BTS – Corporate Video – cma video production birmingham
You could argue that marketing is 75% churn and 25% hero content. What do I mean by this and have I angered an entire industry?
I made up the percentages but my point is that something like promotional video content, that sits on your home page, is shown to key clients at sales pitches and features at the beginning of annual conferences, is hero content. It’s costly, has high production values and goes to the core of what you want to communicate about your business – think of a car advert for BMW. You will probably outsource this to a video production company like us and probably won’t be doing many of these in your business lifecycle.
If the hero product is a masterpiece then churn is a sketch. You need to keep your brand constantly visible across multiple delivery platforms, each with their own format and audience demographic. There’s always a new kid on the block; the current golden boy for video content is Tik Tok. The content doesn’t even have to be hard-sell, it can be customer testimonials, software updates, a member of your staff doing charitable work, a new way of using your product or service or some photographs of your new offices. It’s churn and it keeps you visible; ignore it at your own peril.
It’s a minefield with constantly changing goalposts. So how do the big boys play the churn game like Adidas, BMW and Coca Cola for example? Apart from having massive budgets and dedicated creative teams, they probably also treat their churns as heroes because they can afford to. So what do you do? Well you probably don’t create video content or animations on a weekly or monthly basis. I’m also assuming that you’re time-poor so can’t come up with a new concept and farm it out to a production company every week, so what’s your fall back position?
Well, you post static content with copy, it’s cheaper and quicker and I’m doing it now but is it engaging? Well you’re reading this so maybe you’re a ‘reader’, I am and there’s no harm in that. Unfortunately most people aren’t or simply don’t have the time. A video or animation can get your message across in seconds. It’s engaging, doesn’t take any effort and, importantly, it’s already out there. If you don’t think video content is your main communication tool then you’re in the wrong job. So we have a conundrum, churn needs to be engaging but it costs, both in terms of money and time.
There are various video solutions and they all come with a cost, it’s also a matter of scale. There are elegant content management systems but they are expensive and importantly they need staff to invest in them to work. You could have a go yourself, hire a full time creative or get Dave in accounts to have a go. I won’t scoff, they’re all completely valid these days. You could also build a relationship with a company that understands video and marketing and treat them as a virtual creative team; just dip in when you need to. That’s us by the way, contact us to find out more.
So here are some of the most common mistakes that we find people make and some of the opportunities that they miss:
Here’s how it normally plays out. A client comes to us to make a video, we film and edit it, they get the final product. It’s forgotten about, they’re busy showing it to everyone. Then someone in sales notices that a bit of video content would be great to show in their presentations. They come back to us to re-edit it, we give them a cost and they decide it’s too expensive. Fair enough.
Taking this a step further; there are other departments making videos and other parts of the organisation finding bits they’d like to use in their presentations. Two things happen, firstly most people don’t even know where the content is and secondly it’s often unusable. We could take everything we’ve filmed, break it down into clips and re-encode it so that it’s easy to watch and playback; do we ever get asked to do this? Never.
This last bit about re-encoding is important; we use video file formats that are high quality, probably only work in edit suites and often won’t play on laptops or office machines. You could choose how to share it; cloud, intranet, hard drive, we have solutions for this too. When someone is creating a PowerPoint or social post and remember a great clip that would suit their purposes, they can’t access it. Fail.
Everything you have filmed is an asset, you’ve paid for video production teams to produce beautiful hero content and you only use it once. Why not repurpose it. Take a few clips, put some music and text over it and release it as a 30 second social piece. Why not spend a day filming client testimonials and release a series of 30 second testimonial pieces. Again, use some of the clips from the main promo with text over it to show the scale of your operations and put a short testimonial clip in to reinforce the point. Ten pieces of video content from one day filming, it’s a no-brainer.
This is an art and a science. You could just put the same video on Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and forget about it. Have you thought about repurposing it so that it is in a square format for Instagram, or maybe an upright video (9:16) for mobile devices? Did you know that you could use your promotional video as Pre Roll on YouTube. Those 6 second teasers that drive you mad but sometimes pique your interest so you watch them? It’s inexpensive and is totally targeted in terms of demographics and when it will be shown. Do you know how to tag it cleverly so that it reaches the right search audience and do you ever check the metrics to measure engagement? Not only do companies ignore video churn, they don’t use it to their best advantage.
Every person is carrying a video camera around in their pocket, mobile phones can produce amazing content with very little training. Check out our series of video basics using your mobile phone. Audiences are forgiving of quality over content, especially for churn. Think what you can create at this level. Every member of staff could grab footage, a lot of it bad but if enough people do it, there will be the occasional gem (think monkeys and typewriters!). Get it out there.
Also think about what you show. Most of the big companies have their hero stuff but a lot of the churn seems to be moving across to the human element of business. Rather than sell your product, tell people about how great your staff are, from recycling to climbing a mountain in their spare time. Get those stories out there, they have value and everyone likes a good human story. Your staff represent you, sell them as well as your product.
Get trained up on how to do and manage all this stuff, or get a content partner to do it for you. Sit back and watch your metrics grow to epic proportions.
We produce this kind of content and create ideas around these areas all the time with our clients. It just means that they get a bit more value in the work that we do for them. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it needs a little more thought but it’s definitely worth thinking about what you can do around your video project not just the most obvious stuff that is front of you.
I hope this was useful, if it was then please get in touch with us for a chat about how we can help you at mitch@cmavideo.co.uk
Mitchell Remes is Creative Director of CMA Video and has worked in the creative industries for over 30 years. Mitch has overseen video content productions for some of the biggest brands in the world for CMA Video including Microsoft, Merlin Entertainments, EDF Energy, Costa and many more. To find out more about his experiences in video production in Birmingham and around the UK, connect with Mitch here.
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