business video

5 tips to pick the perfect video partner

You finally decide to create videos for your beloved brand and hope they will help you skyrocket in sales and fans.

You find a production company that promises you results and that it will help you achieve them.

After that, chaos. You feel lost. You don’t get updates during the whole process, and you might not talk because you trust their previous work results. In the end, you get delivered a file with a video that is not what you thought it would be. Does that sound familiar?

This is Storyflow’s Blog ‘We build together’, the place where we share with our readers our knowledge from previous and current experiences. We do that because we believe our success is linked with your success, and we feel awesome when we see any brand with similar values to ours grow.

I’m John Mouratis, the founder of Storyflow, and on this blog, I will share with you 5 things that you should know about before choosing a Video Production Company to work with.

1. Your brand is similar to others but different.

When we create a video for your brand is a simple but not easy process. We have to first understand you and your goals. To learn your values and what is your image. We have to ask specific questions that will let us find any pain points in your systems and of your clients. Then we are in the best position to help you solve them.

As you will find out the combination of the answers to all these questions makes you the unique business you are. We, as a collaborator on your journey, have to treat you like that. That’s why we believe that we should never create the exact same video for 2 different brands.

Because they are different.

You will come across many video production companies/videographers who will try to sell you a video before listening to your needs, and learning who you’re. They might deliver you a good video, but not good enough.

Your marketing budget, and the one which will be allocated to video content, is not limitless. We have to invest extra time to understand what’re the very best projects we can create for you within your budget. So, please pay attention to the information that we try to gather before the creation of your video. It shows how much someone cares about your brand, and how tailored the final product will be to your needs.

On the other hand, you don’t want an entirely new video from what you have already seen. You hire a company to do that for you because you like their job and what you have watched from them. It’s our responsibility to deliver you a product that is of the same high standards, and not get you fully surprised (in a bad way) on the delivery day. Of course, there is always an exception if the whole process has been discussed and agreed otherwise beforehand.

We create systems during the process to ensure that our videos cover the high standards we’re shooting for and our clients are getting an experience that shows how much we care about them.

They get a video based on their major needs, a video that helps them achieve business growth the most.

2. Video Content’s core goal is not astrophysics.

Let me explain this one. Video production is a complicated process that requires multiple phases, and a lot of creative and technical thought on it. Of course, that’s not simple.

Despite that, the goal of the video should be very simple

At Storyflow, for example, we’re providing human connection. Does that sound strange to you? Something that is unfamiliar? Exactly, no!

That’s what you experience every day in your life, with family, friends, and business networking.

People who work in video production usually tend to like to make their job seem more complicated than it is. I think that comes mainly from the fact that they used to consider us hobbyists until a few decades ago, and in some countries, people from the industry still fight those beliefs.

But we are not. We are professionals that provide a product that can be considered one of your best investments if produced properly. It’s not uncommon for videos to produce 20-30x of their investment.

Since we are professionals though, that means we should be able to explain our process in a way that makes sense to people who have no idea how video production works. Because it is not astrophysics. It doesn’t require previous knowledge of other subjects to understand it.

The core value of video content is storytelling. And we learn about that from a very young age, even when our parents used to tell us stories before going to bed.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many aspects of video production that are very technical and require years of time and effort to even understand, and decades to master them. But you don’t pay for that. You pay for the final result, the story that the video will tell, and the business results will bring you.

So please, if you ever feel during the video production process with any professional you have hired that you don’t understand the purpose of something raises your concerns.

Ask and professionals should be able to explain their stuff around the storytelling part. If you start listening to them explaining stuff in very technical terms, unless you asked about them out of interest, consider this as a red flag.

3. A video with no strategy will receive likes but not leads.

Imagine your company as an organization that handles many different sports teams. Each department of your company represents a different team. The players of the team are actual people, they can be clients, people who work in the department, or potential leads. Your marketing department is that team full of young people, and potential customers, who are ready to get nurtured and jump into your next team, the one where clients and fans are playing. Your marketing team is responsible for training those people, getting them excited about your culture, and teaching them what is like to be part of your bigger teams, and what it’s like to be a client or a supporter.

Now the marketing team has different coaches, who in our case are actual tools, and who play a vital role in the training of your potential customers. Video is a very important coach, but it is not the only one. Without the help of the other coaches, your people will never get fully prepared, will never get excited, and won’t want to make the effort to play for your bigger team.

In a few words, you need a marketing plan to complement the final video and get actual results out of it. I have seen in past people many times posting a video on their social media or on their website at a random moment without any other preparation and waiting for it to make miracles. I think all of us know that acting based on the hope for miracles is the path to failure.

The difference between an average production company and the go-to ones is that they will put the extra effort to ensure that the product they deliver you will return your investment in multiples.

That can mean offering you some marketing tips if you’re a small business and have no marketing department or being in touch with your marketing department constantly.

At Storyflow for example, we offer a 10-step marketing plan after the delivery of our video. That way we can help our clients to build the foundations for the success of the project we created for them.

4. Paying a high price for technical requirements

Video production includes 3 different phases: pre-production, production, and post-production. Each phase requires many different departments to contribute in order to achieve the desired final result. That means many people. Creative people, technicians, and people who’re both (usually most fall within that category).

From our point of view, we can clearly see the effort, time, and costs that video production requires to produce an amazing video.

This is our job though, not yours.

You buy and pay, for the final video and the value it will bring to your business. Sure, having video content is not cheap and your investment will be a considerable amount in the end. It is not fair from our side though to reason that price is based on the cost of the gear and the number of people who worked on it.

If we’re doing our job well we don’t need to. Because the value we will provide is going to be much bigger than the actual investment, in a way which you won’t even think twice.

As I said above, we ask specific questions on our discovery call to learn more about your business. That enables us to speak in your language and reason in your world how video content will bring you value.

Sure, if you're interested in learning how video production works we’re more than happy to share all the info with you. But if you want to use all that time focusing on your business, we take care of everything after making clear why the investment is the price we proposed.

5. Not delivering promises

We all have been there after buying a product or a service before. Someone promised us extraordinary results, and because they touched emotional points of ours we convinced ourselves to believe them. And the promise remained…. a promise. After that, we felt so frustrated with ourselves that we fell for that. It sucks, you know it.

The most important thing in our lives though is to learn from our mistakes and NOT make them again.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t. So please, be careful with people and companies out there who promise you the stars without reasoning why you can even get your feet above the ground first.

We care about you and we care about us. Because once the damage has been done, it’s really difficult for everyone to undo it. Stereotypes can be created about a whole industry. You’ll always be able to find brands out there that offer honest and valuable help.

On the other hand, it will never be all about numbers. Video is all about stories and stories convey emotion. Try to find video production companies that will provide both in a good balance, and you’ll feel like you found water in the desert.

It is possible, and you shouldn’t compromise for anything less.

Conclusion:

I hope the above tips were helpful for you and that they might save you from a bad collaboration in the future.

At Storyflow, we’re always happy to hear your stories and identify how video content can currently improve your business.

Please send me any feedback and share your opinion with us.

We believe that progress comes through conversation and we always try our best to find the solution to problems.

Share your story.

Sincerely,

John, Founder