(Updated February 17, 2024 – see new links below)
In the age of digital cameras, there is no excuse to not have gazillions of photos and short video clips available for use in marketing your company. You can take pictures with your mobile phone, with your tablet computer (like an iPad), or with a digital camera. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s convenient and you very likely already have the technology right at your fingertips!
When we’re marketing your company, we can use photos and videos all over your website, on your Google My Business listing, on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, on a blog, in email marketing, etc. You can also share photos or video clips with your prospects if you’ve captured them in the shots. So take lots of photos and video clips so we can pick and choose the best among them to tell your story!
Here is a sample video to show how we can use pictures, video clips, music, and voice-overs for SMB industrial companies just like your company.
You might not need to hire a professional photographer or videographer; You already can capture tons and tons of photos and short video clips in-house. And when we’re working on your marketing projects, we’ll let you know if those don’t get the job done and then discuss hiring a pro.
Keep in mind, however, that a professional video can have a lot more impact, and a lot of pros now offer drone footage to enhance your video. Some of the coolest drone footage is when they fly the drone around inside of your facility! That makes very cool video footage!
Here is a list of things to keep in mind when taking pictures and video clips.
- Give a little bit of thought to lighting and angles, but not too much… we still want these to be mostly candid and genuine. What’s in the background? Is the target of your photo or video obscured in darkness or shadows? If so, then it probably won’t make a very good photo/video. Change your angle to see if you can get something better. We can Photoshop images and slice and dice videos to improve them, but the better an image is to start with, the better the result will be.
- Photos and video clips can show the personality of your company and they don’t have to be perfect. The more polished and perfect a photo looks, the less personality it tends to show. Many viewers might think the perfect photo is just a stock photo that was purchased online or the perfect video is just a tad too slick for them. You know how your industrial buyers are… they don’t want to be sold to via some slick production. But they do want to know a bit about you and trust you, and you want them to be curious about your company. For SMB industrial companies, your clients and prospects would normally prefer to see genuine photos and videos of your shop and your people!
- Take pictures and video clips everywhere!
- around the office with spontaneous pictures of your employees working
- around the shop floor – pics don’t have to be staged; impromptu is often better
- at trade shows, training classes, or seminars that your folks are attending
- at trade shows, don’t take pictures of an empty booth. Always have people in the pics, like your employees engaging the booth visitors.
- For videos, you don’t have to narrate, as we’ll likely remove that audio track and replace it later anyway. So just focus on the short video clips and don’t worry about describing what you’re filming. You can describe it to us later when we’re assembling a larger video for your company. Any background noise is fine; we can handle it. Later, we’ll slice and dice video clips, combining some of the best clips and pictures into a larger video. We’ll add background music and then possibly add a voice-over to the video. After seeing the video, we (as in you and Baer Marketing) can write out a rough script and we’ll have you record the voice-over while watching the video. Or we can hire a professional voice-over talent that has one of those perfect-sounding voices. We have lots of options… but first, we need some video clips from you!
- Do some off-the-wall things for capturing video clips or pictures.
- Have a day where everybody wears their favorite sports team shirts or brings their sports team paraphernalia. Keep it seasonal and on theme, like college football or pro football, but don’t mix the two. In the spring, you could do major league baseball. In the winter you could do pro or college basketball.
- Near a holiday, you could get people in seasonal dress or holding up handwritten messages for the camera.
- Take candid and random shots from the company picnic or party or any company outing.
- Get shots of employees with pictures of their pets and we could do a silly post or video about the pets everyone in your company loves. Silly and unique can add a personal touch to your communications.
- Ask various employees to write 1-3 words describing your company and hold those up on a sheet of paper for a camera or short video shot. It could be what your employees like about your company or it could be about why your customers love your company. When we combine those, the slideshow or video could tell a very compelling story about you. You never know when some small item like someone’s pet or favorite team can help break the ice with a potential new customer!
- Have a photo/video day at your company where all or any employees can take random shots and video clips and then everyone can share them. Share them over lunch… it could be fun, as well as provide lots of useful marketing materials for later use. It could also provide a lot of unique and different perspectives of your company from your employees.
So help us help you by using these suggestions to capture great photos and videos of your company. We want to help you tell your story.
Related links:
Article – Industrial Photo Gallery Advice
Article – Why Manufacturers Need A Factory Tour Video
Article – 4 Reasons Why Manufacturers Use Video Marketing
Company Video Brochure Production – from Baer Marketing
Professional On-Site Website Videos – from Baer Marketing
Contact us today to get started on videos for your company!