Creating Promotional Videos that Kickass

A good promo video makes you relatable, generates more interest in your products, and helps increase sales. Think Dollar Shave Club.

We’d love to say this is easy, but alas, like anything worth doing, it takes focus and work to get great results. So we put together a step by step guide on how to do that.

Step 1: Define What You’re Selling

At first glance, you might think this is easy… but not so fast! You’ll want to decide whether you’re trying to use these videos to sell your brand, your product, or your service.

Before you decide the direction, you first need to find your audience.

For example, if you’re trying to generate more donations for your nonprofit, your target audience might be local companies or businesses within that industry.

To start this process, you’ll want to do the following:

• Create different buyer personas – we’ve linked to a great resource from Hubspot to help you out here (and we use Hubspot too)
• Define your audiences biggest pain points
• Determine age ranges
• Research and detail where your audience views videos
• Describe and document attention spans – this helps understand mediums of distribution.

Be sure to list these all out in order of priority to reference them as you go into script writing and video production.

Step 2: Brainstorm

Now that you understand who your videos will be targeting and why they need/want your product, it’s time to brainstorm ideas for your promo video.

Our typical group of questions we like to find answers for are as follows:

• How can we capture the attention of your target audience?
• How can we create a narrative that will be engaging enough for them to pay attention?
• Will we be able to capture a once in a lifetime experience?
• How will the customer will find this video entertaining and or feel it emotionally?

You want the message to be bold, yet still clear and concise on why you’re selling what you’re selling.

If you’re a tech company, then this might be through shouting out different statistics or if you’re a bank or financial institution, it could be through engaging with your target client’s struggles with budgeting, saving, and so on.

Also, be sure to incorporate different teams that can offer feedback, there’s a reason that old saying about two heads being greater than one has stuck around for so long if you know what we’re saying.

Also also, using tools such as Mind Meister can help with the brainstorming stage. It offers a blank white page that you can write out anything that comes to mind.

Lastly, look around, research, and find inspiration in what other companies are doing that you highly regard. Personally, we love Duolingo’s YouTube channel. They’re doing awesome work, showing their customers and others the ease, and fun, and importance of learning languages.

Step 3: Analyze and Choose Your Ideas

Many companies find this to be is the most overwhelming part of the video process. You have lots of ideas, but choosing and focusing on one is tough. How can you tell which ones are the best fit for your audience?

Here’s a breakdown of how we refine this:

1. Does the idea fit within your brand guidelines?
2. Is the idea fresh, bold, and unique?
3. Does this idea push the envelope?
4. Will this idea create action for your target audience?

In other words, if you have a brand that’s friendly and exciting, does the video idea match that? And does it do that in a way that isn’t stale, with a strong enough call to action to make it memorable?

Step 4: Write a Script

You’ve narrowed down the video idea, but how do you write a script that kicks ass? We generally start with a two-columned script. (We’ve created a simple template for you to use here)

Start by writing the details of the script at the top, such as the agency (Covalent), client, director, and the run time you’re hoping for.

Then, separate the script into two columns. On one side of the page, you’ll write “Video” and write down anything visual that you want to see below it. On the other side, write “Audio” and place any audio information such as the dialogue or voice overs you want.

Remember, the first step is always the hardest. It might seem intimidating at first but the script will practically write itself once you get going!

Step 5: Production

So you now have a script, but what can you do to match that with your production abilities? How can you produce your video in a way that’s better than others?

If you’ve hired us 😉 then you’re already on your way! If not though, here’s what you’ll want to determine:

1. Find voice over talent / actors or actresses as needed
2. Scout & choose locations
3. Ascertain all required licenses or requirements for filming
4. Keep everyone happy!

To help with a few examples,  for banks and financial institutions, there’s no better place to shoot than your own headquarters, and for tech companies showing off products, white backgrounds can sometimes help emphasize on the product, much like Apple does for theirs. Here’s an example of how we helped Pineapple Payments easily explain their platform.

Step 6: Launch Your Video

Now that you’ve produced your promotional video(s), next steps are marketing and distributing them. This is where marketing comes in.

Fortunately, there are several different outlets that you can use and it’s advantageous to use as many of them as possible, with some of them being:

• Press releases
• Organic social media
• Paid social media ads
• Embedding them in email marketing campaigns and so on.

Unless you have an in house marketing team, our suggestion is to hire a great marketing agency, luckily, you’re here and we can help 🙂

In Conclusion

You wouldn’t build a new house without hiring the right construction company, or create a new product, without without finding the right people to produce it. The most important pieces to this puzzle is having the right folks, plans, and tools to get the job done, that accomplishes you main goal.

We’re hoping this helps, but if you have any questions about any of the above, feel free to reach out. This is what we do, and we’ve got the awards to show for it.

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