Given the competitive nature and rising costs of running ads on social media, new brands need to avoid these early and costly mistakes now more than ever.
Brands that don’t understand their target audience before marketing are shooting blindfolded. Knowing how and why you profit are keys to casting a wider net and growing your sales. Even if you have a good sense of your audience, collecting data is the sure proof way to properly make sound, strategic marketing choices.
Saying too much in an ad could leave the messaging mixed and the pace overwhelming. Instead, try to focus on what your goal is and only leave in messaging that meets that goal. Many great ads have achieved brand awareness without saying a single word! Many times less is more. Videos and photos are a visual means, showing is often more powerful than telling.
Creating video content on a high end scale requires the collaboration of many people and typically goes through three stages; pre-production, production and post production. Any assets created from scratch like music, motion graphics or VFX could significantly add to the cost and time it takes for the video’s completion. Even at a skeleton crew level, a shoot with a director/producer and a shooter could cost a few thousand dollars for the production alone.
Costs vary extremely, but so does quality. It is important to have an understanding of your costs and expectations prior to undertaking any project.
Knowing where your video is going to live, how it will be distributed and for how long is just as important as creating the video itself. This of course should be thought of ahead of time. If you plan on using this content for an Instagram post you most likely would want it shot to accommodate a 4x5 dimensional format. Or say you want the content to be able to fit in an Instagram story, then you’d most likely want a 9x16 format for your video.
This looks far different than the conventional 16x9 format we are used to from watching television and if the camera operator doesn’t know better, he can be shooting the content incorrectly.
Underestimating the price of distribution could also cost you! It’s important to know what you’re spending up front and if your entire budget goes into your video, well, no one will be watching your very pretty video.
A brand we work closely to once told me their brand voice is that of Chris Pratt. Funny, but not corny. Cool, but not a bro. Instantly I knew what their brand voice was because this painted a very great description of the voice. Any content made from then on matched that description. Any script we wrote had these parameters in mind to ensure their content never compromised their brand.
Typically brands will have what’s called a “Brand Bible” that guides their creative teams to stay on brand.
If you don’t have clear guidelines as to what defines your brand, your creative team and content may struggle and your attempts to build a recognizable brand could fail.
