If you have decided to get started and promote your business’ offerings with an animated video, you have made a wise choice. With more and more consumers and potential buyers looking for video for everything from first experience of a product or service to validating the company’s credentials, video is playing an increasingly important role in digital purchasing cycles.
This article aims to help you choose a video production company that can be a success for your business and produce videos for you that convert into sales.
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Some key questions for your video production agency
Go into your search for an animated video agency with a plan. Understand their skills and style, and ask for some examples of their previous work and who their clients are. See if their work reflects the company image your firm is trying to portray, and whether their skills are transferrable into the style that you are looking for.
Start the process with a budget in mind too. Different agencies have different ways of billing for their services – some will charge a fixed price upfront or upon completion, whereas others will have other models of a slightly lower starting price but then charge for edits on an individual basis. Either way, make sure you know this all upfront before you commit to an agency so that there are no hidden problems when you are already getting into the brief and the work.
Choosing your style
While it can be tempting to use video as an opportunity to let your creative shackles down, do so with the objective of making your videos fit your existing company style. If your company reflects more traditional, conservative brand values, a funny cartoon video may seem a little out of keeping with the rest of your online brand.
While this is an extreme example, ensure that your chosen video production company knows and understands your company’s brand and target buying personas before they start work. This is essential to creating an end product that speaks to the right people.
Producing your video therefore takes some time and effort, and realistically it will take the expertise of a professional animation videos company. While ‘home made’ efforts can be noble and appear to be an attractive option because they are free, the result is that they will struggle to stand out in an increasingly crowded online marketplace. Video is a requirement now, not a bonus, and needs to be professionally made to really work well.
What skills are you looking for to achieve this?
There is a huge choice of video production companies around that can help you bring your video projects to life. Even for short animated videos, the right agency can really create a graphic representation of your products and services for potential buyers in this short space of time.
Choose carefully, speak to your shortlisted agencies’ customers and see how happy they are with the results. Check references and ask to speak to someone that can tell you their end to end experience of working with that company.
Once you have done so, it is decision time. Arrange to speak with a rep from your shortlisted companies in order to discuss your requirements with them and validate what they would plan to offer your business. The best candidates will come in with a plan, and they will have already done some homework on your business in order to understand the brand, have an idea of your value proposition, and some idea of your target personas and how you are trying to interact with them.
Discuss this with them, and ask them how effectively they think your current brand connects with and speaks to those individuals. Using the benefit of an outside set of eyes, they should be able to offer some insight into your efforts and how video can be harnessed to create strong and relevant messages geared towards your target buyers.
During the selection process, let the shortlisted agencies do most of the talking. Test them for their expertise, ideas and their willingness to share them with you. For a partnership with a video production agency to be successful, it should be a two-way relationship. Open idea sharing and dialogue is essential to this, and you need to see how comfortable each agency is with that.
