You’ve got a story to tell
A start-up’s guide to producing compelling video
This guide is designed to help start-ups with small teams begin producing video marketing content to better connect with their customers and grow faster. We will cover each step of the process, from understanding the benefits of video for your company to strategic conception, production and eventual distribution. From the knowledge that we’ve gained from our experience with video marketing and collecting the best resources from around the web, your team will have all you need to begin making high caliber video in-house.
- Why video? Why now?
- Getting started….identifying your goals
- Telling your story
- And telling it on screen
- Pre-production
- Production
- Post-production
- Distribution and channel specifics
- When to outsource
1. Why Video? Why Now?
Everyone, everywhere is talking about how video marketing is taking over the internet and urging brands to produce video content. It may seem like a fad, but it’s a trend that’s not going anywhere, especially as mobile use continues to rise. If you aren’t convinced of the value it can have for your company, it’s important to reconsider.
Video makes it easier for your customers to discover and connect with you, and it drives more traffic to your website.
- Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from search-engine results pages. (Brightcove)
- Blog posts incorporating video attract 3x as many inbound links as blog posts without video. (Wordstream/Moz)
- Facebook video posts have shown 2.7x higher average reach and 1.9x higher engagement rates than non-video posts. (Buffer)
Your customers prefer video to text, spend more time engaging with your site, and understand your messaging better with video.
- Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared with 10% when reading it in text. (Invisia)
- 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. (Animoto)
- People spend on average 2.6x more time on pages with video than those without. (Wistia)
Video helps your customers relate to your brand and understand your product, making them more likely to purchase.
- Online shoppers who view demo videos are 1.8x more likely to purchase than non-viewers. (DMB Adobe)
- 77% of consumers say that video has convinced them to buy a product or service. (Wyzowl)
- Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. (VidYard)
Clearly, there is a strong business case for video marketing, but many early stage companies dismiss the idea, assuming that only bigger brands can afford quality production that drives real value. Fortunately, that’s not the case anymore. With your smartphone, $150, and an Amazon Prime account, your team can start making and distributing compelling and effective video content that has a real impact on your business. Even if you’ve barely begun developing your content strategy, there is an immediate opportunity for your business to capitalize on video. In the next section, we’ll ask ourselves a few key questions to understand what strategy makes sense for your company.
2. Getting started…identifying your goals
Now that we understand the value of video marketing and are ready to start producing our own content, we can start by asking ourselves a series of questions to help flesh out the strategy. As with any marketing endeavor, we need to understand who we are trying to reach, where we can reach them, and what impact we want to have on them. More specifically, let’s consider:
What stage of the funnel are we trying to impact, and what actions do we want these consumers to take?
Whether you are a B2B or B2C business, your video is likely targeting awareness, consideration, conversion, or retention. Make sure you select a video type that’s aligned with the friction points in your funnel.
Where are our customers located, how do we reach them, and with what budget?
Knowing the distribution channels you want to pursue goes hand in hand with knowing what type of video you will produce. Different types of video are best suited to specific platforms and stages in the funnel, and there are unique aspects and restrictions that dictate how you format for each channel.
We will get into the specifics of each channel later in the guide, but the channels you need to account for are:
- Your Website
- YouTube
- Social
- Paid Social
What is our brand personality, and how does our video communicate that?
As with any marketing or content, we want to portray a consistent brand image through our videos. For example, if “competence” is the name of the game, you may want to consider a how-to video to demonstrate your expertise. But if you are focused on “sincerity,” heartwarming customer testimonials might do the trick.
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can make a choice about which type of video is right for your organization, your goals, and your customers. While the world of video may seem wide open, there are a few tried and true video types that you may want to consider:
- Educational / How-to
- Testimonials
- Explainer
- Product video
- Vlogs
- Lifestyle videos
- Man on the street videos
Once we’ve decided how to reach our customers and we know the type of content we want to produce, we begin the tricky part of actually creating the video that motivates consumers. How do we that?
3. Telling your story…
I’ve already said you have all you need to produce a high-caliber and high-impact video that drives business with your phone. And while the cameras on today’s smartphone are seriously impressive, it’s not the quality of the camera that matters in creating valuable content, it’s how your customers connect to your video. This connection is driven by storytelling, and if you are able to do that, no camera in the world will matter.
Story is king.
Why is it so important? Delving into a little bit of neuroscience and psychology, we can start to see how storytelling influences us.
Oxytocin is a chemical released in our brains when we are in close proximity to people we trust and are connected to; experiments have shown that our brains behave the same way when we are told a great story. What’s better than creating a feeling of trust and connection with your potential customers?
How to tell a story that resonates?
“If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters.” — Paul J Zak
There are commonalities in the progression of our favorite stories that can give us a guide to understanding them and creating our own.
Spend any time researching storytelling (very hot right now), and the name Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey will come up quickly.
Campbell coined the term monomyth. This concept suggests that despite very different plots and settings, all the stories that are worth retelling (the ones passed down through generations) essentially have the same narrative arc. The Hero’s Journey is the path that narrative takes for the protagonist.
While the concept of the monomyth may put a damper on your dreams of being totally unique, I like to imagine that there is still plenty of room for individual creativity and original storytelling. Instead of thinking about the plot (i.e., the series of events in your story), focus on the arc (i.e., the emotional journey). Spending time really understanding The Hero’s Journey will get you accustomed to thinking in a narrative structure, allowing you to build your own embellishments on a solid foundation of master storytelling.
“As a storyteller, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them. When you tell the story of your struggles against real antagonists, your audience sees you as an exciting, dynamic person.” — Robert Mckee
For practice, use these worksheets to break down some of your favorite movies into the parts of The Hero’s Journey. It’s most fun to do with a friend, and keep going until you can do most classic movies without a worksheet.
4. …And telling it on screen
Understanding the narrative arc and knowing the type of story you want to tell is a great first step, but it’s the first of many in producing your own video. You have to translate that story into visuals, using on-screen imagery that bolsters your narrative and helps your viewer connect with your message.
Capturing the right footage to enhance your storytelling is crucial to the success of your video. Think of your favorite documentary (or any documentary for that matter) — it’s not a video of someone telling a story in front of a camera for one long cut; the filmmakers incorporate still images, old footage, and on-screen cues to make the narrative richer at each moment.
Storyboarding and shot planning ensures you capture content essential to weaving your tale together in post production. By identifying the key parts of a narrative through a storyboard, the panels you create will serve as a direct guide to the footage you want to capture.
The guide below will teach you all the technical basics of storyboarding that you need to begin putting together your own.
In addition to the main narrative, you need to capture plenty of B Roll to visually tell the story in ways that narration and graphics can’t.
“What’s B Roll?” you say? The term B Roll comes from the old days of editing actual film reels when footage from a secondary camera (The B Roll) was physically cut and blended with footage from the primary camera (The A Roll). The B Roll footage can be edited into the narrative to help set the scene, show transition, or hide rough cuts from editing down the story.
Here is an A Roll frame from a project we did for Special Xtra Coffee in San Francisco:
And here is a B Roll shot we used to establish the setting of the coffee shop, while the owners were telling their story in a voice-over:
We will cover more of the specifics of editing and incorporating B Roll further down, but be sure to consider B Roll in your shot planning list before you start any shoot.
5. Pre-production
Now we have a story to tell and a rough plan for how to do it visually, but how do we actually produce this video?
Before production, we need to make a few more key decisions, primarily on equipment and setting.
Setting
While the setting may seem like the “background” and therefore not important, it can have a huge impact on the tone of your video. Your goal is to find a setting that can communicate and reinforce your brand personality, without distracting from the main event.
- Shoot in a deep room so the background blurs out.
- Using dramatic perspectives in the backgrounds makes for interesting shots. Walls should recede into the background at an angle.
- Remove visual clutter from the background, but leave in objects that are relevant to the interview and/or provide visual interest without being a distraction.
If you don’t feel like you have an attractive and non-distracting background available to your team, it’s easy enough to set up an inexpensive “studio” in your workspace.
Equipment
As we established at the beginning of this guide an iPhone, Amazon Prime account, and $150 to spend are all you need for baseline production. We recommend four key pieces to get you started:
1. 2 iPhones (1 for film, 1 for audio)
3. Light Set Up
4. Smart Phone Tripod
If you want to take a step up from baseline, there are a few additional options that are worth considering (up to a couple thousand bucks) before it would make sense to hire a professional. The next step would be upgrading to a quality point and shoot or a DSLR camera, getting a shotgun mic, and/or exploring multi-camera set ups. If you pass that threshold, you should evaluate if the best course is to bring professional film producers / videographers on board.
Once you are ready to get started you can reference this comprehensive pre-production checklist from USC to make sure you have all your ducks in a row.
6. Production
No matter what type of video you are making, there are a few elements you need to consider: composition, lighting, audio, and B Roll. We’ll incorporate some specific tips and tricks for common video types (whiteboards, interviews, etc.) as we go.
Composition
Understanding the rule of thirds is one of the most important basic film-making concepts and can give the startup founder (that’s moonlighting as a cinematographer) peace of mind when framing shots.
Your default should be to place your subject on one of the four points where the thirds come together on a grid. You can see this above in the water shot and here in the video we produced for Resource.io and Doordash.
FYI: When you compose an interview shot or a shot that follows an action, you must give the subject forward space to talk into or move into — lead room. In the case of an interview, the lead room or space in front of the subject is also referred to as talk space or look space.
Once you’ve mastered the rule of thirds, consider exploring The Golden Ratio which is a more advanced positioning system.
To give you inspiration and more technical information, take a look at this full guide to camera shot types:
Positioning a second camera:
When using two cameras, set Camera 2 closer and a little more off-center than Camera 1. Make sure both cameras are on the same side of the interviewee, either left or right. Don’t put one on each side. This is called breaking the axis and it can be jarring for the viewer.
Lighting
The standard film-making lighting set up is known as 3 Point Lighting, and it’s the best place to start for beginners.
The 3 point set up consists of:
Back Light: A back light hits an actor or object from behind, and is usually placed higher than the object it is lighting. It can be used to separate an object or an actor from a dark background, giving the subject more shape and depth. Backlighting can help keep your subject from looking 2-D.
Key Light: A key light is the primary light of the scene. It will be the brightest direct light source and is used to illuminate the form of an actor.
Fill Light: The fill light “fills” the shadows created by the key light to lessen the contrast severity.
As you set up your lights: set the key light to illuminate the side of the face with more breathing room, place the fill light on the side closest to the edge, and put the backlight/rim light behind the subject angled down to illuminate their head and shoulders.
The subject should be the brightest element of the shot.
If you are using more advanced equipment (e.g., DSLR) familiarize yourself with temperature and white balance to increase the professional quality of your videos.
At a basic level, color temperatures above 5000K are considered “cool” (i.e., blue-ish). Lower color temperatures (under 5000K) are considered “warm” (i.e., orange-ish). While you don’t need to play around with color temperature too much if you aren’t comfortable, it’s important to maintain the same temperature across a whole video. Keep an eye on your camera settings when shooting in different locations for one video to ensure consistency throughout.
Key Tip: If shooting a whiteboard video, it’s important to get the white balance right and adjust lighting to account for whiteboard glare.
Audio
Take a moment before your shoot to quiet the room you are working in and collect a 30-second sample of the ambient noise. This is what is known as a room tone and can be used to smooth out the skipping cut sounds in your audio later, if needed.
Here are a few additional tips to remember:
- Account for wind protection if outside.
- Make sure your Lavalier mic isn’t rubbing against any clothing (tricks below). Using your basic Lavalier microphone with the audio notes apps will be a huge upgrade over the camera alone.
- Make sure to clap loudly into the mic once both camera and audio are rolling. This will help sync the audio tracks in post production.
- Having trouble or need help? Email us, and our in-house audio engineer will happily write back with free advice on how to tackle your sound issues.
Capturing B Roll
Earlier we covered how B Roll was essential to visual story telling, and it’s important to keep those purposes in mind when capturing it as well.
- Set the scene
Shooting in a park? Capture people playing with their dogs, wide shots of the whole park, the playground, close ups of city signs, etc. - Provide visual context to your story
Talking about your friendly service at a coffee shop? Show staff members and customers interacting while providing a service. Get close ups of beans and steaming cups of coffee.
Keys to Successful B Roll
- Storyboarding ahead of time will help you remember to get the footage you need in the heat of the moment. Be spontaneous but also plan ahead.
- Capture more than you think. Editing is much harder without quality B Roll.
- Camera movement helps keep visuals engaging and interesting, while different angles help viewers step into a different point.
Additional Production Scenarios and Tips
Interviews
When shooting an interview, use the rule of thirds and have the primary camera offset to the subject’s left or right, with the interviewer sitting next to the camera. This ensures that the subject is not directly looking into the lens, and is instead looking at the interviewer.
Warm up the subject. If possible, avoid letting the subject be aware of when you start rolling. Chat them up with questions about breakfast or lunch and give them a bit of backstory on yourself.
Transition into story questions. Use chronology as a guide, and go back far. If you are a B2B business interviewing a customer, start at the beginning of their career or their first day at that company. Get the background and then use that as your launching pad.
Treat it like a conversation. If you act natural, they’ll act natural.
Tip: Use body language and mirroring to help emotionally guide your interview subject.
Screen Casting
When making a product or explainer video, screen casting (or recording computer screen output) can be a great way to visually tell your story. OBS is a free tool that gives you all the options you need to tell your story the way you want. Choose to capture sound, see the mouse movement, format the size, change the zoom level, etc.
We used OBS when we were making the launch video for DoNotPay’s robot lawyer this summer.
Appearing On Camera
7. Post-production
Congratulations — you’ve done all your filming! Now before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s get back to basics. Upload all of your footage and audio, and organize it in clearly labeled folders.
After organizing the footage, we like to trim down our usable interview footage or A Roll and then create a transcript of any voice tracks.
Once everything is trimmed, organized, and transcribed, it’s best practice to go back to your story board to put together an updated story draft. With your updated plan in hand, you can actually start putting your video together.
Tools
- If you’re using a Mac, the free iMovie application works very well for small projects.
- Animoto is an incredibly easy, basic editing tool that is well loved by social marketers.
- If you are getting into more advanced work and graphics, we at Tradecraft swear by Adobe Premiere as the best paid choice. Bonus: it offers a free trial if you want to test it out.
Editing
Once you actually start editing, keep these three areas in mind:
- Flow and transitions: You want these different pieces of film to feel like they belong together, and that is hard to do on the first try. While shots with similar lighting or motion are more likely to feel seamless, try out several different combinations to see what works the best.
- Sound syncing: Remember when we talked about linking our narrative to key visual cues? You can easily do it in iMovie or in Premiere.
- Adding music: How many of your favorite ads have a catchy song playing? Music adds an emotion/feeling that it can be hard to do through words and is an essential element of a great video. You can learn more about selecting music for marketing videos here.
8. Channels and distribution
Finally! You’ve made a killer video and now you need to share it with the world…Well, you’ve got a few options.
Most of what we have discussed so far is best practice across all platforms, but there are a few things you should know to select the right channel and optimize your video for that channel:
General tips
- Assume your video will be watched on mute on all channels. This means you need to design for sound off: create captions and graphics to tell your story.
- Consumers are increasingly watching video on their phones, inundated with content. Across social channels, it’s important to optimize for mobile and the scrolling feed based environment.
- Adding people to your video and creating a quick emotional pull in your story will help to capture your consumer’s attention.
Website
- When hosting videos on your website, it’s important to consider the context and the value of your video. This is prime positioning for your brand and can be higher stakes than social videos, so it’s important to make sure you have high-quality production.
- Videos on your website are likely focused further down the funnel with the goal of upping conversion rates. Product videos and customer testimonials work to fit that bill.
- This is higher risk and higher difficulty — relative to other channels, you may want to consider outsourcing.
YouTube
- YouTube is now the second largest search engine behind its parent Google, with 3 billion searches per month. As such, this is a great tool for earlier in the funnel.
- When posting on YouTube it’s important to research Google Trends and to develop your YouTube SEO strategy to make sure your video is easily discovered.
- Finally, YouTube viewers are more interested in certain types of content, with educational and skill-building videos being the most prominent. “Learning is more than a trend. It’s a YouTube trait.”
- The key to Facebook video is to focus on sharing. Short, fun, and emotional content encourage sharing behavior, helping you expand your reach.
- Follow these tips to optimize your video for News Feed:
- 92% of Twitter video views happen on mobile — when people are on-the-go, wanting entertainment, or in the mood to connect to a shared experience. (Twitter)
- It’s critical that you optimize your Twitter video for mobile and your story gets to the point quickly — the video version of 140 characters.
- Five best practices for Promoted Video
Snapchat and Instagram
- Snapchat is all about video, and users are looking for something that feels “raw” and “authentic.” Add text and drawings to your video and record in vertical format to make your content feel more native.
- Instagram users, on the other hand, are looking for quality. You can bring your fancy photos to life with a “behind the scenes” look through Instagram Stories.
Looking for more? Take a deep dive below.
9. When to hire/outsource
Now that you know the ins and outs of video marketing strategy and how to build your own, it’s important to know when you should be looking for outside help.
Ask yourself these questions to see if using an external provider might be right for you:
- Do you need expensive equipment to get the video you’re looking for?
- Is this video going front and center on your website?
- What is the filmmaking skill required to produce the story?
- Do you have 100 other things on your plate and don’t have time to become your own expert?
As you grow, the best answer is usually a mix of in-house expertise and working with outside agencies. You are the expert when it comes to your brand and may want to retain control, but with increasing levels of sophistication outside expertise and an unbiased opinion are often needed.
If you are exploring outside assistance, there is a full range of affordable choices depending on the project. You should consider film students, freelance videographers, small media teams, or larger agencies. Make sure to review these tips on how to work with external providers before getting started.
Want more help with video?
Our media team at Tradecraft can help with your video marketing strategy and production. Email harry@tradecrafted.com if you want to learn more. Or just say hey and send me one of your videos to look at!
Further Reading:
