Welcome to part 2 of this blog post! Check out Part 1 here.
By now you’re in a different position than when you made your first foray in to video. Some turned out well, some not so well. You’ve learned about your audience/clients/users, you’ve created a brand identity and expressed it, and you have marketing channels established. You’ve taken your stock car to Daytona and white knuckled your way to waving a checkered flag and tearing up the infield. Now it’s time to turn it up a notch and add some finesse to your style.
5. Talent Recruiting / Culture Video
Congrats! You’re feeling the pressure of almost every tech company in the world. Maybe you landed a huge client, maybe you raised a series A or B and now you’re building your team FAST. With this huge flux of momentum, you’re going to start getting attention that you want to take advantage of. It’s important to direct these new eyes to something very important, you’re HIRING! Future employees may be reading articles hearing about your company for the first time, browsing your site and looking at . . . what? Ideally, they’ll get a great quick understanding of what it’s like to work at your company and become compelled to apply.
Many companies choose to represent this through video, which can be effective but accuracy in the messaging really needs to be spot on to make a good impression. Huge tech companies are going to spend a fortune on videos like this because they have state of the art office spaces, lavish perks, full HR teams to focus on this, and media teams to execute.
My advice would be to not try and compete to seem epic but play with your own playbook and tell your own unique story. A lot of these are unbearably cheesy and don’t seem to capture the real feel of the start-up. Capture a slice of realness that separates your team from an army of employees at a tech behemoth.
A relatively simple format that isn’t too difficult to execute would be doing quick sit down interviews with a few key team members, intercut with footage of your office and team events. The founders could talk about why they started the company and its core values. Usually, it’s engineers that you need to bring on board asap so a deep dive with the CTO or Head of Engineering would be perfect to share more about the technical work at your company. A word or two from an early engineer on the team could give the viewer a vision of what it would be like for them if they were hired.
For this nuanced of a message you’ll need someone that can not only produce a passably professional looking video, but craft a meaningful story. Something in the $1,500- $2,000 range is where you want to be. If this amount scares you, I would justify it by thinking about what you pay for referral bonuses or commissions to recruiters.
This could be what tips the scale for a prospective employee to come in to interview and when that game changing engineer joins your team, it’ll be like getting an N64 for Christmas. It’s a good piece of content for your team to share out as they recruit from their networks too.
6. Sales Tools
Now we’re having fun. You’re selling your product to clients, gaining users and your sales team is making great progress. One of the benchmark measurements for the real value of a piece of media being produced is how close it’s connected to the revenue of a business. You spent a chunk of change on the recruiting video earlier, why? Because the impact of adding another engineer to your team is immense, and they’re building what you’re selling. There’s a correlation to make between your spend on recruiting new talent and the budget of the video.
Here’s a softball lob of a correlation, if your sales team needs a tool to combat objections and concerns about your product, and they can use a video to move a prospect through the sales pipeline to closed/won, what is the value of that video? What is your cost of customer acquisition? What is the value of a new contract? That can help you decide how to take advantage of these.
Not in all cases, but generally, these videos take the form of testimonials. Getting your existing clients to talk in their own words about your prospect’s concerns is a valuable asset for sales. This can be incredibly poignant if you’re in a situation where your competitors are resorting to FUD tactics (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt).
In this application of video, I would still say to lean heavily towards substance over style. Remember this is a sales tool above all else and the benefit of more videos being able to address multiple value propositions exceeds that of a cinematic masterpiece. It also likely won’t have a shelf life of longer than a year. That being said, the expertise of someone to devise a strategy around interviewing, and the ability to craft a cohesive story out of 5–7 interviews is critical.
You’re going to need to be prepared for at least 1 full day of production with, at minimum, a one man band video crew, and editing for a 1–2 min video. In almost any market for acceptable quality will run you $1,500-$2,500. Depending on the value of your contracts and the amount of product features or responses to FUD you need to address, start with 1–3 videos.
7. Product Announcement / Commercial
You’re product is evolving. Those features that we’re dreams at the conception of the company are now ready to launch thanks to the blood, sweat, and diet coke of your team. What a video can do to help you here is get the announcement out in a fun and quick way so that your users to start utilizing this new tool or feature asap.
There are a few different ways to hit this goal stylistically ranging from simple to complex. It really depends on how specific the product update is, how much education is needed around it, and how you want to represent your brand. Ultimately though you want to walk away saying “That really represented us accurately”.
Something that is much more important to this type of video compared to the others mentioned is your marketing channels for distribution. The maximum value of this really depends on the ability to get it out in front of the right audience. Do you have social media pages set up? Have you scaled to the point where you have someone in charge of marketing?
If this is your first foray into this style of video, I would keep things simple and use it as a good piece of content to launch or support your early social channels. A quick and dirty overhead, prop-based, voice over video, shot with members of your team involved, should be able to be executed for around $1,500. You want to have some additional funds in the budget set aside for social ads. Don’t double down on producing something $2,000+ without someone on your team capable of being the DRI on the marketing strategy to maximize the payoff. (I could write an entire post about this point alone).
Once you get to the point of having a head of marketing and established channels for distribution of content, you’ll be poised to make a big impact with the help of a professional creative team for around $5,000-$7,500. That will not only be a great kick-off to your new product announcement, but also represent your brand in context with your users to the biggest audience you’ve had yet.
8. Explainer Revamp
After you’ve become well acquainted with how to maximize the value out of a video you’ve decided to produce, and you’ve got the ones listed earlier under your belt, you’ll be ready for a flagship branding explainer video. By now the first explainer video you did when you started the company is probably humorously outdated and taken down ages ago.
The big difference between that effort and this one is that there is a new audience for your message. You’re announcing to your industry that you’ve arrived. It sets the stage for you to define your brand to your new users, the media, and anyone on this grander scale that wants to get a concise and visual representation of what your product does and why.
In this new installment you’ll be producing something with a really long shelf life (9 months to 1.5 years). It will encompass the mission statement of your company, the key value props of your product, and showcase your brand. Make it something special with the help of the pros you used last time and shoot for $5,000-$7,500. This should be dripping in style and have a really cohesive creative strategy. It will be as close as you can get before working with an ad agency and having to go into the tens of thousands in budget, but it will be uniquely yours.
Quick Recap:
- Intro Explainer Video
- Conference Quickies
- Website Materials
- Training/Support Materials
- Talent Recruiting / Culture Video
- Sales Tools
- Product Announcement / Commercial
- Explainer Revamp
These steps aren’t for everyone exactly, but most companies could point to each and have a handful of examples from their own experience. It’s important to realize what you’re ready for and when, and operate realistically with respect to video.
What I try to do is work as the connector between the wild artists and the non-creatives to understand what we can accomplish together; to create something that will not only look and feel like your brand, but make actual production sense and hit clear objectives to maximize utility.
Happy shooting!
Victor Lord is currently a Lead Producer at DYNMC Creative .
