Design a strategy before you start

A lot of companies decide the idea of online video is a good one and they charge in head first without putting any thought into it.

You need to have a clear plan of what you want your online video to achieve, what is your end objective? It might be to encourage conversions and increase sales or it might be to drive traffic to your site or it might just be to increase your brand awareness. Once you know what you want to achieve you can work out how you’re going to go about it, what you want to shoot, when you can shoot it and what’s needed.

Don’t go overkill on the production

A common misconception for businesses just getting into online video is that it needs to be state of the art and look like something out of a Hollywood movie.

The reality is most smart phones these days are sophisticated enough to provide a good quality video, if you really want to go to the next level a simple flip video camera will be perfect. You don’t need state of the art editing equipment or a camera that costs more than the average family car. If you really decide video is the media for you more expensive items can always be purchased as you get going.

Incorporate your brand identify

As fun as it is to play ‘guess the company’ behind some advertising your online video is not the place for this, you need to keep your brand identity strong throughout.

You don’t need your logo flashing away throughout your video and you don’t need your website scrolling along the bottom of the video throughout. Something as simple as a branded banner in the background or a set incorporating your company colours will suffice with a good quality still at the end of the video.

Don’t make it too long

In most cases when someone clicks on a video and they see it’s several minutes long they’re going to click off it before its finished buffering.

Unless you’re videoing a seminar or conference or something that can justify being thirty minutes long you need to keep it around the two minute mark. You can always break one large video into several smaller ones to make a miniseries. It’s much better to have several smaller videos rather than just one long one.

Trying To Be Cleaver

Every budding online video creator dreams of their video going viral but every minute 35hours are currently being uploaded to YouTube; this state alone has increased by over 40% in the past twelve months.

Focus your efforts on making a video that’s going to be genuinely useful and informative to your target audience, you don’t need any cats doing something cute and you don’t need to be miming along to the latest chart hit into a hair brush. Viral is great but unless it was written down in your original strategy before you started it’s not needed for your campaign.

Jess writes for Forever Crystal Wine Glasses and are currently looking at the best way to incorporate video into their new site.