Low Priced Corporate Videos, High Priced Look

One of the best ways to generate free marketing potential for your business is to take advantage of video on the internet.

Previous blogs discussed the necessity of high-end photography to use as a means to display your product on your website and others as well as print advertising, tradeshow displays, and for press kits, video is an ever-expanding medium that shouldn't be overlooked.

We have found it useful to have a nice 30 second, 1 minute, and 5 minute piece on each product as well as our company for different purposes from time to time, and include these on our marketing kits that are available for download on our site for press, bloggers, and retail partners who have websites of their own (or may look to do local traditional advertising). An example of what we do, can be found on our site by clicking here.

Creating a video can be daunting if you haven't done this before, and budgets aside, there are plenty of expenses you can rack up if you aren't a do-it-yourself kind of person. Presuming you are like me and want things to look high-end, but don't want to budget the multi-thousand dollars to do a custom video, a lot can be done in the form of a photo montage with a trailer clip that you shoot from a standard video camera.

We already discussed the importance of photography, so this article presumes you have that in place already sitting on one of your computer drives. I use a really great service called Animoto that is basically a Hollywood video editor in a box for dummies. With a simple interface, you upload your videos in the order you want them, and add a music file that they have pre-cleared songs on their site available (or you can upload your own - there are no copyright restrictions limiting your use on the site, but you can still get yourself in trouble if you don't have rights to use a song you upload). When you click the process button it automatically does all of this fantastic yet high-end jazz to your photo montage to perfectly meet the beat of the song and end it at the right place. They also have video options to add up to 10 seconds of video to your montage.

Although regular accounts are free, they are very limiting and for a corporate video you will want to upgrade to the professional option at $40 / month. I basically get all of my video needs together at once along with the song I want to use and then sign up for 1 month and burn them all out at once. This gives you high def downloads, no Animoto watermarks, and a link to your site at the end that will still work in youtube.

As a bonus, the month is unlimited videos so I do a few videos of each of my girls with their best friends as xmas gifts for them and a separate one to the grandparents and close friends as an e-holiday card on steroids.

The formula I like to use is text cards to intro each relevant photo, a promotional video of the product somewhere in the middle (I used our NBC Today Show clip), followed by some more photos telling the rest of the story. Here is an example of one.

I also use this for corporate training videos at bigger box retailers like Babies R Us when helping introduce our product to each of their stores. It's nice to personalize a few slides specific to them (like showing it properly displayed at one of their stores) and a personalized thank you slide. We also add a separate full size video clip from our President and Founder as a personalized touch thanking everyone in the end. You get my point though as to the possibilities for you.

If you are filming video yourself, any video camera will work, but I recommend one that shoots in high definition. The most important thing is a tripod so that you can get the right angle and that there is no shaking on the camera. Test out your shots in different rooms at different times of the day to get the best lighting.

Good luck!

I like the formula