When it comes to video production for marketing, you have three basic concerns:
- Success depends on releasing videos regularly. Therefore, you need to complete each video as quickly as you can, so that you can get to work on the next one. If you’re releasing three videos per week, then you need to be able to produce three videos per week, so as not to disrupt the schedule. The longer they take to produce, the longer they’ll take to release, and the less likely you’ll be able to gain a following.
- Hopefully, if you’re embarking on video marketing, you’ve got some money in the budget to produce those videos. However, the less you can spend and still achieve video success, the better. If you can make videos that regularly go viral and spread the word about your brand, for just a few dollars apiece, then that’s more you’ll see in profits when the money comes rolling in.
- Simply releasing videos as often as possible isn’t enough. They need to be high quality videos. Not (necessarily) in terms of budget, but in terms of creativity. Your videos have to be able to engage your audience and draw them in. They’re representing your brand. So if they don’t have creativity and quality behind them, they’ll reflect badly, and hurt your reputation, rather than helping it.
These are the three basic tenets that every video marketer strives for during production. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to achieve all three. The best you can hope for is to pick the two that are most important to your strategy, and focus on them.
Planning Is Key
We can all agree that the most important of the three is creativity. Creativity equals quality. You can spend a huge budget and all the time in the world producing your videos, but they lack creativity, they’ll still be poorly executed. And if your videos are poorly executed, they have no value to your brand. So that leaves time and money. Which does it make the most sense to sacrifice?
First, let’s ask this: Which is more important to creativity? Is it money? Some of the most popular videos on YouTube consist of a person sitting in their living room, talking to a $30 webcam. You don’t need a huge budget to make high quality videos. All you really need is a bit of planning. And planning takes time.
Of course, there are a fair few videos that have been produced both quickly and cheaply, and still managed to engage audiences and develop a following. But you can’t rely on that. You may have a burst of sudden inspiration that leads you directly in front of the camera to produce a great video in the space of an hour. But when you only have an hour left before you’re supposed to post the video, do you really want to bet on that happening?
Rather, you need to leave time for planning. This doesn’t necessarily mean producing videos slowly. It just means budgeting your time. Determine how long it will reasonably take you to produce a high quality video, and create a release schedule that gives you enough time to do that. Then, spend the intervening time planning for the next video. If inspiration strikes and you come up with a brilliant idea in five minutes, great. But if not, you still have at least a few days to flesh things out.
Planning means not just the idea itself, but the execution. If you have a brilliant idea, but don’t figure out how you’re going to accomplish it, you can run into trouble once it comes time to film. Then that idea can end up costing you a lot of extra money. Planning out how to do things as cheaply and efficiently as possible (without sacrificing quality) can be the difference between producing 20 videos or 100 videos for the same amount of money.
If you take time and focus on creativity, you’ll be able to cut your costs and increase your profits. This will help you keep to your video release schedule, giving you the time you need as well. So the saying is true: with time, money, and creativity, you can only pick two. But if you choose wisely, that doesn’t mean sacrificing the other. It just requires a little planning.