Are You Ready For 2018? Why You Should Start Planning Your Video Marketing Strategy Early
October 17, 2017
17th October 2017 by CH
Halloween, Christmas, and before you know it’s the new year and you’re planning your 2018 marketing strategy over a cold turkey sandwich…
So why not enjoy your time off and start planning early?
We’re here to help, so take a look at our advice to ensure you begin 2018 with style.
Good video production takes time
As wonderful as it would be to come up with an idea for a video on day one, shoot it the next and then have it signed off by the end of the third, it’s obviously not a good idea and of course it’ll have creative limitations.
Depending on the scale of your production, it can take anything from a few days to produce short form videos for social, to weeks or even months for large scale video campaigns, product launches and even in-depth documentaries.
But as with Christmas shopping, don’t fret! Advanced planning can help speed up the process, ensure that everything flows according to plan and maximise the quality of the end result. If you’re struggling, begin with our handy guide for writing a video brief.
Ask the right questions
Before you start work on your marketing plan for the upcoming year, it’s important to firstly establish what you want to achieve and how you’re going to measure your results. You’ll need KPIs and goals.
If you’re struggling to see how video marketing can contribute towards your overall strategy, check out our article about how you can use video to grow your business online.
We’ve also got 5 tips for increasing video engagement on social media to help you achieve better results.
Decide on a budget & check in with your agencies
Having an idea of your budget (even a ballpark) early on will help your agencies estimate what’s achievable for you. Your video agency can tell you what’s possible too and what style and scale of production you can go for. So, once you’ve established your budget, get in touch with them and brainstorm ideas and tell them exactly what you need. Make it a collaborative process! Visibility of your marketing plan and key dates will also ensure they’re available and ready to go at the push of a button. Here’s a reminder on why it’s more cost-effective to go with a professional video production agency.
We’ve been providing a variety of video production services for our clients for the last 12 years.
We understand why planning and preparation are so important. That’s why we’re already collaborating with clients on their 2018 video marketing strategies right now. And we can help you too.
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We're #23 in the UK Top 50 Big news from us! CH Video have climbed 7 places in the EVCOM (Event & Visual Communication Association) + Moving Image UK Top 50.
When Euronics came to us with a brief, it was a good one: take a true story about an extraordinary delivery and turn it into something worth watching. The Brief Joe, a Euronics delivery agent, had been tasked with getting a chest freezer to a customer in rural Wales. The road ran out. He carried on anyway, on foot, through fields, across rivers and over hills. The customer was delighted. The story deserved to be told. Euronics asked us to produce a short comedic video retelling that journey. The challenge was finding the right visual language to match the scale of the tale. The Concept We pitched several approaches centred on a comic-book aesthetic, bold, energetic and a little tongue-in-cheek. It felt like the right fit: a story that was equal parts heroic and absurd, told in a style that leaned into both. The concept paired real interview footage of Joe with AI-generated visuals to bring his journey to life. Where a traditional shoot would have required location days across Welsh countryside, generative AI gave us the tools to illustrate the story scene by scene. Creative Wrangling We filmed Joe against a studio blue backdrop, letting him tell the story in his own words. His delivery did a lot of the heavy lifting (puns intended!), dry, matter-of-fact and quietly brilliant. The AI-generated visuals were built around detailed multi-angle reference sheets for Joe, the Euronics van and the chest freezer.
Generative AI can easily open doors to help create bespoke, crafted content to elevate a video beyond the usual approaches. Recently we tested the latest AI tools to create vast scenic landscapes, humorous underwater worlds and visual effects shots for several campaigns. The tools have advanced a long way over the last few years and the barriers to creating believable or imaginative worlds are fading away all the time. Need an underwater disco full of dancing fish? Got it. A speaking anthropomorphic clown fish? Absolutely. The Key is Consistency It was key to ensure a good amount of consistency across each video. We created multi-angle reference sheets of characters and key objects and use node-based tools to link these, and additional brand references, to ensure the look was maintained throughout. The tools are now in a place where you can also direct and control the results much more closely. Camera moves, lens choices and lighting can be defined and adjusted to get closer to the image or video that you’re looking for and as the creative options expand, options for creativity within each shot expand infinitely.
