Why Your Business Needs Professionally Made Videos (and when)
To this day, video endures as the most engaging type of media content to support entrepreneurs, businesses, and brands, accounting for about 82% of online content available. From social media shorts to a full series of ad campaigns, video content has the largest impact on raising your brand awareness and expanding your company’s reach. If you were to do an online search for marketing trends in 2023, almost every list you’ll find has a section about video content (same if you searched for 2022, 2021, and so on). Video outmatches all other types of media content with its ability to showcase your brand’s identity, communicate the narrative that defines your company’s purpose, and resonate on a deeper level with your target audience. A well-crafted video can be the true difference maker between providing a great service or product to selling it.
The Impact of Professionally Crafted Video
The immense impact that video has for promoting businesses can be attributed to a number of factors. For one, video offers the most versatility when it comes to communicating to the target audience. The narrative possibilities with video are almost endless; it can help your business launch a new product line, recruit new employees, or provide an overview of what your company does. Secondly, video is the preferred medium for most consumers to get their information versus text or an image. According to a study by HubSpot, 81% of consumers polled said that they were convinced to purchase a product or service after having watched a video about it. Lastly, video has the most impact when it comes to growing your website traffic and engagements.
Picture yourself going to a company’s website for the very first time to simply find out what this business does. This site has all of the relevant information spelled out on the homepage but they also have a company overview video providing similar information. The video will take longer to watch than to scroll through the text but you will most likely retain more information from the video. While a certain line of text may be bookmarked by you (such as an efficiency statistic or a market price comparison) a moment from a video can leave an impression on you. I could read all day about the history of a company like Corona and gain an understanding of what their branding culture is OR I could watch that old TV ad and get all of that information from one sequence. Let’s not forget that the longer that a potential customer stays on your website, the more likely they are to engage with your business.
Our friends at Pravana can (and sometimes do) facilitate their own live streams for quick tutorials but when it’s a two-day seminar for their educators, they call on the pros who have helped them time and time before.
DIY or Hire a Professional Crew?
With the latest innovations in smartphone camera technology, video creation is now more user-friendly than ever before. There certainly are moments where a DIY approach to video is not only viable but actually the optimal approach. If your company is having a fast approaching event or if you want to get the word out about an upcoming sale, putting a quick video out on TikTok or Instagram can be the perfect video solution to that problem. Real-life demonstrations of your product or service being filmed or streamed from your smartphone can add a level of authenticity to the demonstration by giving your audiences a raw and in the moment presentation. For your immediate video needs, a DIY approach can absolutely be utilized to great effect.
However, when it comes to utilizing video for your long-term and business growth goals, you want the end product to be reflective of your company’s standards; intentionally crafted with professional quality and worthy of the asking price. The video is there to help support one of your business’ goals whether it be launch, an expansion, or an evolution so you’ll obviously want to get the best return on investment that you can. While the math of making a $0 investment into video and crafting one on your own may be tempting, think about your own company and what it offers first. The service or product that you offer isn’t something that anyone can provide and even if you’re in a large market industry, there’s something unique about your creation that makes you stand out from your competitors. Producing video assets works within the same dynamic; creativity is a service and you’ll want to turn to a company that is dedicated to providing that service in an intentional manner for optimal results.
Let’s try to frame this in terms of a different service your company may employ like landscaping. Just like buying a camera instead of hiring a video crew, you could invest in purchasing a tractor, weed whacker, and hedge trimmers in lieu of hiring a landscaper. But then you have to invest the time it takes to learn how to use this equipment on top of the time it takes to do the actual work itself. You could do a decent job at it and eventually become skilled but unless you’re planning on opening a landscaping side business, is learning it worth the effort? It’s not uncommon for companies to attempt a similar route with video. We’ve heard the “oh, we’re just going to buy a camera” line a few times in the past and almost every one of them eventually came back to hire us for the next video project. Some were even humble enough to share how much they appreciate our work and professionalism now that they understood what an undertaking producing videos really is (and offering to sell us a camera lol).
The lights, the cameras, the microphone, and even the furniture; all placed intentionally with the eye of a professional video crew.
“Paid” Isn’t Always “Professional”
Whether it was something as small as a shoddy phone charger or as big as a lemon of a car, we’ve all been burned before on relying on something proved to be unreliable even though we paid for it. However, where we source these items should (ideally) have an impact on your expectations for it. Since my brain is stuck on this landscaping metaphor, we’ll reference it again. If you decide to hire someone for that work, you should have a different set of expectations for calling on a professional landscaping company versus turning to the kids who live down the street. While it isn’t impossible for you to luck out and those kids do a better job than some pros would have, the more likely defiance of expectations would be the professional crew falling short. The same set of expectations apply to employing a video production company. In a perfect world, professional prices would always yield professional results but since ours is imperfect, you’ll have to do some vetting while picking a creative services partner.
As we previously discussed when talking about how to choose a creative services partner, there are signs to look for in avoiding this potential pitfall. True professionals show that they are invested in the project with that care being obvious from start to finish. Professionals also state and set a standard of expectations for the collaboration, too; from costs to timelines to the support needed on your end, a plan should be laid out once the project details are finalized. While you may be eager to get this project up-and-running as soon as possible, it’s actually a good thing not to get an immediate “yes” from a potential creative services partner (unless it’s a flat “no” of course), your project is likely being given careful consideration before commitment. You’ll have to practice some patience when finding the right video team for you because this project, and your business, are well worth it.
If you’re looking to establish or grow your business, take video into heavy consideration as a support tool for that goal. You can give your audience a glimpse of your business in action, why you decided to dedicate your life to this service or product, and what sets you apart from the competition all through the most popular, impactful, and accessible form of media content available. You put in all of the hard work to provide this great service or product, now it’s time to trust in other professionals to help you sell it.