Most businesses know that video is a powerful tool when it comes to marketing and brand promotion. If you decide to video an event such as conference or corporate party, you will undoubtedly end up collecting some valuable material that can be used for all sorts of marketing activities.
The trouble is that businesses will take these videos and use them for a very narrow purpose. One the purpose has been achieved, the content is archived and essentially forgotten about.
With a little more thought and better planning, however, you can get those video snippets to work a lot harder for your company over a longer period of time.
Pre-Event Planning
Let’s say you’ve decided to video an event your company is taking part in. Setting goals for this sort of initiative is highly important. Decide what you want to use that video for, who you want to take the images and what kind of messages you want to get across. It’s important to brain storm and look at all the other areas where this content might come in useful.
Perhaps you have a company celebration and you want to video people getting awards. You can also use that more informal environment to interview staff and get their opinions on working for your company. You can catch CEOs and directors at the most relaxed and engaging. You can show potential customers and recruits what a great company you are.
There are a good few questions you need to find answers to:
- How are you going to film the event? Are you going to use smartphone cameras or employ a professional video company?
- What information and interactions do you want to cover?
- What sort of things can you use your video content for? For example, is there content there that you can employ for recruiting high quality candidates to your business.
Building a list of how your business will benefit from video content also helps you build a good catalogue that is highly useful and which you can draw on in the future.
During the Event
Events can often be chaotic and difficult to manage, so having a competent and creative video production team behind the camera is important. A lot depends on what you need to achieve but certainly being aware of the potential of a particular moment as and when it occurs is key to gathering content that will later be useful.
Using Your Video Post-Event
It pays to collect and store your video footage in one place and have a way of deciding which sections are useful and which are not. Editing and putting together footage is an art in itself and not something most of us are that competent at. That’s why it will almost certainly help to work with a video production and content company that knows what it is doing and can advise on how best to leverage the content you have. Good archiving and labelling practices means you can draw on particular video content as and when you need it.
The key to making your event videos work harder for you is having a greater understanding of the potential of all that content. Once you start to open your mind and expand your marketing horizons, you will find that collecting and ordering video material soon becomes a kind of symbiotic as well as automatic process.
As in all things, it means you need to have a plan and a strong set of goals and operating parameters. Get it right and you’ll have a growing resource that you can call on when developing your video marketing that will prove invaluable.