Although it’s more difficult than ever for business owners to ensure that their company is making a decent impression on the marketplace and competing with the plethora of rivals fighting for every potential customer, it’s also true that there have never been so many ways to get your company’s name out into the public domain to help bring in new business.
For a start, print advertising isn’t dead, no matter what some people might say – posters, leaflets, adverts in newspapers and so on do have an impact, albeit a smaller one than might have been felt in years gone by. These days, it’s all about digital, with websites the main gateways through which customers learn about companies they’d otherwise never have heard of. Every company has a website, but that sometimes may not be enough to convince a customer that they should deal with them.
One of the great untapped revenues of advertising in the digital age is the corporate video, which has been woefully underused by many medium-sized companies. In just three or four minutes, viewers can hear from senior personnel, go behind the scenes of a company (if relevant) and hear about what makes them special and valuable to their customers – it’s a visual medium, which people respond to better and take more from than paragraphs of text. To be fair, from the point of view of those who have no idea how to make a video, it sounds like a pretty expensive and time-consuming affair for no guaranteed return, which is why they balk. However, it’s surprisingly easy to get a well-made, professional-looking video sorted both quickly and cheaply.
If you hire a company that deals in corporate video production London to make the video for you, a great deal of the work will be taken out of the process for you (and unless you’ve been to film school, you won’t have the first idea about how to do it yourself). In fact, the biggest problem you’ll have will be choosing a production company, because they’re springing up everywhere these days.
When you discuss briefs and requirements with each of your production company candidates, you should pay attention to how much they appear to be on the same page as you – you don’t want them going off and doing their own thing so that the finished video doesn’t end up resembling what you wanted in any way, shape or form. However, once you’ve found the right company (the different quotes you receive should obviously be taken into account), things should move fairly quickly. Most decent production companies will be able to come up with or improve a script, get all the necessary shots and then edit them together cohesively – some may even be able to add effects in post-production if you want to include them.
Once you’ve got your video embedded onto your website’s homepage and hosted on websites like YouTube and Vimeo, you need to make full use of your social media channels to spread it and get the word about your company out to as many people as possible. If you’re lucky, the video will go viral, and that guarantees millions of views. Try your luck – you’re already gaining an advantage simply by having the video made, and the sky’s the limit as far as advertising in this way is concerned.
