 Today on The Journey, we'll be giving you tips for producing a promotional video for your small business. Now it's been known for so long, videos convert much better than just text, marketers, people out there, people on social media. You spend more time watching a video than you do reading through a long paragraph. So if you really want to convert users online to your business, think about these videos in a much larger sense. Yeah, these videos are the best way to market your product or service. It takes a complex product, right, and breaks it down into something a little bit more fun and entertaining. It makes us want to watch more and more. So if you think creating this video could be intimidating, it really isn't. It's pretty simple, which is a few tips that we're about to give you. You can create a nice promotional video that will entice consumers to get your product or service. So let's go a little bit more in depth about why you really should focus on these promotional videos. So videos explain things faster. People's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and videos make it a great way of taking a lot of information and condensing it into a short amount of time to easily digest it. Yeah, and you're exactly right. It captures people's attention. If you focus solely on text-based promotion, you're going to lose out on a ton of customers and clients because you want to be where they are and you want to capture their attention because like you said, it's almost non-existent. The next benefit is you can use it everywhere. You can share it on your social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You can also share it on YouTube, which will allow you to then embed it into your website. Yeah, basically this means that you get to reach your audience everywhere they are. All right, so let's now get into how to create these promotional videos, starting with having a shorter video. As we said before, people's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. The longer the video, the less likely people will actually watch it. So there's not much out there that can be described and defined within two minutes. Your promotional video should be anywhere between 60 and 90 seconds. Short and sweet, concise. Make sure you grab your viewer's attention. Yeah, and then make sure you don't really ramble on because it's pretty easy to do on video. I mean, we've done it a ton. Have little conversation guides, basically little bullet points of what you want to say in the video so you really get your point across. Next, you want to make it yours. You want to be able to add your brand, your logo, your colors, things that when people look at this video, they know exactly who's making it, what product, what business. And then with that, really knowing who your audience is and what this video is set out to accomplish, you should be able to explain directly to them and then look at the video and go, oh wait, that's me. I absolutely need this. So what problem are you solving with that video? You want to make sure you really convey that to your audience. Next, you want to be able to create high quality content. It's very competitive out there. A lot of people are making videos. Over 400 hours are uploaded to YouTube per second. So you want to make sure if you're going to promote your product, your service, it's going to be high quality and make sure people are going to watch it. Yeah, and with these videos, you really want to invest in high quality equipment to really make sure your videos pop. You don't want to be associated especially with these videos being promotional for really putting your best set elf out there. It looks like an amateur did it and it's not really that professional. You don't want to be associated with poor quality. So if you're doing this in-house yourself, you'll definitely need to invest in the camera or some smartphones nowadays are very high quality to be able to give you exactly the look you need. Yeah, and with that, you really want to focus on audio too. You can go out there and get some pretty cheap wireless mics, you know, those little avaliers, you hook up to you to make sure your sound quality is there because there's nothing worse than some echoey, awful sound while watching this high class video. It just throws off the whole dynamic. Some other areas to note, lighting. You want to make sure that you watch for unflattering lightings. People need to be able to see what you're promoting. Also a tripod, you want to make sure you keep the camera steady. And if you don't have a tripod, just make sure you're on a level surface. However, working with a video production company, while it is a bit more expensive, it does bring back the ROI needed to really skyrocket your business. Because these videos matter and it could be reused and reused and reused. So if you really think about it, this investment may not be as much as it might seem. And you don't want to forget about SEO. Even if the video is just on your website, you want to make sure that people can find it elsewhere. Yeah, these are things like the title of the description, the keywords you use, the tags you use, especially if you use on like YouTube or another video hosting provider. You really want these videos to be found. Also captions helps boost your SEO too. So Google doesn't understand what that video might be, but it does understand the captions because they're just words. And it also helps those that are hearing impaired to be able to not only see what's going on, but understand the context behind it too. It just helps you be a little bit more inclusive. And you want to make sure that you have a good aesthetic, visually captivating thumbnail to go with your video. This is going to be the first thing that people see. So you want to make sure that it's going to be engaging for them as well. Yeah, and what I would recommend here is don't try to capture a thumbnail from the actual video you consume. Take the time either before or after to take some cool pictures and make that the thumbnail itself versus trying to do a freeze frame and grab that there. All right, that's a wrap. We just talked about Sips for producing promotional video for your small business. Be sure to like and comment below. And hey, if you found this video helpful, make sure you subscribe to our channel and ring that bell to see these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you next time.