The decision to invest in hiring a video production company is not one to be taken lightly. After all, creating a professional video is no small feat – it takes time, money, and a whole lot of coordination.
But when done right, a corporate video can be an extremely powerful marketing tool. A well-made video can help you communicate your brand message, promote your products or services, and drive conversions. In other words, it can be a game-changer for your business.
If you’re thinking about hiring a video production agency to create a corporate video for your business, there are a few things you should do first. By taking the time to prepare in advance, you can ensure that the process goes as smoothly as possible – and that you end up with a final product that you’re happy with.
Here’s what you need to do before hiring a video production agency:
1. What Are Your Objectives in Hiring a Video Production Company?
Before finding and vetting potential agencies, you need to take a step back and define your goals for the project. You need to know what you are trying to get out of your video. Are you attempting to sell a product, train your staff, advocate for a cause, raise funding, or inform the public about something important? Video can do all these things exceptionally effectively, and your goal informs your creative approach. Ask yourself: how do you define success? Being able to articulate your goals is extremely important. Video production is a collaborative art, and ensuring the entire creative and production team understands your vision is crucial to achieving it.
2. Who Is Your Target Audience?
The more details you have on your audience’s demographics, the better when it comes to hiring a video production company. Defining your audience specifically allows you to target your video’s tone, language more precisely, and mood to appeal to them and motivate them to action. Many people say I want to reach everyone! Wouldn’t it be great to have an audience of 8 billion? Being more realistic, however, focusing on your core customer, your employees, or those willing to donate to your cause can help tailor your message and set you up for success.
3. What Do You Want People to Learn?
Most successful short-form videos today have a single primary message. Attempting to say a dozen things in a single video dilutes each of your points and may well render the entire video unmemorable and meaningless. Our advice: Focus on one topic, make a compelling argument, and your chances of success increase.
4. A Call to Action.
Perhaps you want your audience to purchase a product, donate to a cause, plant a tree, or learn about an important topic. Engineering a call to action at the end of the video is an excellent way to stimulate and engage your audience. Give them a specific action by hyperlinking to another video, website or a donation page, for instance. Make it easy for them to act.
5. What Is Your Video Production Budget?
Your budget may be the most critical question you need to answer. It sets expectations for all stakeholders and lets you know how far your resources may stretch, and the developers know what tools and creative approaches are at their disposal. Ask yourself what the cost of success is. How much you are willing to spend to educate your workforce (training cost per person) or how many products you must sell to recoup your investment are good ways to quantify and justify the expense of production.
To some, spending money on video production and distribution may seem abstract, especially when it’s difficult to directly attribute the cause and effect of viewing and purchasing, for instance. However, putting your message out in front of your audience — and video is often the best, most efficient, and impactful way to do that — is invaluable to informing, educating, and motivating your audience to action.
6. What is a Realistic Production Time Frame?
Video production efforts can proceed quickly or take time to develop. This depends on many factors. If your goal is to record an event and then edit a highlight reel, then the production time frame is set by the date of the event. The edit will be defined by what outputs you want — the piece’s duration, what other branding or stock footage or graphical elements are involved, and what kind of review process is required for approval.
Suppose your goal is to create scripted drama acted by professionals. In that case, the timeline may be longer based on script development, approvals, casting, building sets or securing locations, etc., that must occur before production. Or maybe you want to interview experts. That can go quickly or take more time based on the required research. Or perhaps you have a conference where you wish to present your video — in such a case, your development horizon is set by the conference date. in these examples, you get a hint of the kinds of things that may and often do affect your development timeframe.
7. What Creative Approaches are Available?
Having a particularly creative approach in mind before approaching a video production company is not necessary, but being able to articulate what you like and what you don’t like is always helpful. Any particular creative approach will be defined by budget, audience, and project goal, but knowing what appeals to you and turns you off helps initiate conversations with creative developers. Realize there are always multiple ways to tell a visual story. We recommend looking for sample products that you like and don’t like and being able to describe why informs the team, who will then propose achievable solutions.
Ready to Hire a Video Production Company?
With the above information, hiring a video production company will be much easier since you’ll now be able to define your production needs and initiate discussions with a solid idea of how to proceed. But, of course, you might still have questions, want to discuss the possibilities, or want to receive a formal quote. We can help you with these.
When you’re ready to start your project, we can let you know our thoughts on your plan if you contact us. You have nothing to lose by asking. Could you send us a message today? We love talking about videos and helping our clients achieve their communication goals.
We’ll work with you every step to ensure your project is successful.
