More and more marketers are warming up to the idea of using video to promote their products and services. At Big Red SEO we know that customers like variety, and an informational video can be a great way to inject some liveliness into your marketing campaign strategy while keeping your visitors’ attention. Video can be scary, though, especially if you’re new to it, and as a beginner it’s easy to make mistakes in the planning stages that keep your video from being successful. To make sure that the best possible video emerges from your efforts, our Omaha SEO company has come up with these handy planning tips.
1. Start your video with a concept brief
Yep, that’s right. You may think you’d be safe skipping this step, but it’s much better not to. At Big Red SEO we recommend solidifying your video concept with a brief to allow you and your team to document exactly what questions you want to answer in your video. We believe that this is the best way of keeping everyone involved in the project on the same page. Having everyone in agreement as to the aims and methods of the video before you start ensures that no one can come around three-quarters of the way through post-production insisting on some monumental change.
In creating the brief, you’ll want to focus on your goals, topic, and takeaways.
- What’s the goal of the video? Why are we bothering to make the video in the first place?
- Who is the video for?
- What’s our project topic? The more specific the better here. For instance, if you’re in the heating and air conditioning business, you might choose a topic like “why you need a high-efficiency furnace.”
- What are the takeaways of our video? What do we want our viewers to learn from watching it? This is important to hammer out, because it’s much easier to teach effectively if there’s something definite you want your audience to learn.
- What’s our call-to-action? What do we want viewers to do after they’ve watched our video?
This is a good list to start with, but as different projects have different goals you may find yourself adding or subtracting certain questions based on what you need.
2. Write your script
Once you have your topic set, it’s script-writing time! This may sound daunting, but remember, it doesn’t have to be anything too involved. It’s not an art project and you won’t be winning any Academy Awards for Best Screenplay—your video script’s purpose is purely functional, and you should consider it a success if it allows the person on camera to deliver your message accurately while sounding and acting like a real human being.
Write in plain English
Writing a script is different from most other forms of writing because you’re paying special attention to how the lines sound—that is, how they’ll sound coming out of the video subject’s mouth onscreen. It’s easy to write something that sounds good on paper, only to find out that it sounds overly formal or stilted when spoken aloud.
There’s more to a script than dialogue
This is so easy to forget but it’s true. Our Big Red SEO team recommends making the script thorough enough that you could potentially pass it along to someone else to shoot. To that end, it’s important to include stage directions (multiple shots, scenes or characters, wardrobe changes, etc.) that make the movements of the video absolutely clear.
Script every word
If it’s good enough for the Coen brothers it should be good enough for you! To cut down on the number of takes and ensure that the message you want to convey is exactly what will appear onscreen for your viewer, Big Red SEO suggests leaving nothing to improv. Nothing is worse than ending your marketing campaign video only to realize you left out an important part.
3. Do a table read
This is basically a practice run through your script. Why not just jump straight to filming? Because practicing can bring to light things you might want to change before you pull the cameras out. Maybe there’s a phrase in the script that sounded good until someone actually said it, or a camera movement or scene change that doesn’t make sense, and the time to find that out is now. You don’t want to gather the whole video crew and then find out there’s something wrong that grinds production to a halt. Lastly, performing a practice run will help you reduce the typical “um” and “uh’s” you can experience when you start to stutter and adapt accordingly.
Contact Big Red SEO Today at (402) 522-6468!
Our team at Big Red SEO, an SEO and web design company in Omaha believes that video creation is a great addition to your overall marketing campaign strategy. We hope these tips show you that script-writing isn’t as hard as it sounds and motivate you to get started making fantastic videos to promote your business. If you have any questions about this post or SEO and web design in general, contact Big Red SEO today!