It’s Our 25th Birthday! We’re Celebrating by Giving Away Free Videos. Find Out More:
We’re giving every client that signs a new contract before the end of April 2023, two FREE videos (some restrictions apply*). These videos will be 15 seconds each and are ideal for advertising on social media, including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Short videos highlighting the best of your brand are a great way to engage customers on social media. They provide a quick, visual representation of your product or service that is easily digestible. Take a look at these examples:
FULL VIDEO
15-SECOND TEASER VIDEO
Not only do they grab attention from potential customers scrolling through their news feeds, but they also help build trust in your brand.
The key advantages of using short videos are that they can be used to explain complex features or concepts in a simple and concise presentation. The viewer is able to get a quick overview of what you are offering without having to read long paragraphs of text. Short videos can also help build trust in your brand by providing honest insight into what it has to offer.
When used effectively, short videos highlighting the best of your brand are sure to benefit both you and your customers alike. Click here to get the conversation started with a video expert today. Make sure to let us know that you’d like to claim this offer!
As your business evolves, it’s important to evolve your video marketing as well. Changes in leadership, technology, location and workforce can all have a tremendous impact on defining who you are to your industry as a whole, your competition, your employees and potential new employees. Big changes are more obvious, but many companies change more slowly overtime so after 5 or 6 years a “new” company has emerged. Without a doubt, the most effective form of marketing to effectively showcase your business and its progress is video.
Video marketing offers a wide range of benefits for businesses that use it correctly. With videos featuring employees talking about their work or showcasing new products and services, you can provide potential customers with an inside look at your company culture and operations.
Additionally, videos are great for getting people interested in what you’re offering because they’re easier than ever to watch on a variety of devices at any time. When implemented correctly, videos can reach way beyond your website. Fresh video content also provides businesses with an opportunity to connect more authentically with their audience by sharing stories and demonstrating how they can help them solve problems or achieve goals.
Take a look at how Schaefer as changed. Here’s a video we filmed and produced more than 6 years ago:
And here’s a video project we’ve completed recently:
It is essential for your business to remain agile and adaptable in order to remain competitive and relevant. Video is an effective tool that can be used to showcase a business’s unique approach or values. It is also important to remember that change can be positive and should not be feared, but rather embraced as an opportunity for growth. Embracing change and utilizing video will allow businesses to better communicate their message and stand out from their competition.
Video marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses to engage customers and create lasting relationships. For companies that attend trade shows, video marketing can be a key part of their strategy for driving sales and increasing brand awareness.
Here’s a video that Starwood Customs featured on custom built Jeeps in their trade show booth at SEMA.
Videos are an effective way to capture the attention of potential customers, draw them to your booth, and easily explain products or services that may otherwise be difficult to demonstrate on the trade show floor. With quality, creative, bespoke video, companies have more options than ever before to showcase their products and services in an engaging way. And the benefits of your videos don’t end when the trade show does, your videos can reach more people even after the show is over through email marketing, social media, and beyond.
Trade shows provide an excellent opportunity to get your company, product, or services noticed. They are crowded events packed full of potential customers, so you want to stand out from the crowd and draw attention to your booth. One way to do this is with video presentations that show off what makes your product or service unique.
Ingersoll Rand has a strategic partnership with a motorcycle company and their team used IR tools to build motorcycles live on the trade show floor. The same tools that were being used to build the motorcycles were also featured in this video:
Here are some ideas for types of videos that can help make an impact at trade shows:
Launch New Products
Tease Upcoming Releases
Showcase Satisfied Customers & Positive Reviews
Highlight Products & Collections
Promote Sales & Promotions
Offer an Inside Look Into Your Company, Culture & Team Members
Video marketing at trade shows is a great way to engage potential customers, increase brand awareness, and have a memorable presence. It provides an opportunity to reach more people in a shorter period of time while providing visual content that can be consumed quickly and in multiple formats. Video is also easily shareable and can be used to create an ongoing viewership for your brand. Investing in video marketing for trade shows can help your business stand out from the competition and build consumer loyalty. Ready to get started?
It’s that time of year, again. Leaves are falling, the temperatures are dropping, and turkeys are getting nervous. It’s budget season, and you should be nervous too, if you haven’t planned for video in your marketing, HR, or safety/training budgets for next year.
As we approach 2023:
Video continues to be used by an overwhelming majority of businesses, with 86% of businesses using video as a marketing tool. (wyzowl)
94% of marketers say video has helped them increase the viewer’s understanding of their product or service. (wyzowl)
Job postings with videos are viewed 12% more than postings without videos and have a 34% greater application rate. (CareerBuilder)
Recruitment agencies are reporting 800% more engagement with job ads that have video embedded. (firefish)
With the budget season upon us, we’re fielding many questions from executives and businesses who want to add video to their marketing, recruiting, and HR strategies. What will it take, and what will it cost?
Video production is truly a multidisciplinary task, brought together by a team of creatives with diverse skills and experiences. Many factors will affect your video production costs. How large is the crew? Are people going to be interviewed? Is it an on-location shoot or in a studio? Do you want live-action or animated video? All of this should be considered when putting together a plan for your videos. The type of videos you want and how you choose to produce them will affect your video budget.
Video concept creation usually goes one of two ways: the budget drives the video concept, or the video concept drives the budget.
Setting the budget before the video concept creation begins, can limit the overall creative treatment of the video: a limited number of actors (if any), fewer days to shoot, a smaller crew, and the need for a voiceover. This can ultimately affect the quality of the finished product, from storytelling to lighting to wardrobe/makeup.
Pairing the right budget with the best message execution is key to creating a great video that resonates with your audience. To create a video that delivers the communication goal, you must know how the video will be used (marketing, recruiting, safety, broadcast, website), identify the audience you want to see it (customers, employees, candidates), and what you want the viewer to feel or do after they’ve seen it.
As clients look into creating more video content, one of the biggest questions is budget. At SpotOn Productions, our average video costs about $8,000; in line with national data from Wyzowl that the average cost of producing a 60-second explainer video is $7,972.
Ultimately, you should budget anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 for your video needs. It depends on the story you’re trying to tell, what you’re looking to create, and the number of videos you want to produce. The key is getting the most for your money.
At SpotOn Productions, we’re here to guide you every step of the way, from the planning as you set your video budget(s) for 2023 to helping you get great value from whatever budget you or your company have already determined. Regardless of the project and budget you have in mind, the important thing is that when you partner on video projects with SpotOn Productions, you’re in good hands. Our team can bring your vision to life, just the way you imagined, showing the world your best.
And hey, we’re very capable and ready for any six-figure productions you want to produce! Bring it on! With SpotOn Production, you’ll get excellence with every size of video project.
At the end of the day, the SpotOn Productions team is all about creating videos that deliver your message and engage your audience. Give us a call. We’ll meet with you and help you plan out your video strategy for 2023, or maybe even chat about that idea you’d love to see come to life!
One of the first things that happen in a down economy is that companies begin to slash money out of their budgets wherever possible. Unfortunately for many businesses, one of the first areas they begin to cut money from is their lifeline: the marketing and advertising budget. While this may seem like an easy place to save some quick dollars, it can be one of the worst places that a company can select to cut funding to survive long term. Cutting your advertising takes a bad situation and makes it worse. When your business drops and you stop telling your unique story to customers, you set yourself up for failure. During the Great Depression, industrialist Henry Ford noted, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops the clock to save time.”
ALL ABOUT MARKET SHARE
One of the biggest reasons to continue, if not increase, advertising during a down economy is customer behavior. When money is tight, customers become even more discerning with every dollar they spend. They hunt for not only quality but value in their purchases. While your competition cuts their advertising budget, you can capture customers’ attention and build long-term brand loyalties. When you continue advertising through a bad economy, the landscape becomes much less crowded because your competition has gone into hiding. As advertising noise is reduced, your “share of voice” multiplies. Your competition becomes “out of sight…out of mind.” During these times, timid competitors will fall behind (and likely never catch up), while your “share of mind” goes uncontested. This means a higher probability that your business will be noticed and your product or service purchased. A larger market share is very important if the pie is getting smaller.
A famous adage states, “When times are good, you should advertise. When times are bad, you must advertise.”
SHOW ME THE STUDIES
In business, it’s all about numbers. Here are a few studies conducted during economic downturns showing that companies that consistently advertise even during recessions perform better in the long run.
During the 1970 recession, a study by American Business Press and Meldrum & Fewsmith showed that “Sales and profits can be maintained and increased in recession years and in the years immediately following by those who are willing to maintain an aggressive marketing posture, while others adopt the philosophy of cutting back on promotional efforts when sales appear to be harder to get.”
A study of 143 companies in 1974-75, also conducted by American Business Press, found that companies that continued advertising during the economic downturn and did not cut marketing expenditures had the highest growth in sales and net income during the two years of the study, and the two years following the recession. American Business Press also showed that companies that cut advertising in one or both recession years had the lowest sales and net income increases during the same study periods.
McGraw-Hill’s study of 600 B2B companies during the 1981-82 recession looked at aggressive companies that had only a slight edge over their competitors going into the recession. These firms continued to invest in advertising and continued to grow successfully. The big news came two years after the recession. Businesses that cut back on advertising stalled out at sales levels that the aggressive companies blew past during the recession. By the end of 1985, companies that had advertised aggressively had grown by over 256%.
In 2008, Millward Brown shared evidence that 60% of the brands that went ‘dark’ during an economic downturn (no TV ad spend for 6 months) saw ‘brand use’ decrease 24% and ‘brand image’ decrease 28%. Brands that cut their ad budget at a higher rate relative to their competitors were at a greater risk of share loss.
An IPA (The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) study in 2008 reported that “Following a budget cut, a brand will continue to benefit from the marketing investment made over the previous few years. This will mitigate any short-term business effects, and will result in a dangerously misleading increase in short-term profitability. The longer-term business harm will be more considerable, but will not be noticed at first.” The report also highlighted that “A brand judged to be on the way down, because it has fallen silent, will very rapidly see this manifested in word-of-mouth, which will accelerate the perception of failure.”
WHAT MESSAGE SHOULD I BE SENDING?
Think of it this way, if your company reduces communications to your current and potential customers, and your main competitor maintains or increases communications to your current and potential customers, whose business is more likely to grow during and following the recession?
It’s important to look at the message you send to your customers. The key is to craft messages that reflect the times and describe how your product or service benefits the consumer. In a recession, consumers don’t stop spending; they become more selective. Customers look harder for value in their purchases. People are going to continue to buy, and they are likely to buy from a business that they know, like, and trust. For a company, this means your advertising message must be adapted to what the buying public wants to hear. Restaurants focus on value, consistent quality, and lower prices, while auto mechanics focus on improving the reliability of the car you own.
Conduct research…send surveys. Find out what is driving the needs of your core customers. Some good questions to ask: How have customer emotional needs changed? Where are the new opportunities? How does your message need to change? How can you reposition and make your brand more relevant over the next 12 months of economic hardship?
A May 2008 Milward Brown paper titled “Marketing During Recession: Survival Tactics” recommended that the best way to leverage media spend during a recession is to put it behind high-quality creative and effectively making creative work harder. Across a variety of categories, brands and channels, creative was found to have five times as much impact on profit as did budget allocation.
WRAP IT UP
For the continued success of your business, it is vital to continue advertising, especially during these hard economic times. The more visible you are, the more confident customers and prospects become. Study your customer to learn their needs and build relationships with them. Marketing never stops; if you quit now, you’re wasting what you’ve already created and invested in your customer. While times may be tough, this is an ideal environment for creativity and opportunity. Maintain a strong and consistent message while focusing on your core values. Your customers will see your business as one that has weathered the storm and be confident in doing business with your company now and in the future.
Need to stay top of mind with your customers and grow your market share during the recession?
Call us to see how video can help you show the world your best.
513-779-4223 or sales@spoton.productions
Right now, trying to hire great talent is more challenging than the Reds having a winning season. If your organization needs to step up its recruiting brand and improve candidate quality, it’s time to incorporate video into your recruiting and hiring processes. Below is some inspiration to help identify what routes would work best for your recruiting, so you can start converting engaged viewers into your next best hires.
Here are five great ways to effectively use video for recruiting:
1. Showcase Videos on Your Career Site
When interested candidates visit your career site, they are looking for ways to learn more about your brand and what it’s like to work for your organization. What better way to successfully communicate those things other than doing it with video? Showcase your company culture, provide employee testimonials, give insight into day-to-day responsibilities, or display your incredible workspaces. Using video to communicate a genuine representation of your company’s work style makes connecting with the right candidates more effective.
2. Incorporate Video into Your Job Postings
Embed relevant videos into your job advertisements to effectively communicate your company’s expectations. That way, candidates can better decipher whether they are a good fit for the position and your organization. A quintessential video for this section is a “day in the life” video. Showcase the position’s responsibilities and what the environment is like. This type of video really resonates with candidates, compelling them to apply when they feel it’s the right fit (and opting out when it’s not). A key thing to note is that videos help increase your SEO. Job postings that include video are more likely to appear in a job seeker’s search results than those that don’t.
3. Use Video at a Job Fair
Give job seekers an inside look into what it’s like to work for your organization. Set up a computer or tablet for on-site viewing or share the video links directly with job seekers. Using video at your job fair booth will drive more job seekers to learn about your company, and it will also help connect with ideal candidates.
4. Share Videos Across Social Networking Sites
Use video to expand your recruiting reach across social channels. Share recruiting videos via YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. Doing so will encourage viewers to share videos with their peers, extending your talent reach across multiple user networks.
5. Use Video After the Hiring Process
Video is an excellent employment tool even once you’ve sourced, interviewed, and hired. Create welcome videos to kick off an employee’s first day or custom training videos for onboarding. Improve your new hire’s performance by providing videos that help them better understand your company’s processes and values.
Video is quickly becoming a core aspect of recruiting. Each year, more and more companies are choosing to adapt their strategies by incorporating video. Gain a competitive advantage by starting the process of integrating video into your organization’s talent acquisition strategy today.
The work we create at SpotOn Productions helps our clients show the world their best. And while winning awards isn’t why we do the work that we do, it is nice to have your work recognized by peers and be able to celebrate the wins with our team.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve won our first ever Gold Telly Award, which became the top award starting in 2018, for a total of 5 awards in 2022. This brings our Telly Award count to 44 Tellys in the last 16 years. We’re proud of the work that we create and incredibly grateful for the amazing clients that partner with us to create incredible videos that help solve their business challenges.
The awards we officially won at the 43rd Annual Telly Awards are:
Gold Branded Promotional Content Award – “Nature Delivered” for MetroParks of Butler County
You have some video content. Now what?! You’ve done the hardest part, now let’s put your videos to work… again and again.
You Need Video Content Now More Than Ever
People consume video content faster than ever before, and many brands struggle to provide viewers with a consistent content stream. Not only can we help you create the perfect video, but we can also help you distribute it through a custom video marketing strategy designed to attract, engage and convert.
Already have videos and footage from the past? You’ve done the hardest part, now let’s put your videos to work… again and again. Let’s repurpose your existing videos and create new content to tell a new story. Need to create new videos and want some content inspiration? Take a look at some shareworthy footage we took throughout the year:
Promote with Purpose
Distributing and promoting your video is critical to its success. There are many possible methods of online distribution available once you have videos to share. Together, we’ll create a comprehensive marketing strategy that combines exposure through a combination of owned media (website, email marketing, etc.), paid media (paid search and social ads), and earned media (press releases).
The same video content can be prepared in different lengths, which will also help contribute to their long-term success. Short videos do best on Instagram and in paid ads, but longer videos for product reviews, demonstrations, FAQs, etc. will do best directly on your website.
Connect with Multiple Audience Types with the Same Video Content
Every video is intended for one or several specific groups of people and your video marketing strategy should target each one differently. The difference could be as simple as geographic location or involve more complex demographics. Once we know who they are, will we need to attract them to the top of the funnel, engage with them in the middle of the funnel, and guide them through conversion.
84% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads. (Wyzowl)
85% of marketers say that video is an effective way to get attention online. (Animoto)
Video ads were the #1 way consumers discovered a brand they later purchased from. (Animoto)
Over 90% of people say they discover new brands or products on YouTube. (Google)
86% of marketers say video has helped them increase traffic to their website. (Wyzowl)
Viewers claim they retain 95% of a message when obtained via video. (Social Media Week)
Measure the Success
Not only does the Internet provide the viewers, but it also provides detailed analytics for your videos. We’ll help you track key performance indicators (KPIs), which are easily measurable and provided by video hosting platforms. They give us details like total views, total unique viewers, view-through rate, total watch time, clicks, comments, etc. Each of these will help us understand the reach and effectiveness of each video. The data also benefits future video marketing strategies!
Let’s Get Going
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again… your business needs video content. Luckily, even a little video content can go a long way with proper planning and promotion. But to maximize reach and achieve your most important business goals, a steady stream of video content is most effective.
We get this question a lot and while there is no easy answer, we’ve done our best to summarize what you expect when you choose to work with SpotOn Productions.
