Great videos come out great because of some upfront planning. Before you start filming your company video, you should take some time to nail down a proper production plan. The pre-production period helps flush out problems ahead of time and prevents roadblocks during the filming process. When working with a good video production company, they will help you through this process, but there are still things to think about ahead of time.
Know Your Intended Audience
Unless you have a good understanding of your target audience, you won’t be able to have as much of an impact with your company video. Before you embark on your corporate video production project, you need to know the things that resonate with your audience, and what kind of message they are more likely to respond to.
For instance, if it’s a marketing video or a product launch video, you can use a marketing persona or demographic data to identify the characteristics and preferences of your audience. Dig deep and try to understand your audience’s desires, their drives, and their video watching habits. If you get to know them well enough, you’ll be able to create content that is tailor-made just for them.
To understand what kind of video content resonates with your audience, some marketing experts recommend that you review engagement on different social media channels to find out what your customers are excited about. This is so you can harness interests and use it to your advantage in your video.
Know What Message You Want Your Audience To Take Away From The Video
You have to define the message of your video long before a video production company comes for the shooting sessions. Select a specific message that you want to convey, and create a rough draft of the video script, ensuring that your message is properly articulated. Don’t try to squeeze too many messages into one video — that increases the chances of your audience missing what you are trying to convey. Instead, if you have several different messages to pass across, plan to create a different video for each message.
What it is that you want the viewer to take away from the video? That’s a key question that you should be able to answer before the corporate video production team comes around. If you want the viewers to take a certain cause of action after watching the video, you should start brainstorming ideas on how to incorporate that in the video in a manner that will guarantee higher engagement. If you are clear on both the message that you are trying to pass across and what you expect your audience to take away from the video, the production team will have an easier time working with you to shoot a high-quality and highly effective corporate video.
Block Off Time and Secure Any Locations Needed
You and employees are definitely busy with your other responsibilities, but you still need to allocate time for the production company to come around and shoot the video. Any employees and executives who are supposed to take part in the production processes should reschedule all their other activities so that they are available when they are needed to appear on camera. When people start having scheduling conflicts during video production, the process could drag along for a while and this could affect your timeline for releasing the video, or even the quality of the video.
In a similar vein, the location(s) where the video shoot is to take place should be secured, cleared and prepared beforehand. Most corporate video production companies will send a recon team to help you identify the best places to shoot your video on your company premises. If you are well organized and you are working with a professional production company, they will be in and out in no time, and you will be able to go back to your regular programs in no time.
Determine How and Where The Videos Will Be Used
You also have to decide before the shoot where you want your videos to end up. Professional videographers understand that the end use of a video determines the techniques that have to be deployed during its creation. For instance, a video that’s intended for internal use within the company will be shot in a completely different way from a video that is supposed to be put online. Videos that are supposed to be viewed on social media need to be short, informative, and entertaining, while videos that are to be used internally for employee training need to be very detailed, and very formal. When your production team is clear on the end-use of the video, they’ll know what techniques they need to use to optimize it for that platform, and this increases the chances of the video being successful in fulfilling its purpose.
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