If you are considering using video as part of your micro-business marketing activities, then you will need to consider how best to produce your videos. This article explains how to do it.
Producing Promotional Videos needs good quality equipment
There are two broad options; make your own or call in a local video production company. Doing it yourself with your own equipment means that you can produce new videos at short notice, which can be very appealing if producing promotional videos is likely to be a significant form of activity for you. On the other hand, a local company can bring the degree of professionalism and expertise needed to produce quality materials.
If you do decide to do it yourself then you will need to ensure you have sufficient quality equipment. Recording short videos on your mobile phone might be fun, but it is unlikely to give you the quality needed by your micro-business. You will need a good quality digital camera with video and sound built into it, plus editing software. The sound can be a particular issue as the microphone is often built into the camera, so the speaker’s voice can get distorted and it picks up a variety of other noises – it can’t tell the difference between the speaker and other noises, so picks up everything.
An alternative to this is to have a separate microphone but editing software will then be needed to bring the separate visual and audio parts together into one file. This is often easier said than done as even a few milliseconds difference can make the speaker’s lips seem to be moving at a different time from the words they are saying. The viewer might then concentrate on this difference and get distracted, rather than listening to the words themselves.
Using a Production Company
If you do decide to use a video production company then spend some time preparing beforehand. Normally, you would buy a batch of time such as a day or half day and the company will come in, record what they need and then do the editing offsite.
You can maximise the number and quality of videos produced by preparing and rehearsing in advance so that you know exactly what you want and what to say, then you can get on and do it. Otherwise you will waste time after they arrive working out what to do rather than using the company for what they are best at, i.e. recording video with high quality equipment. You may want to arrange a production meeting before the day so that you know how best to prepare and can have everything prepared.
Promotional Videos and Search Engine Optimisation
Your videos can be used to boost your search engine optimisation generally (which you can read more about in the article search engine optimisation) and may themselves also be found via search engines. The following tips will assist with video-based optimisation, although some are quite specialised and you might need to ask your web developer to do it for you;
- Apply Alt Tags to the videos and have a separate video site map if you have several videos. Search engines will then know that these are video-based items and index them accordingly.
- Use the word ‘video’ in your meta descriptions, titles and keywords.
- Consider having a text transcript for the video as this enhances accessibility for the hearing impaired and the additional text may contribute to your general optimisation.
- Make sure your web developer is using ‘schemas’ to describe the content as video. This is the favoured way of describing video content for search engines. This post from Google explains it and gives the coding needed; Google Video Schemas
(Source; these optimisation tips were adapted from this Econsultancy blog posting)
