Video has long been touted as the marketing medium of the future, but the future is here. If you’re not using video as part of your marketing strategy, you’re going to be left behind. If you’re worried about getting started, no need. Even if you can’t afford to hire an in-house video production team, there are several highly-skilled companies that offer the video production services you need.
In this article, we’re going to cover the video production process and video production services you should look for when looking for a company to handle your video marketing. It’s time to join the 60% of businesses that are already using video marketing and enjoying the ROI video marketing offers.
Video Production Services: Everything You Need to Know About Creating Video Content:
Video Production Services: The Production Process
Video is a powerful tool through which to communicate your story, moving your audience to feel, think, and behave in a certain way. When done well, video can be one of the strongest drivers of conversions no matter your type of business or industry.
What does it take to do video marketing well?
Regardless of whether you have an in-house team or hire a video production company to handle your video marketing, there are three categories of video production services you’ll either need to do yourself or make sure the company you hire offers:
- Preproduction
- Production
- Post Production
Preproduction
Preproduction is the video production service that includes creative and planning. This includes video production services like:
- Evaluating your video’s objective, target audience, method of delivery, and tone
- Formulating a budget
- Creative development and pitching
- Scriptwriting
- Storyboarding and outlining
- Shot lists (the scenes you want to include in your video)
- Location scouting (looking for places to record your video)
- Casting
- Permitting (getting the necessary permits from your municipality)
- Equipment prep and rental (as needed)
- Hiring subcontractors (as needed)
Preproduction is the first part of video production. It happens behind the scenes but it’s probably the most important part of creating a video that accomplishes the goals you want it to. Without putting in the work on the frontend, you’ll never get to the end result you need. This is where you’ll create a solid foundation upon which to build your message. It involves two very different video production services: creative and logistics.
The creative side is about creating and refining the concept of your video, writing a script, storyboarding, and making sure that you fully understand not only the story you want to tell but what you want viewers to do with that story. Logistics, on the other hand, is all about the details involved in how you’ll turn your ideas into a finished and polished video.
Production
The production part of video production is the actual video shoot. Here are a few of the video production services (and staffing considerations) that go into production:
- The Producer is involved in all phases of production from concept to completion. This includes coordination, supervision, and control of budget, talent, crafts, and more.
- The Director of Photography (Main Camera Operator) works with a Director to execute their vision for the script. They oversee the Camera and Lighting Departments and create the visuals that tell the story.
- The Assistant Camera Operator is responsible for marking a sync point between the video and audio with a clapper board (slating), making sure that the focus is set correctly, and changing batteries and recording media.
- The Field Audio Engineer mixes, reproduces, and manipulates sound and effects.
- The Gaffer is the head of the lighting department. They’re responsible for the design of the lighting plan.
- The Grip develops and builds the set for a movie, commercial, or television show. Grips work on the equipment that supports the cameras and lighting.
- Makeup Artists must know and understand makeup and the techniques used to apply it to the face and neck. Body Makeup Artists apply makeup to various areas of the body and can alter the actor’s appearance.
- The Drone Operator operates any drone cameras used for video production.
- The Production Assistant is responsible for communications between the various production departments and managing lockups.
- Specialty equipment might include high-def cameras, lighting, audio, and other equipment.
Post Production
After your video has been filmed, post-production begins. This stage includes video production services like:
- File management
- Video editing
- Motion graphics or animation
- Recording voice-overs or voice acting
- Audio mastering
- Color grading
- Delivering files
Post product typically covers everything that happens after filming is complete.
Video Production Services: Common Types of Video Content
There are hundreds of different video types or formats and there’s no guarantee that the video production company you hire offers the video production services you need for the video you want to create. Let’s take a closer look at the eight most common video production services you’ll find:
Event Video Services
Event videos range in time from 30 seconds to 3+ hours and can be a “recap” or event teaser video or a multi-camera production. This type of service is used for lectures, meetings, sports, weddings, performances, and other live events.
Commercial/Advertising Video Services
Commercials tend to be 30–90 seconds and can be scripted, docu-style, or animated. This type of service might include sponsored content, branded content, pre-roll, etc.
Promotional Documentary Video Services
These videos range from 1–30 minutes and use interview-driven storytelling. Promotional videos, infomercials, and travel videos typically fall into this category.
Corporate Video Services
Corporate videos include everything from long training videos to brand culture videos to promotional videos and are generally 1–60 minutes in length.
Real Estate Video Services
Real estate videos are typically under 5 minutes and use tons of filming techniques like drones, sliders, timelapse, and more to create a mouthwatering video experience.
Educational Video Services
Educational videos are things like explainer videos, PSAs, tutorials, and how-to videos. They can be quick, 30-second videos or longer videos for more in-depth topics.
Music Video Services
Music video services include exactly what you imagine (a musician lip-syncing to create a video for their music) but they can also be used by other clients when the video doesn’t need an audio story. Trailers and teaser videos may fall into this category.
Social Media Video Services
Social media videos tend to be 15–60 seconds and can include text, music, and narration. This type of video is used across social media platforms and does particularly well on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram Reels, and most TikTok alternatives.
Video Production Services: SEO
Did you know that video can increase traffic from search engines by as much as 157%? Marketing video production services should align with SEO best practices to boost your video’s visibility in organic search results. Here are five video production services that are all about optimizing your video content for search.
1. Start With a Strong Video Marketing Strategy
Video is an important part of your business’s sales and marketing funnels as well as being a great SEO strategy. When you’re building your video strategy, you’ll want to focus on working video into the rest of your marketing strategy to create a cohesive marketing plan. But how do you create a strong video marketing strategy? Here’s a five-step process that we like:
Step 1: Set Goals for Your Videos
Start by outlining what you want to accomplish with your videos. These goals should coincide with the different stages in your marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, and decision).
Step 2: Speak to Your Target Audience
Once you know what you hope to accomplish, you’ll want to get a specific audience in mind that you want to target with your video. At the end of this step, you should know who your product or service is for, what you want them to do after they view your video, and where you can find them.
Step 3: Find the Story You Want to Tell
Every video should tell a complete story including a main character (your target audience), a conflict (your target audience’s pain point), the search for a solution to the conflict (your product or service), and a resolution (how your product or service makes things better).
Step 4: Stick to Your Timeline
Create a timeline for every part of your video production as well as an overall timeline that encompasses all of the other timelines. Keep in mind that things happen. Changes to scripting or messaging, delays in getting review and feedback, and delays in implementing any changes can push your timeline all out of whack. Be realistic when creating your timeline and allow yourself extra time to help keep things on track.
Step 5: Stick to Your Budget
If you’re creating a high-quality video, the budget can quickly get out of hand—especially if you’re outsourcing your video production services. Whether or not you’re handling things in-house or not, though, you still need to set a budget.
When you start with a solid video marketing strategy, you’ll be in a much better position to create videos that rank well in search engine results.
2. Optimize Your Video Titles
Creating and optimizing video titles may be included in marketing video productions services but if not, you’ll want to make sure that your video titles are fully optimized to help with SEO. Titles should include keywords related to your video’s content and grab the attention of viewers. While clickbait titles had brief popularity, viewers quickly became weary of titles that were designed simply for clicks. As such, your titles should be directly related to your video content and designed to draw attention while delivering once viewers click.
3. Include Video Transcripts
Video transcripts are a must for SEO. If your marketing video production services don’t offer video transcripts, you should absolutely write your own. And, really write them. Don’t simply rely on the auto-generated transcripts. You’ve seen them on YouTube, right? They’re not great.
Why bother with video transcripts? For starters, they make your content accessible, bringing your video to a larger audience. In addition, they make your content scrapable by search bots, essentially serving as more indexable page content.
4. Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website may not seem to have much to do with video production services but trust us, it’s important. Adding video to a webpage can increase your rank in search engines, increase conversions, and more. Take a look at your highest-performing pages (the ones that get you the most conversions) and, if there isn’t video there already, ask your video production services company to create targeted, related videos for those pages. Video production services and website optimization work well together to get your content seen by more people.
5. Promote Your Video
Your video SEO strategy will benefit greatly from promotion. Every time your video is viewed or a user engages with your video, that content gets a bit of a signal boost that Google and other search engines use to determine where to rank your content. This creates an echo chamber of sorts in which your video gets engagement, Google and other search engines reward you for that engagement by increasing the ranking for your content, more people see your content as a result, which leads to more engagement. And so the cycle continues.
Video Production: Worth the Work
Video production services can easily pay for themselves over and over again since you can use a single video in several different ways. You can use the same video on your website, in your email marketing, on social media, and just about anywhere else. Using your video in multiple places across your marketing efforts maximizes your investment in video production services and increases your ROI. Using the information and tips in this article, you have everything you need to create a ridiculously strong video marketing strategy, regardless of whether you bring your video production services in-house or outsource to an established video production company.
Your brand has a unique story to tell that sets you apart from your competition and builds powerful brand identity. Video is one of the best ways for your brand to share that story while also keeping visitors on your website longer, keeping their attention, and getting them to engage. High-quality video and a strong video marketing strategy can bring in new customers and keep existing customers coming back for more.
