Making personal connections and using great storytelling are key to successful marketing campaigns. But with so many people working remotely from home these days, some companies are struggling to tell their brand’s story in the same engaging ways, especially to create sales and marketing videos without dedicated studio time or on-site video shoots.
You don’t have to put your video marketing efforts on the shelf just because offices are empty. In fact, making a professional video from home (or any location) is easier today than ever. You can still create a great marketing video from home without a fully stocked video production toolkit. If you’re willing to spend some time on basic setup, you’ll soon have a system to create your sales and marketing videos while working remotely.
The main ingredients to making a professional video from home are:
Let’s dive into each of these a bit more.
As with any marketing content or campaign, it’s important to know why you’re creating a video before you do it. That knowledge will inform your approach and your script, and the script is a core ingredient for successful marketing and sales video. There are a few questions to consider before you can answer the big question above:
Once you’ve answered these questions, you should be able to write your script. Remember: different types of videos have different levels of engagement, so be cognizant of video watch times when you’re choosing your video type and crafting your script.
The script is the foundation of any professional marketing video. You can add graphics and catchy music to the finished production itself, but without a strong message and a compelling call to action, you’ll quickly lose viewers’ interest.
Before you write your script, make sure you know what type of video you’re making. This may mean having buy-in from different departments, depending on the nature of your video. For example, if your video is a how-to about using one of your products, you’ll likely want the product team to weigh in. If it’s a high-level marketing video, you may find it impactful to have sales, service, and your product team involved in the scripting, if not the production itself.
Here are a few tips to ensure that you have a strong video script:
It may also be helpful to put together a storyboard to accompany your script. If you need help drafting your video script, check out Raka’s video storyboard and script template.
Branded virtual backgrounds have caught on with increased use of video conferencing tools and they’re easy to create. You can use Zoom or Canva to manage and create your virtual backgrounds. Once you’ve saved your virtual background, you’ll be able to use it anytime, whether you’re making a professional video from home or just enjoying a virtual happy hour.
If you have it available, Raka recommends using an interior image of your office or your storefront as your virtual background. Another approach is to have your design team or agency create a branded background that includes your brand colors, logo, or other defining brand attributes.
You can enhance the quality of your video by just doing a few simple things:
Another thing to keep in mind while creating your next video: your co-workers, customers, and prospects understand that you’re working remotely, so while your dirty laundry shouldn’t play a starring role in your video, if your kids, pets, or cool home office tchotchkes (my Dad has a bat autographed by Derek Jeter, for example) make an appearance, don’t sweat it. Who knows—it might even be the thing that leads into your next great sales conversation!
Virtual backgrounds aren’t the only graphics you should feature in your videos. Especially when making professional videos while remote, adding graphics to your videos could enhance the presentation while at the same time reduce the amount of time you have to spend staring into your webcam. Just like with virtual backgrounds, you can use Canva to create graphics to add to your videos if you don’t have a designer available to create them.
Of course, you don’t always have to rely on heavily designed graphics to get your point across. Screenshots, screen recordings, and simple images shot with your phone can do wonders to help tell your story, and they’re easy to produce for basically everyone. I’m a big fan of the Full Page Screen Capture Chrome extension (and so are 43,000 other users), which takes a screenshot of an entire webpage—not just the part that’s on your screen—and allows you to doctor the screenshot before saving as a jpg or PDF.
The types of graphics you might use will vary based upon the type of video you’re creating and who you’re creating it for, which is why Raka recommends creating a graphic library so you can quickly and easily repurpose designed files for videos, presentations or other assets.
An animated logo or other bumper at the beginning and end of your video can help to encourage brand awareness and retention among your audience. Typically, these sorts of assets require someone with some video production or motion design experience to produce, but there are tools out there like Biteable, PlaceIt, and Brandcrowd that can help you do the work from the comfort of your couch.
It’s difficult to convey your brand’s message in a 5-10 second animation, but it can be done. You may want to sample some other animated logos before designing your own to get a feel for how your competitors or like-minded companies portray themselves in motion. A few ideas you may want to consider include:
One of the ways we’re seeing a lot more people create remote professional videos is relying on the power of animation. Of course, animated videos don’t require you to clean up your piles of laundry or spend any extra time on your hair, but they do require a level of comfort with some animation tools that not everyone has, and animations can take a long time to produce. At Raka, we use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects to create our videos—both of which can be sampled for free right now in the Adobe Creative Cloud—but you may prefer other tools, such as Apple’s Motion, which is a relative bargain at only $49 (of course, you’ll need to have a MacBook to make the investment possible).
If you’re interested in learning more about making animated videos, check out our blog post on how to make an animated video.
No matter its purpose, making a professional video at home is easier to do today than it’s ever been. Raka recommends starting with small projects—like a 30–45 second videos explaining a campaign to your internal team to get comfortable—before moving on to bigger productions. Taking advantage of tools like Zoom and Canva can go a long way to creating a polished product that your boss will love, but the best way to make a great home marketing video is to follow the same steps you’d take when creating a video in-studio: be prepared, polished and to the point.