By Brandon Buck
With the world in various states of lockdown and social distancing, you likely have had to make your office virtual, and have your staff work remotely. This may put a damper on the timeline of your campaigns; for now you’re having to continue on without an easy way to generate new content. In fact, video can be particularly hard to produce when no one is in the same room. So, what are your options?
1) Leverage social media platforms to get your voice out
If you need something to get out the door immediately, utilize the tools you already have at your disposal: your phone or your computer’s webcam. These devices can all record videos directly themselves, but there also are a plethora of social media platforms eager to post your content: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, all have quick and easy ways to record and post videos. Whether you record sitting in your home office, or outdoors on location, these Apps can get the job done. And consider that the substance and context of your message is often more important than the quality of your recording.
2) Re-appropriate existing assets
If you have the capability to edit your photos or videos, you can reuse the older assets in your archive in new ways. For example:
• If you work in a retail space, do you have photos of your showroom in high enough resolution that you can zoom in and crop for new social media posts? We have seen many restaurants do this to remind prospective delivery and takeout customers what the ambience was like before the closures.
• Can you edit together a video of your best moments from last season, or create profiles of your employees using footage over the years?
• If you have a completed video from a previous project, can you comb through the raw footage to utilize unused shots for a new piece?
• Can you use deleted scenes from an interview that didn’t make the final cut into a short new piece?
Professional photography and video shoots usually acquire far more footage than is featured in the final project, so now might be a good time to go back and see if there’s some forgotten gold (you might even feel nostalgic).
3) Use Online Video Services
There are online video creation services that can create videos based purely on text. Lumen5 is one service that can build videos based on input text. The process isn’t entirely automated, but can certainly help speed up the process of producing new video content, especially formatted to work best on social media. The subscription levels enable you to access varying sizes of stock photo, video, and music libraries, and you’re in control of the text that comes on screen, as well as the timing of the whole piece.
4) Use Templates
If you have video editing software, like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, you can purchase template projects on sites like VideoHive or Motion Array that will allow you to quickly create high-quality videos. Instead of having to conceive of a unique style and manually build up your project, these template services have the fundamentals of the project ready to go. So now you can just insert your photo or video assets, change out the text and music, and you have an engaging new video. Even altering simple aspects, like colors, can make the video look completely new and unique.
The COVID-19 lockdown has created a new and unique challenges for companies all over the world. And though creating video content may be more difficult than it has been in the past, users are also more engaged with their devices than ever before, creating a perfect time to explore new avenues to reach your customers and clients.
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