Josh wants me to make two promotional videos for him to help him gain more clients which I have written about in this blog Josh- Personal Trainer, so I thought I would do my first bit of research on What makes a successful promotional video. When researching I found a site that gives 8 steps to creating a promotional video and I wanted to make some notes as what has been written helps me with my idea.
The screenshot below from the site is talking about the first step to take which is to identify the goal. It then lists below what some of the common goals may be and that if you have multiple goals make multiple videos. Luckily for me the main goal is to Drive sales as Josh wants more clients so this helps massively as he doesn’t have several goals.
The next step it gives it to choose a direction of the video so whether want it to be a testimonial or informative etc. I think for the videos I am doing it is more to drive sales but also inform people on how Josh trains people.
The third step the website gives is to set the tone of the video for example humorous or entertaining etc. The tone I am going with is Artsy/ Hip/ Cool as this is my favourite style of video and when I met up with Josh it is the style he enjoyed when I showed him what videos I do. I also personally from a creators point of view think its a very attractive style.
The next step it gives is to pick the length of video so for this you need to think of a few things so what the goal of the video is which mine is sales, think were the ad will appear and the overall budget. My promotional videos will be appearing on Facebook and Instagram so I will be making both videos a minute. Budget wise I don’t have one as I am doing it for free so I am just putting maximum effort into it but I am just going to be making it a really good one minute to keep the audience engaged for the whole minute.
The site then says to choose a video style for example animated or B- roll etc. I will be using B-roll as my video style mixed with real people however the people won’t be acting they will just be exercising normally as capturing them exercising naturally is best also the B-roll side comes in because this is how I want to smoothen out the shots by using B-roll for example going from long ranged shots to close ranged etc.
Step 6 is to outline the idea of the videos you are making this is something I will be working on over the next few weeks as I begin to develop what is going into the videos etc.
The site also goes on to say you need to think of the scene, characters, audio/ voice over/ text overlay, product (if there is one), props and the final CTA (Call to action). These are all really good things I need to add into my planning stage.
For step 7 and 8 the site said to write a script and a storyboard so you can plan more in detail and you can visualise it more these are also things I will be working on during the planning stage.
Now I have looked into how to make a successful promotional video I need to act up on what I have found so I need to make sure my video drives sales as that is the main goal for Josh so I am going to look into ways to drive sales as it can help develop my idea. I also need to make sure the tone of my videos are artsy/hip hop/cool as this style really suits me and from looking at some inspiration in this blog Contextual Analysis- Inspiration- Personal Trainer Promotional Videos I can see they use these styles to so I need to make sure I practice the techniques they use. This also links to the style of video which I am doing which is B- roll so I am going to be practicing my B- roll to. So I am now going to make sure I complete these tasks to make sure I have a successful video.
Maguire, A. (2020). 8 steps to creating a promotional video. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-create-a-promotional-video-707fa7a63019 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2020].
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