Published: December 12, 2017
by Justin Difazzio
1. Start with a solid foundation.
Every good building starts from a solid foundation. That’s the single most important thing to get right. Without a solid footing for a building, it’s just a nailed together pile of components. The same is true when you’re starting any project. Here at OC, we may not be involved in heavy construction, but we know how to build a successful and creative brand. It starts from the ground level by setting specific goals for the project. Knowing your target audience, the message and purpose of the product, your deadline for distribution, and your available budget will help you burst out of the gate with the most potential. Let’s follow this through a typical OC video project!
Target Audience
Even the most well-made, eye-catching, entertaining video won’t be effective if it is delivered to the wrong audience. That’s why having a clearly defined target audience will ensure you have a healthy launch. If you come to us with a campaign to attract new donors or clients, it would be helpful to know what market you’re looking to attract, from age range to income to geographic location. All of these factors can influence the content of a video production.
Equally important is knowing which delivery channels you want to use to reach that audience. A video about a new campaign or product for current supporters might be best delivered through email newsletters and mailers, whereas a video encouraging people to try you out for a service might be a better fit for social media and targeted advertising. In addition to all of this, knowing your target audience will better help you measure your return on investment after you release your video into the wild. With more strongly defined goals related to all of these factors, the results can be measured against those goals instead of some vague notion of what impact it might have had.
Message and Purpose
Tying right in to finding your target audience is deciding on your message and purpose. Purpose generally defines the message in your video. If you want to attract new donors, talking about changed policy and new management maybe isn’t the way to go. A better message would be something about what impact you’ve made, what services you offer, and how supporting you would enrich the client’s life in some tangible way. A clearly defined purpose can laser focus your production, cutting out wasted time and budget from a production. With an idea of exactly what you want to say, how, and to whom, nothing gets shot that doesn’t need to, saving you time and money.
Deadlines
Productions can be complicated machines to manage. Trying to get locations ready for a video shoot, personnel from your organization prepped and ready, and generating the content of a video all take time. Knowing how much time you have brings us all one step closer to making a tight production. If you want a promotional video for your spring fundraiser, and it’s already March, that will determine what kind of production there will be time for. If you know in October the theme, audience, and deadlines for your spring fundraiser, there’s much more we can do to make something spectacular for you. There is always the possibility for unexpected factors to creep up during the process on both sides, so it’s important to build time in to accommodate and correct for those things. Deadlines make quick disposal of guesswork, leaving everyone happier in the end.
Budget
With deadlines and message and target audience in place, there is one final piece to the puzzle, and it’s a doozy: budget. The life blood of a production is the budget. A better budget can ensure a bigger, more elaborate, more long term project. However, bigger doesn’t always mean better. There is plenty we can do and have done for people with smaller budgets. With lots of pre-production for a project, money can be saved on the production and post production. Knowing just what you’re looking for and your aspiration for the project are a huge step toward budget-friendly projects. Big or small or somewhere in between, there’s no denying that having a sensible and clearly defined budget is a huge factor in setting a solid foundation for a production.
Conclusion
It might seem overwhelming trying to come up with an idea for an effective video production, but if you nail down these things, a solid foundation for project will practically build itself. With budget and deadlines in place, we can more clearly define the scope of a production. And after clearly defining the purpose, message, and audience, we can determine the content of that production. Whether it’s your first time or you’re an expert in the field, following these steps will guarantee that your healthy foundation solidifies into a well-built video campaign.
Not sure where to start? Have a few but not all of these in place? We’d be happy to help you pin down the specifics in a consultation!
Contact Us!