Financial firms need a marketing strategy for video production. Indeed, they always have. Yet what has changed is the importance of video within your overall marketing strategy.
Video is no longer an optional “marketing extra” for IFAs and financial planners with a bit of leftover marketing budget to spend. In today’s digital world, video is absolutely central and vital for attracting, engaging and converting audiences.
This is particularly the case when it comes to social media. Indeed, one Facebook official has even predicted that the social platform will be entirely video-based by 2020.
Why does this matter for financial advisers? Put simply, if you are an IFA ignoring video in your marketing then you are lagging behind. Over half of internet users want to engage with videos when it comes to companies’ content. Even more than emails, newsletters or blogs. Indeed, having a video on your landing page can increase the conversion rate by as much as 80%.
Yet there really is no reason to neglect video. Videos for financial advisers do not necessarily need to be expensive or complicated. Indeed, often the more raw or simple a video is, the more authentic it can appear to your audience. That certainly goes a long way.
Types of Financial Videos
There is no single type of video when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here are some options:
#1 Explainer Videos
This type of video helps your audience understand an aspect of your service, or your company.
#2 Interview-Style
Often, all it takes is a short interview with one of your advisers to convey thought leadership, industry authority and trust. Or, you could interview an influencer outside your firm.
#3 Event
Is your IFA business promoting an event, seminar or conference? This type of video collects highlight reels, presentations and interviews to whet people’s appetites.
#4 Client Story
These financial videos focus primarily or exclusively on a client testimonial or case study. They help create a personal, human touch to your brand.
How the Financial Video Production Process Works
Before launching into the video creation process, it’s important to ask what the purpose of your video is. What are you doing it for? (Hint: you need a better reason than: “just because we should!”).
To begin answering this important question, try answering these other ones first:
- What are you trying to achieve? Perhaps you aim to increase sign-ups to your next seminar event. Or maybe you’re looking to increase awareness of your brand amongst HNIs in your area.
- Where will the video be published? For instance, maybe you plan to promote it through a Facebook Advertising campaign, or via YouTube.
- What’s your budget? Financial video production can be a significant investment, but it doesn’t always have to be.
- Who’s it for? I.e. who is the target market you’re trying to reach and engage with the video?
Once these questions have been answered, you can start to work through the steps of actually producing your intended video – usually with a specialist agency.
First Step: Scripting
Sometimes, you can produce some excellent unscripted, spontaneous videos. Yet most financial advisers will do best when writing a script. It keeps editing time and costs down.
Using a script also helps prevent your video from dragging on, which makes you lose viewers.
A script doesn’t need to be a long, complex or fancy document. It can be as simple as writing an outline or blog post on MS Word or Google Docs.
Second Step: Understand the Camera
Video production equipment can be intimidating for financial advisers. Yet this doesn’t have to be scary or complicated. In all likelihood, you have a near-professional grade camera in your pocket: the smartphone camera. If you know how to take a video with that, then you’re well on your way!
You need to make sure you have decent storage on your phone. Turn off the notifications so that you aren’t interrupted by annoying sounds or vibrations whilst filming. Lock the exposure before recording, so your camera doesn’t keep adjusting and re-adjusting – something that’s very distracting for the viewer.
Whilst iPhones, Android and other smartphones offer great capabilities, they don’t quite touch the quality of professional-grade cameras. For those IFAs wanting to operate at this level, you’re usually better off working with a specialist agency who already has access to the equipment. Buying it all yourself is likely to be far more costly than hiring their services.
Third Step: Get a Studio Together
You need a good environment to record in when it comes to financial video production. This is where costs can quickly begin to add up if you’re not careful – tripods, lights, microphones, and so on.
You will need a key light, a back light and a fill light to make sure you have decent illumination when recording. You can get this together for fairly cheap, if you’re careful.
You’ll also need a decent microphone to record audio – don’t rely on your smartphone.
From here, you’re almost ready to start shooting. Get your script, and gather your subjects!
Fourth Step: Record
You now know what you’re saying, and who is saying it. You also have your equipment and recording space. Time now to hit the record button and do a few takes.
Make sure you vary the camera angles and distance – you’ll want some at a distance, as well as medium and close up shots.
Remember, what you record will need to be edited later. So bear that in mind as you shoot.
Fifth Step: Organise and Edit
You have your footage, now it’s time to put everything together. If your computer is particularly disorganised, then you’re going to struggle here!
Video files are very large, and need a good amount of organisation to keep everything together, coherently. Video editing software in particular gets funny if things aren’t kept in the right place.
Consider investing in a good external hard drive for your video files, rather than keeping everything on your desktop. From here, you can use a programme like Apple iMovie to edit your video – or Adobe Premiere Pro for the serious hard-hitting software.
From there, you need to choose some decent accompanying music and publish! Just be careful with copyright laws, as most music in the digital world isn’t free. You’ll need to pay for a licence.