Download the companion white paper here: http://web.tubifi.com/Free-White-Paper-5_Tips_For_Building_Your_Brand_Using_Video_Marketing?utm_campaign=SlideShare-5-Tips-Brand-Video&utm_source=SlideShare
There's room for all types of video in your marketing mix -- product demos, recorded sales presentations, customer testimonials, etc.
But every organization needs at least one high-impact video that encapsulates the brand and showcases the overall unique selling proposition.
With these 5 tips you will learn how to create high-impact video marketing that elevates your brand, quickly, and at a cost that any organization can afford.
High-concept videos are not typically focused on product features or pricing discounts. To elevate your brand you want to focus on visionary, "big picture" stuff. Think about what benefits your product brings to your customers, and what sets your product apart from the competition. Tubifi's co-founder, Ian Brower, says: "Great video starts with a great idea. The creative idea is an inventive response to a business problem. No more, no less. It's not some mysterious bit of alchemy. It's not wizardry. It's a discipline, it's a story that sells a product. And how well you tell that story defines how engaging and persuasive your video will be." At Tubifi we embrace this discipline by taking our clients through the process of developing a Creative Brief document. It is a valuable exercise in defining, in writing, what your unique value proposition is and what your key message to the target audience should be. It is an essential starting point for your high-concept video. The CoachUp video posted above represents an example of a powerful video that was developed following a lively and comprehensive Creative Brief development session. CoachUp is an early-stage startup with only a handful of employees, but this video has been used successfully to elevate their brand -- to make them seem much bigger than they are -- to the benefit of recruiting customers, trainers, investors, and employees.
"Stock" is a dirty word in advertising circles, carrying the connotation that it is low-quality, cookie cutter, and un-original. But in the past 10 years, thanks to the availability of stock imagery and video over the Internet, media libraries have undergone a massive renaissance in quality and accessibility. Take a few moments to review the millions of royalty-free and rights-managed film clips offered by companies like Getty, Thought Equity (now T3Media), and Pond5, to name but a few. To paraphrase an old advertising slogan: this is not your father's stock media! Ian Brower, co-founder of Tubifi and former Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, says, "everything that is expensive to shoot already exists. And it exists in easily-obtained, click-of-the-mouse format." Imagine for your video you want footage of a helicopter flying over a city, think about the complexity and cost of getting this accomplished by your local videographer: permitting, sourcing a helicopter, hoping for the right weather. Hopefully you get it right the first time because if you need to re-shoot then you have to go through all this complexity and cost again. Reels-full of expertly filmed footage like this already exists in online media libraries. Benefits of using media libraries when developing your high-concept video:High qualityHigh impactLow costSpeedier production timelineReduced risk of spending a lot of time and money and ending up with something you don't like
Just because you want a high-concept, richly produced video, doesn't mean you want to wait forever for it. Fortunately, you don't need to. You can accelerate the development and production process of creating your video by eliminating traditional steps that...add the most coststifle collaborationexpose you to the most riskand waste the most time Storyboard Development: Storyboards are a relic of a bygone era when producing video content was much more difficult and costly. Ad agencies would create storyboards as means of ensuring clients were bought in on the concept before they started filming. The problem with storyboards is that they are, by definition, highly conceptual. They are static, often cartoon-ish drawings, and they do a poor job of representing actual live action. Each cell in the storyboard might represent tens or hundreds of actual frames in the video, so camera position changes, transitions, sound, and so forth are not easily portrayed. Because of this, storyboards can set you up for disappointment if the client's imagination of what is storyboarded does not match the actual end product. Skipping the storyboard and going from script straight into a rough cut of the actual video is much faster now with modern non-linear video editing software, especially if you use media libraries of existing footage (see tip #2 above). For this reason, Tubifi prefers to eliminate the storyboard phase and zoom right into a rough-cut first rev of video creation. Custom Video Shooting & Pre-Production:We already addressed some of the problems regarding quality of custom video shooting vs. using video libraries of pre-shot footage in tip #2 above. Another pitfall of custom video shooting is that it is one of the lengthiest phases of the traditional video creation process (and one of the costliest). So if you eliminate or minimize the use of custom shot video, then you can dramatically shorten the timeline (and reduce cost). In fact, if you lean heavily on video libraries then you can actually incorporate content research into the creative concepting phase, thus shortening the timeline even further -- and sometimes sparking some fantastic creative ideas that never would have otherwise surfaced.
www.businessdictionary.com defines "Call To Action" as "words that urge the reader, listener, or viewer of a sales promotion message to take an immediate action, such as 'Write Now,' 'Call Now,' or (on Internet) 'Click Here.'" Just because you are creating a high-concept video doesn't mean you shouldn't have a Call To Action. In fact, we recommend that you maximize the investment in your video by using multiple CTAs. Tubifi is doing early development work on de-coupling the video production process from the CTA, so it is easy for any marketing person to overlay a CTA onto a video without editing the video itself. That would allow you to use the same video with many different CTAs, and would ease the process of running A/B testing to figure out which CTA produces the best results. Until then, you can simply ask your video production vendor to create a few different final frames of your video with different CTAs to support the different ways you might use your video.
An Online Video Platform (OVP) allows you to host your video "in the cloud." Then you can use embed code to post the video on your website or blog, or distribute your video to YouTube and other video sharing sites. The OVP transcodes your video into different versions that will run optimally for each viewer depending on their device, browser, and bandwidth. The OVP you are probably most familiar with is YouTube. You can upload your video there, for free, and then drive people to YouTube to see your video, or use YouTube's embed code to post your video to other pages. However, we advise that you do not upload your video directly to YouTube (or to Vimeo, or any other free OVP that is also a video sharing site) and then embed the YouTube link on your website/blog/Facebook page, etc. Instead, you should pay a little out of pocket and use a 3rd party OVP. Some popular 3rd party OVPs are BrightCove, BitsOnTheRun, and Vimeo Pro, etc. They typically charge you a small monthly fee, and typically there is some ceiling placed on number of videos, total file size of the videos uploaded, and/or number of streams. Tubifi offers their own OVP to clients, it is priced aggressively at $49.95 per month, with the first 90 days free (if you exceed 5000 streams per month then the pricing goes up a little bit). Host your video(s) on the 3rd party OVP and then use it as a platform to post and embed your video to YouTube, Facebook, your website, etc. Here's why:YouTube monetizes the videos hosted there in a number of ways -- none of which are consistent with *your* marketing priorities:Distracting/competitive advertising -- other companies can pay to run pre-roll video advertising ("your video will appear in 15 seconds..."), ticker ads that appear as overlays while your video is playing, and text ads associated with your video. So at best this is simply a distraction you hope your viewers will ignore, and at worst it is your competitors trying to steal away their eyeballs or hijack your message.Post-roll playlists -- YouTube uses an algorithm to offer to viewers a playlist of related videos once your video finishes playing. Do you really want to leave it up to YouTube to figure out what your customers and prospects should view next? See this screen shot of a product demo video on the Experian website. You can see by the YouTube logo at the bottom of the video player that Experian has used YouTube's embed code to post the video on their website. And what is shown here is the playlist that YouTube presents the viewer at the conclusion of the video. The video thumbnail in the lower right-hand corner is *not* a video created by Experian. It is a video created by some angry guy who didn't like it that Experian messed up his credit score. So by leaving it to YouTube's algorithm to determine the playlist, Experian is giving exposure to videos from competitors and other detractors right on their own website.Create your own custom branded viewer experience. See that little YouTube logo at the bottom of the player? It is pretty innocuous, but wouldn't you rather replace it with your own logo? Here are some cool things you can control about the viewer experience when you use your own OVP:Branding: add your own logo to the player controls, or as a watermark on the video itself. The logo can be click-able and direct traffic to any web page you want.Viewing defaults: select autoplay, set the optimal screen dimensions, etc.Sharing controls: add controls that let viewers embed the video or share it with popular social media sitesPlaylist: select a specific collection of videos to be offered to viewers at the conclusion of your videoAnd more... Click the this video to see some of these features in action:http://content.tubifi.com/previews/1jHk4JH2-X8B0DXOw
Track all your results. Perhaps the greatest benefit of using an OVP for a marketing professional is that the OVP can provide rolled-up reporting for all the different places you embed your video. The alternative is to go on a scavenger hunt to all the places where you have embedded your video and then manually consolidate the different reports.You can also view engagement data to see where people are dropping off or abandoning the video stream. This can be very valuable in determining where elements in your video might be turning off viewers. Edit the video, eliminate the elements that are causing abandonment, or move important information so it is featured before the major drop-off points... the OVP can be a valuable tool in iterating and fine-tuning your marketing.