Want to leverage video for your business, but not sure how? It’s increasingly important to deliver messages across as many mediums as possible, but producing good video and claiming a worthwhile return on investment takes care and planning. These tips will help.

1) Know your market segments

Video works differently for different audiences. One audience may respond best to a short clip suitable for sharing on YouTube; others to standard television commercials. A short fiction piece may impact one group strongly, while it’s the documentary that hits another hard. You need to know your market segments, and decide which ones you need to target most precisely with your video. You may even need to invest in multiple videos to cover different groups, if you don’t have a standout high-value segment.

2) Work with a qualified film production team

A nice camera and a credit of film studies from community college does not equip you for effective commercial video. Even a line of successful commercial productions may not make a particular team appropriate for your specific goals. Make sure you thoroughly discuss what you need – and check references.

3) Lay out concrete goals

If you want to use film or video for your organization’s goals, you need to know those goals in advance. If you don’t have a strategy nailed down yet, you can’t possibly produce commercial video to meet strategic goals, nor can you communicate what you need clearly to your production crew.

4) Trust your experts

You don’t want to put a corporate documentary or a commercial through the wringer and end up with something bland and boring. That doesn’t mean you can’t raise objections or offer suggestions to your production team – it just means you need to limit the people doing so to a few key decision makers who trust the experts to use their expertise appropriately.

5) Collect data

Modern businesses live and die on their understanding of customers, which means collecting as much hard data as possible. That doesn’t mean extensive focus-testing – it means surveys and web analytics, so you understand how people behave when they see your video (or scroll past it un-viewed on their news feed).

If you’d like to learn more about commercial video production, or any other aspect of film production, you can contact Red Hall Films today.