You’ve decided video could be useful for your business. The next question is usually: what exactly should you make?
It’s tempting to start with the format. We need a promotional video. We should get some customer testimonials. We need something for social media.
But I’d normally start one step further back.
What do you actually need the video to achieve?
A film introducing your business to people who have never heard of you has a very different job from one designed to reassure somebody who is already considering working with you. And both are different again from a film promoting a particular product, service or event.
So rather than starting with the type of video, start with the problem you’re trying to solve.
“I need people to understand who we are”
This is where a business story can work particularly well.
It’s an introduction to your business: who you are, what you do, what makes you different and perhaps some of the people behind it.
These films often work well on a homepage or prominent page on your website. Someone may have heard of your business, found you through Google or followed a recommendation, but they don’t know much about you yet.
You don’t necessarily need to explain everything. The job of the film is to give someone a feel for the business and enough reason to want to find out more.
Depending on the company, that might mean interviewing the founder, showing the people behind the business, demonstrating what you do or telling some of the story of how the organisation came about.
The important thing is that it feels like your business rather than a generic corporate film.
“I need to show that what we do actually works”
This is where case studies and customer testimonials come in.
There’s only so much you can say about your own business before people quite reasonably think, well, you would say that.
Hearing it from a customer is different.
For businesses selling higher-value services, particularly where there’s a longer decision-making process, a good case study can be extremely useful further down the customer journey.
Instead of simply asking somebody to say how wonderful you are, I prefer to uncover the story: What was the problem? Why did they choose you? What happened? What changed as a result?
Sometimes that can be told by one customer. Sometimes the stronger story comes from interviewing several people and exploring the relationship between them.
The resulting film can sit on your website, but it can also be something you send to a potential customer after an initial enquiry, meeting or pitch. At that point, its job isn’t really to introduce you. It’s to provide evidence and reassurance.
“I need to promote something specific”
Sometimes the objective is much simpler.
You have a new product. You’re launching a service. You’re running an event. You have something particular that you want people to notice and act on.
That’s where I’d think in terms of a promotional film.
Because the objective is more specific, the film can be more focused too. Who needs to see it? What do they need to understand? And, most importantly, what do you want them to do afterwards?
It might live on a product or landing page, be sent to existing customers by email, form part of a social media campaign or be used as paid advertising.
Where and how the film will be used should influence how we make it. A video designed to interrupt somebody scrolling through social media has a different job from one being watched by somebody who has deliberately visited a product page.
Understanding the audience, objective and where someone is in the buying journey is something worth establishing before production starts.
“I need content to keep communicating with people”
Sometimes you don’t actually need a video at all. You need video content.
There’s an important difference.
If you’re regularly communicating through your website, LinkedIn, YouTube, email or social media, it can make more sense to plan a collection of useful content rather than put the entire budget into one finished film.
A single shoot might give us a main film, several shorter edits, individual interview clips and other pieces of content that can be used at different points over the following months.
Video is particularly useful in this respect because the original material can often be reshaped and repurposed rather than used once and forgotten.
That doesn’t mean producing as many clips as possible for the sake of it. It’s about deciding beforehand what would actually be useful and then making sure we capture what we need while we’re filming.
How long should a business video be?
There isn’t an ideal length.
A 20-second advert, a 90-second promotional film and a four-minute customer story can all be exactly the right length because they’re doing different jobs.
The important question is how much you need to communicate and how much attention you can reasonably expect from the person watching it.
Someone encountering you for the first time through an advert probably isn’t going to give you five minutes of their attention. Someone who has visited your website, read about your services and is seriously considering spending several thousand pounds with you might.
There’s also no simple rule that says a shorter video is cheaper to make.
Distilling a complicated story into 30 or 60 seconds can sometimes require more work than allowing the story a little more room. Editing is often about deciding what to leave out, and making something concise without losing the important parts can take time.
So I wouldn’t start a project by deciding that a film needs to be exactly 60 seconds or exactly three minutes.
Make it as long as it needs to be, but no longer.
One film or several?
This is worth thinking about before you film rather than afterwards.
One of the most common mistakes I see is trying to make one film do too many different jobs.
You want to introduce the business, explain a new service, include a couple of customer testimonials, tell people about your values and perhaps squeeze in a call to action at the end.
Individually, those might all be good ideas. Put them all into one film and the message can quickly become muddled.
At that point, I’d normally suggest making several focused films rather than one film that tries to say everything.
Importantly, that doesn’t mean the project suddenly needs to cost four or five times as much. We can plan the production so that we capture several different stories or messages across the same shoot or perhaps a couple of filming days, and then turn that material into separate pieces of content.
There are efficiencies in doing that. If we’re already on location with the cameras, lighting and sound set up, capturing an additional interview or some extra footage can be relatively straightforward.
The additional cost often comes in the planning and editing, because each film needs its own purpose, structure and message.
So sometimes one really good film is the answer. Sometimes the better investment is a small collection of films, each doing one job properly.
Sometimes the answer isn’t video
This is an important one.
Clients sometimes come to me having already decided they need a video. Often they’re right. But it’s still worth asking what problem they’re trying to solve.
Video is a marketing tool. It isn’t a marketing strategy in itself.
If you’re not clear about who you’re trying to reach, what you’re offering or why somebody should choose you, making a film isn’t necessarily going to fix that.
My background is in marketing as well as video production, so I’m quite happy to have that conversation before we start talking about cameras.
For most projects that’s simply part of getting the brief right. If it uncovers a bigger marketing or strategic problem that needs some work first, that’s something I can help with separately too.
Start with what you’re trying to achieve
You don’t need to know what kind of film you need before contacting a video producer.
In fact, I’d much rather someone came to me and said:
“This is what we’re trying to achieve. What do you think we should make?”
From there we can look at the audience, where the content will be used, what you need people to understand and roughly what budget you have to work with.
Then we can decide whether the answer is a business story, a customer case study, a promotional film, a collection of shorter content – or something else entirely.
Start with the job the video needs to do. The format comes afterwards.