Trend Watch: Unleash Your Inner Video Producer By James A. Martin
March 3, 2008
Still wondering if online promotional videos for your products or services are worth the effort? Consider this: Blendtec, a manufacturer and e-tailer of high-end blenders, has seen sales jump 500 percent since the company began its quirky "Will It Blend?" series of Web videos, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Success stories like Blendtec's are possible partly because of the growing popularity and ubiquity of Internet video. Seventy-five percent of all U.S. Internet users watch video online during a typical month, according to comScore data. Also, YouTube recently began making its videos available to smart phones over broadband cellular networks — further expanding the potential audience for online video.
Given these trends, the motivations for producing promotional Web video are clear. But what about the methods? How can a small e-business produce videos that will resonate with their customers?
To find out, we asked Larry Jordan, president of Larry Jordan & Associates Inc. , a training firm in the Los Angeles area specializing in post-production. Jordan offered tips for avoiding common mistakes and producing effective videos for designed to boost your sales.
Q: What's the most common mistake inexperienced video producers make when shooting promotional videos? Jordan: The biggest mistake I see is people shooting their videos in a hurry and on the cheap. Keep in mind that customers will compare your online promotional video to TV commercials. Over the past 50 years, TV ads have become embedded in our national psyche. They have rich colors and high production values (except for low-budget local promo spots). So the worst thing you can do is create something fast and cheap that demeans your business or what you sell. You don't have to spend a lot of money to produce a quality video. But you need to take your time and make it look good.
Q: How do you make your video look good?Jordan: Three things apply to any type of promotional video you're shooting:
Put your camera on a tripod. This gives your video a polished professional look, as opposed to a jerky amateur appearance.
Light your subject properly. Too many videos suffer from poor lighting.
Use a quality microphone. I recommend never using your camcorder's built-in microphone. An external microphone will give you better audio.
Q: What's the key to using humor in a promotional video?Jordan: Coming up with something a large group will think is funny is extremely difficult. What's funny to one person is rarely funny to an entire group. Humor can work if your video is aimed at a particular type of customer, but it's risky when you're trying to reach a large audience. Test it out on a few impartial people first to make sure your concept is truly funny and not offensive.
Q: What advice do you have for shooting a promotional video for a service-oriented e-business?Jordan: Before shooting any promotional video, regardless of what type of business you own, consider the audience you're trying to reach. Put yourself in their shoes. Who is the audience for the video? Is it an 18-year-old biker or a 65-year-old retiree? An urbanite or a suburbanite? What should your video say to them about your company and its products? What benefit will watching the video provide your customers? Be really clear who your audience is and what the benefits of watching your video will be for them. The answers to these questions should dictate how you shoot your video, right down to the camera angles and music.
(Continue to Page 2 for tips for how-to and collectibles videos, plus gear recommendations.)
Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
