How to produce your institutional film
Today more than ever before, the public is bombarded with pictures. People consume photographs, videos and animated images on a daily basis. So, the audience has become more demanding. How to make an institutional film which will be seen and which retains attention? How to avoid your corporate video suffering the harsh law of the zapper?
We will define 6 key points you should know to make the difference and to make an impression. They are based on industry experience and careful observation of public behavior in the consumption of audiovisual products. They also enable you to save time and money by obtaining ‘right first-time’, well designed and effective corporate videos.
“An institutional film or corporate video is an internal or external communication film of a company, association, institution or of a group.”
Choose a communications agency that really listens
We could have said: choose a good communications agency. That’s obvious, you say. But how can you know that it is a competent agency? Well, it all starts with listening. Choose an agency that promotes listening and exchanges in its process, which works closely with you at all the stages of developing your corporate films. A corporate video, as you will see, involves several steps and it is crucial that you can intervene each time to fine-tune your marketing message, discuss details, draw on the suggested ideas.
But the communications agency must also be attentive to market standards in terms of corporate films. Technological watch and intelligence is the secret of those who dominate their profession because they never stop learning and getting trained. That will be reflected in particular in its catalogue, through the diversity of the type of videos on offer.
Design a visually surprising institutional film
Remember that you have little time to make an impact on your prospects. For your video to be seen, the audience must want to watch it. Whether it’s when arriving on your website, the Facebook or other social network news feed, the first thing the viewer sees is the miniature, the frozen-image thumbnail that represents the contents of your corporate video. Right from the start, choose an original visual which will catch the viewer’s attention.
For example, animation offers more flexibility than film. Motion design or whiteboard animation, because they are more recent, attract and intrigue the audience. This is a unique way to stand out and emphasize the uniqueness of your business with this graphic originality.
See a sample institutional / film video
Imagine a short film
There are institutional films which last between 5 and 10 minutes. Instead, we recommend choosing a duration of 1 minute 30 to 2 minutes 30 maximum. Why? This is the average length of time spent viewing YouTube videos. So, it’s the optimum length for your corporate film or commercial.
Your prospective customers zapp easily and quickly from one content to another. By making it short, you increase your chances that a commercial video will be viewed to the end. A short video also leads to a greater number of views and encourages engagement. These are two important criteria for Google’s ranking.
For your corporate presentation movies, you can also cut a big video into episodes. Multiplying the videos will help get a better ranking.
Tell a story
Storytelling, the act of telling a story, is a recent development in marketing. It is a question of adapting the immemorial “once upon a time” to corporate films. It combines several advantages over the conventional video product that provides a solution to a problem in a short time-frame. Storytelling captures the attention of your prospect by connecting to his love of stories, inherited from childhood. The sales pitch of your corporate video will have more impact with a message, supported by a story, which goes to the heart of the audience.
A story also makes your message easier to memorize. Added to this is that your prospects are 50% more receptive with the visual and audio combination offered by institutional video.
Get your video storyboarded
What will your corporate film look like? Before any image is filmed, it is crucial that you can have a clear idea of the final result. In cinema, that’s the purpose of the storyboard. It is a kind of comic strip that allows the film to be represented. Each shot appears there. This is the stage where you can make the final modifications you want. After that, we start filming and we can’t go back (unless we start filming again, which is very expensive).
Get good referencing
Once the corporate video has been made, it must be visible, be broadcast! You can obviously put it on Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo, if it’s a corporate video for your external communication. However, there is a know-how to optimize your referencing.
First of all, there is the choice of the title of your institutional film, which should include the emblematic key words of your marketing message and which are also searched by Web surfers, your future prospective customers. To do this, you can resort to Google trends and Google’s keyword generator. You must also look after the meta-tags; in fact, these are tags that give certain information to the search engines for better ranking. There are also other tips and we recommend you use a professional at this stage. How to name the video file, the description, the adding of the transcription, etc. all this is part of the art of optimization for search engines (SEO or Search Engine Optimization).
Remember that 50% of buyers trust you more after watching a video. Reassure your prospective customers, inform them, educate them in an amusing and effective way with successful institutional films. After all, it is your brand-image!
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