Video and animation

VIDEO AND ANIMATION: MOVING PICTURES, MOVING YOUR AUDIENCE

Videography and animated content provides a great way to present your information in a medium that can engage your audience more effectively. While that’s often been the case, the increase in some excellent production tools can now help you produce better content, more quickly, at a lower cost; along with a rise in available channels to feature that same content once you’ve produced it.

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Video grabs attention much more easily than text content, and is therefore more effective in helping to get your message across. Video is also shared much more frequently than written content, helping to bring your content to a wider audience.

While the increase in the number of tools available to help you produce content is a great thing, like all tools they should be used well. Pre-production and post-production are still two of the most essential phases of creating your video or animated content.

Pre-production helps to determine what it is you’re trying to convey before you press ‘record’. Having considered what your message is, you’ll be better prepared to capture the content needed to make your video, while also helping to prepare anyone who may be speaking to the camera.

A good pre-production process will also ensure that you have everything in place before you record, or will help you resolve any potential issues ahead of time. Equally, a good post-production process will allow you to edit your project much quicker, while also ensuring that you have access to your captured footage to manage in future projects – that’s especially useful when you’re looking to produce multiple small clips for social media channels.

 

Use video alongside other content

Video can be most effective when used alongside other content or as part of a clear content strategy. Use a web link at the end of a video to send your audience to a webpage where you’d like them to get more information or perform a certain action, such as signing up to your newsletter, contacting you, or making a purchase. Don’t forget to also include the relevant web links in the caption of your social media post or bio to increase your traffic.

 

Use video and animation

While video can be a great asset, at times it can be hard to produce a good video. Finding a willing volunteer to be in front of the camera, or managing the multiple channels of filming, audio and lighting might make producing a video tricky. Likewise, some subject matter just doesn’t look good on camera, or getting everything in place can prove too complicated. When that’s the case, using animation can be a really useful alternative. Animation allows you to create whatever you’d like, and present it in a way that suits your brand more clearly.

 

Create templates

If you plan to use video or animation regularly, then having templates to help you would make sense. Templates may help speed up the editing process when you’re producing a lot of content, or they could be a useful tool to ensure consistency in the visual style of your content – something that will help your audience recognise your content.

 

Share ‘evergreen’ content

Videos can be great content to share repeatedly on your social media channels, or elsewhere – such as in your workplace reception or on your website. If you consider what you’re producing before you create your video, you can ensure that the content doesn’t date too much; this means you can then use the content repeatedly in different outputs.