What Does a Promotional Video Need To Do?
- Project a sincere message
- Entertain (without making the viewer dizzy!)
- Motivate
- Create a sense of trust
- Identify the 3-5 major attributes of your company, product or service.
Examples of major attributes you can highlight include:
- Specialized experience or training
- How long your company has been in business
- Price
- Value
- Quality
- Employees
- Location
- Variety
- Convenience
- Hours
- Guarentees
- Samples or examples of your work, product or service.
The Use of Testimonials in Video Production
You may want to include testimonials in your video as well. It can be very effective to get one or two of your clients to say how you helped them. To add credibility, when editing testimonials, you’ll want to include their name, title and company a couple of seconds after they appear on screen. This titling is commonly called ‘lower thirds’. You may want to include their company logo, especially if they are from a well known company. To see how long it should be on the screen, actually read the information as though it was the first time you were doing so. This will avoid the lower thirds being on for too long or short of a time.
Now That I’m Done Editing my Promotional Video…
Once you’re done editing your promotional video, it’s time to get it viewed. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, people need to view your video! So once you’re done editing it, you’ll need to save it as a file. Make sure you save different versions of it, possibly in different file formats. For instance, you’ll want to save a high resolution version of your finished program for posting on your website and video posting sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. And you’ll want to save a smaller size one in case you want to send it to someone in an email. While you’re at it, you might want to save a QuickTime and WMV version of it too, as large and small sized files. To leap the horns of the outputting dilemma, you may want to just output an Mp4 version, which can be opened and seen on Macs and PC’s.
Even though you’ll have seen the video many times, make sure you watch each version to make sure that it’s not chunking along or has artifacts in it due to it not being of sufficient resolution. You may have to do a fair amount of experimenting to make a small sized file that still looks good when played. So before releasing it to the public, test it before sending the video you’ve spent all of this time filming and editing.
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