the charity offers.
What we’re trying to achieve with professional marketing video production is an increase in the perceived value of your product or service. By creating that increase you make it more likely that the audience will take the leap to making a purchase. This is going to get a little schooly but humour us for a moment: consider that, in the mind of the audience, there is no difference between ‘perceived’ and ‘real’ value; i.e. the value that is in the quality of the product and the value that is added through marketing, respectively. So, it is generally a lot easier and cheaper to add value to the product by making it desirable to your audience through positive branding than it is to make your product proportionally better.
This is reflected in the work of Austrian-American social economist Ludwig von Mises. He argues that it is impossible to split the enjoyment of a diner between the quality of the food cooked by the chef in a restaurant and the value provided by the man who sweeps the restaurant’s floors. Ogilvy vice chairman, Rory Sutherland, rather sharpens the understanding of this by saying that it would be impossible to enjoy a meal if there were a strong smell of effluent coming from the loos; i.e. it would not matter how great the chef, the ingredients or the food were, if you couldn’t shake the smell of sewage.
This has been the role of marketing since the beginning – it is a lot easier to add perceived value than it is to add to the functional value of what you are offering. What does this have to do with video production? Well, we want you to know that we understand the challenge that all marketers face because that helps us to make better, more effective films.
Brand marketing videos come in many different guises. One of the most effective is animation. This is because you can show as well as tell your audience as you communicate the salient points of your message. When we were approached by RBI - Recruitment Business International - to market the fact that they own and operate eight separate but complementary publications, it was only a matter of time before some bright spark came up with the idea of an octopus. Animation allows you to illustrate concepts like this simply, effectively and often cost effectively. Animation production does generally take more time than live action as the elements - or assets - need to be created and then an experienced animation puppet masters make them move to your voiceover or music track.
Since we started Casual Films back in 2006, the earliest days of online video, you can count the number of films we have delivered as a hard copy on your fingers. That’s out of well over 10,000 films. Because of this, it’s safe to assume that you will be sharing your content online. That’s because it is the cheapest, most efficient, and most effective way to do it. Wherever you’re planning on sharing your project, it’s important to consider this when creating your brief and thinking about the creative messaging, as this may well inform the direction you take.
We had one client that was looking to run some internal communications videos to keep its staff up to date with what was happening in the wider company. These were power-station workers. Their average age was in the late 50s, and smartphone/computer usage was a single-digit percentage. We looked, for a time, at the possibility of cutting the films into short outputs and then having them playing on screens that we would put up in the men’s room above the urinals and other areas around the facilities where the audience would spend time. In the end, they didn’t go ahead with it, but the example illustrates the creative thinking that can be employed to get the right people to see your films.
One of the really cool things about the advances in AR is that we can now share video content with consumers at different points in their buying cycle. For example, if we are promoting a mustard, we may know that when a shopper is in the shop they might be interested in where the mustard is grown. If they look at the pot with their AR-enabled phone, they might be shown an interview with the farmer, the ingredients, or some footage of the farm and processing facility it was manufactured in. This might sound a little too open for comfort, but this level of transparency is coming – consumers will demand it. When they get home, the customer looks at the pot again and this time they are shown recipes, possibly defined by the other ingredients they bought, or the day of the week and their past eating habits. The fact is that the number of ways that you can share your content with your audience is growing by the day. Don’t always think that the only place they will watch your content is Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube or Facebook, because it’s not.
There are three different avenues for distributing your content online. The content that you produce for each channel may be slightly different, in terms of the length, style and CTA. For example, you may wonder how long your YouTube video should be and if your LinkedIn version should be shorter. In practice, finding the answer to your question is a little more complicated than a formula. Get everything you need to know for your unique context in our whitepaper, What Is The Right Length For Video Online?.
These are all the channels for which you own the control. They include your website, social pages, intranet and internal staff communications.
The information here is what your brand says and what people say to you. Around 90% of online conversations about brands do not take place on their own pages. This means you have to get out there to influence these conversations.
Your earned media are shares of your content, and articles and blogs written about your channels. This is what people say about you. You earn views here by creating content that people want to engage with and share.
Your paid channels are, unsurprisingly, the ones you have to pay for. They include paid posts, traditional advertising, and programmatic marketing.
Every single business is a trove of great stories just waiting to be told. As with the Jonathan Adler film above, this profile for GoDaddy illustrates the power of video production to share compelling narratives. It helps that Lyn Slater is an amazing character who shines from the screen. Don’t be disheartened though, there are great characters everywhere. Our Ariel Production System enables our experienced team to find exactly the right story to tell your story in a clear, engaging way.
Client response:
“Casual Films have revolutionised the way we collect and tell stories. Their work directly contributes to the health of our business.
To produce the same work with our internal team would require at least 4x more people and significantly more expense and challenge.” — GoDaddy
Over the years, Casual Films has produced over 10,000 films for clients that run from the world’s largest to the very newest seed stage startups. That experience has allowed us to hone our process to make it perfectly fit for the purpose of delivering our clients exactly what they need.
As a full-service video production company, we’ll take you from creative development all the way through to post production. Your named Executive Producer will act as your guide, working with our proprietary Ariel Production System to deliver you all the content you need to deliver on your goals, no matter what they are.
Contact our marketing video production team here and find out why our clients keep coming back to us.
Marketing video production costs can vary wildly, from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds or dollars. Luckily, as this is a creative process the amount you have to invest in the process can be taken into account when coming up with suitable ideas. At Casual Films, our average project is in the $15,000 to $20,000 (£12,000-£18,000) range. This is because our films require creative ideation, scripting, producing, shooting or animating, editing, sound design and music. This gives our clients a product with the best chance to achieve the goals we discuss in the briefing stage.
If you just want a video on your website, save your money and shoot it yourself, on your cell phone. If you want a professionally produced business tool to solve a business problem, then you won’t find better value than working with Casual Films.
Casual Films is all about finding the perfect production for your problem. How can we help?
Casual Films Specialisms
Video Production Services
We know that compressed deadlines and tight budgets sometimes require a more streamlined service.
That’s why we’ve developed Ariel Express - our low cost video offering. Just describe your business, product or service in 155 words, and we’ll create a 60 second video using stock footage, motion graphics and voice over.
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