How to Create High-Quality Video Content on a Budget

Video is all the rage right now on social media. Whether it’s a short GIF, or an hour-long live video, social media is all about video. No matter the social media platform you’re trying to focus on, video should be an integral part of your strategy – even LinkedIn, one of the least visual social networks around, has started to embrace video in recent years.

After all, videos get 12x more shares on average than text and link posts combined. To put it simply, videos can help you build your brand, capture leads, and gain customers on social media.

s, and gain customers on social media.

But there’ is one significant challenge to video marketing for most businesses: how do you create great social media videos on a budget? And even more, how do you create these videos consistently?

How expensive can making videos be?

It’s true, up till now video has been cost-prohibitive. But that’s no longer the case, especially not on social media.

In this post, we’ll look at six ways in which you can create high-quality videos for social media on a small budget.

1. Create a video strategy

If you’re making videos on a budget, then you need to have a strategy. This will guide your whole process, and reduce potential overspend by helping you stay focused.

Added to this, having a video marketing strategy can help you create more professional looking videos. The fact that you’re making videos on a budget is no excuse to do a shoddy job.

Some important elements of an effective video strategy are:

The available budget for making social media videos
Ideal social media audience
Objectives for sharing videos on social media
The frequency of sharing videos
What kinds of video you’ll need to create based on objectives

With an effective strategy, you can also maintain a consistent brand voice while getting your message across to your audience. And as noted, it gives you a clear focus so that you don’t overspend.

2. Use an effective video maker and editor tool

You can bypass the stress of shooting videos yourself when you opt for video tools that help you create videos. And even if you do shoot videos, you can use these tools to edit them.

Most video tools now provide templates that you can customize to suit your brand and fit your message. For example, you can find Halloween video templates that you can edit for your business during the Halloween season.

A tool like Promo.com provides a huge video template library that you can edit to make social media videos for your brand. It also enables you to search for relevant templates using keywords.

Tools like Promo.com make it much easier to create video content consistently, and with very little investment on your part. Whenever you need a video, just choose the template that works best, customize it with your branding, your call to action and so on, and you’re good to go.

And as noted, even if you do shoot your own videos, there’s a case for using these types of tools. They enable you to upload your video and edit it until you get your intended output. Plus, you can add text captions and calls to action to your videos which is a very important aspect of video marketing.

Another way to go about it is to use something like VidMob. VidMob aims to help businesses scale their video marketing operations by facilitating contact with various experts that can help you create videos – great if you don’t want to work on any videos yourself, in-house.

Their focus is on promotional/ad videos for social media, so mostly short, engaging videos designed to help you promote your products and services, and boost your social selling.

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3. Invest in the basics: the video gear you need

If you plan to shoot many videos for your social media campaigns, then investing in video gear is vital.

There are many pieces of equipment you can buy, but these four tools are essential:

Digital camera – to ensure your videos look great
Microphone – most built-in microphones aren’t enough to deliver a clear sound for a brand video
Tripod – to stabilize your camera while filming
Lighting kit – to ensure that the lighting is up to par and your video looks great

This is a long-term investment, and one you only need to make if you’re planning on filming videos yourself. You can also use video creators to help (as mentioned earlier) or if you’re only going to create a few ideas completely by yourself, you can, in some cases, leverage equipment you already have – like your smartphone camera:

4. Use your smartphone to shoot videos

Today, smartphones take great videos – definitely good enough to share on social media (although not for creating promotional/marketing videos).

Apart from having great output from your smartphones, it can make your video content real and relatable. If you want to create down-to-earth videos that your audience can relate to, then use a smartphone.

If you’re using the iPhone, you can use an app like iMovie to edit your video.

Or, you can also transfer the video to an independent editing tool to make it look better. One great option is Filmora, which you can use to fully edit your videos, add effects, and add an audio soundtrack.

5. Keep things simple

When you’re sharing a video on social media, nobody is expecting James Cameron-like production quality. Most people just want to see a video that provides them with some value and looks good.

Whatever message you’re trying to convey, your videos should be as clear as possible. That’s why you should know exactly what your message is before you create your video (as I mentioned earlier, strategies are essential)

Are you using video to increase brand awareness? To tell your audience about a new product? To show a customer case study?

Whatever message you’re trying to communicate, you should find the simplest way possible to do it.

This has two advantages:

You can communicate your message across effectively
You can save money

When you consider that you’re competing for your audience’s attention, then simplicity is the best way to achieve results through your videos.

For example, check out this Instagram video from Oreo:

It’s simple, effective, and didn’t cost an arm and a leg to shoot.

6. Keep your videos short

Most social media users have limited attention spans and patience – in fact, a study found that your video engagement will drop sharply once it exceeds 2 minutes in length.

While creating scripts for your videos, it’s vital to keep it as short as possible. If you’re shooting a video where people will be talking, then you should keep the words to around 300 in total (note: most people can speak 160 words per minute).

Apart from keeping your audience engaged, short videos also mean less cost. If you’re getting a designer in to shoot and edit your video, then you know that a 5-minute video will cost more than a 2-minute video.

Here’s an example where IKEA used a 15-second video on Instagram to introduce their anti-slip mat. All the video does is show the mat’s benefit.

Conclusion

Having a limited budget is always a challenge, but with the right strategies and tools, you can create videos that meet your audience’s expectations, and convince them to take action – without breaking the bank.

Shared from original article posted by Lilach Bullock https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/how-to-create-high-quality-video-content-on-a-budget/562098/

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