Now more than ever, consumers love watching videos and demand is continuing to grow. Corporate video content is changing the marketing landscape. Businesses across every sector are taking advantage of corporate video for a wide range of applications. As compared to reading large manuals, and sifting through chunks of information, this medium is easily digestible, easily accessible, and highly engaging.
Top of the list is to identify how the corporate video fits into your marketing strategy. The possibilities of using corporate video are endless. From promoting your brand to showcasing your products, there’s so much to take advantage of.
- Showreel – A showreel is a short video which highlights a person’s previous work. It is usually around 2-3 minutes in length and features footage from different projects that they have worked on. It is perfect for branding and showing your potential customers what you are capable of.
- Explainer Video – An explainer video is a short-form video used for marketing and sales purposes. Its aim is to highlight a business’s product or service in a compelling and efficient way. This type of video is designed to be short in length, concise, and easy to share on all digital platforms.
- Investor Relations corporate Video – An investor relations video is used to communicate corporate achievements, boost attendance rates, and engage shareholders and stakeholders. It also shows that the company is transparent, honest, and willing to allow outside parties to review its business activities and values.
- Event Video – An event video involves capturing social and special events by a videographer. This covers a wide range of applications including conferences, exhibitions, networking, and live performances. This is a great way to promote your event and reach new audiences online. It is not expensive and tends to be memorable/impactful as you can use a range of colours, graphics, and edits.
- Location Video – A location tour video is a full-motion video of a particular location. It involves someone doing a walk-through of a location, to show the topography, real-time sounds and sights and personality of the narrator. Entrepreneurs and start-ups tend to choose this option.
HOW LONG SHOULD IT BE?
There’s no standard length that is designated for a corporate video, but most companies like to set a corporate video timeline ranging from a single minute to 5 minutes. A corporate video timeline should not be a concern, since you are building your face, and your brand identity via the corporate video. It is most importantly used to convey the quality, the standards, and the mission you stand for. Hence, any time frame is acceptable. Only when the company feels proud of its corporate video, it will be flaunted into the digital world to be seen by all.
It’s already established that Marketing via corporate videos is an effective and influential marketing/advertising technique that allows diverse companies to convey their business message onto the wide platform. Corporate videos can range from process training videos to CEO profile videos to trade show videos and more.
Producing a corporate video process typically can take 4-6 weeks to complete. It involves various stages – development, pre-production, filming, post-production stages, and editing stage. If the video is longer than 5 minutes, the corporate video timeline can be extended to 8 weeks. In the final delivery, corporate video production will typically include live-action scenes, interviews, b-roll, and motion graphics text.
Even the production of a 1-minute video can take a few weeks, which seems excessive for such a short end result, but don’t forget that the final product has to be something that creates a strong and lasting impression of the business, it must involve, engage and encourage the viewers even in those 60 seconds.
If a company has set a low-budget video without any special effects, graphics, or other particular media requirements, then, generally speaking, a very short video could be finished within a week.
So, it definitely takes time to produce videos of quality.
But what exactly is involved at the different stages of the video project? Neon suggests you treat the corporate video-making process like a project in itself.
- Identify the tasks involved – Define the overall objective, and what all needs to be done
- Define the critical path – Envision and construct the workflow – sequence of activities
- Create a timeline – How long will each team take
- Build a production calendar
- Add the tech requirements and cost
- Assign team members and tasks – assign tasks for the stages of pre-production, production and post-production
- Milestones – look at its stages – check the progress at every stage. In case the team needs to colour or pattern or content during the draft, or 1st shoot, it is better, than to re-do the complete production, if it fails to excite the viewers
- Present the final creation to the team and involved stakeholders
- Finally, launch the Corporate video successfully
Let’s outline a general week per week plan to assist you to plan a corporate video timeline.
Development Stage -Week 1
Corporate video making will start with a 1st level planning stage. This is a stage of development in which a team will discuss how to make this an effective video. Together they will discuss the brand, its guidelines, and goals and create a general overview of what video type they want and how the video will fit in with its overall marketing plan.
In the overall project, this will involve identifying the tasks, defining the path and a timeline calendar to be followed.
The Pre-Production Phase -Week 2
Before a production team starts filming, there will be complete pre-production. This phase involves mapping out the video content, scriptwriting, and editing to produce the final shooting script, possibly casting people in the video if necessary or doing voiceovers.
Once they have a concept of the video structure, they will map out the content in more detail using a visual mock-up or storyboard. At times corporate videos feature actual employees of the company, influencers, or just common people and their opinion.
At this stage, it’s critical that all ideas are brought forward to successfully finalize the storyboard, revisited for feedback, further enhanced, and then added in. As we mentioned above, all tech requirements and costs must be keyed in at this stage and adhered to.
Video Production Process – Weeks 3 and 4
With all pre-production preparation done, the team can now work on what is known as creative execution, most of which is actual shooting.
The team will produce enough footage to be used in the post-production phase, so it’s normal for the crew to do multiple takes of the same shot to create choices for the editing team who can play with options while working in the final stage.
Post-Production Phase -Weeks 5 to 8
After shooting and gathering all the raw footage, the video production team moves into the next stage, where they perform the first edit and create what is known as a rough cut.
They’ll go through the voice levels, add in sound mixing, and visual effects, and connect the important scenes and voiceovers with text and b-roll that helps to establish context.
The finished film will need to be of very high quality. It then gets viewed by the full team, and stakeholders involved. Everyone’s opinion and vote counts. They sure want to make sure the final film is coherent and engaging. If required, the crew spends a few more hours or days to fine-tune it, into its best state.
Once final it is all set to be launched on a decided date, on the website and other social media channels and through email marketing.
We hope this was useful. We can help you assess your corporate video requirements, plan a corporate video timeline and successfully create it for your company.
Connect with us for a free consultation at info@neonvideos.com
