Video Production Oakville – The Captain’s Blog

Another Rule of Thumbnail: Colour

Make Your Thumbnail Image Stand Out with Colour

Bright colours will make your thumbnail image pop. Of course, that doesn’t mean to go completely overboard. Do just enough to differentiate your video from the others. Don’t settle for the existing colours in your image. Use photo-editing and graphic design software to boost the saturation in the thumbnail image just enough to make the colours stand out over other thumbnails. Even small adjustments to the hue and saturation can attract viewers directly to your thumbnail. Consider applying a filter to your thumbnails. Even something as simple as sharpening the edges can have a subliminal effect on thumbnails. Remember, video production in Toronto is highly competitive. Edge out the competition with an appealing thumbnail.

The Next Rule of Thumbnail: Include a Face

Include an Enticing Image of a Person

Putting the extra effort to create a winning thumbnail is a great way to ensure success in the competitive word of video production in Toronto. People are naturally drawn to faces. Try to choose an image that will draw the eye and entice people to click. Emotional facial expressions can also go a long way to engaging viewers to watch. Extreme close-ups are one type of thumbnail that can amplify emotions. Thumbnails that show laughter, joy, sorrow, anger — all can draw attention to your thumbnail. Make the viewer wonder, “what made this person feel that way?” — and compel them to click on your video thumbnail to find out!

Here’s another Rule of Thumbnail: The Action Shot

Find an Image Packed with Action

Another way of capturing attention in the fierce competitive world of video production in Toronto, is to use an action shot as the thumbnail. The added sense of motion will encourage viewers to click on your video to see what it’s all about. The Slow Mo Guys are known for conducting crazy experiments, and along with optimized titles, they almost always include the main action shot from their videos on their thumbnails. The amount of clicks they get shows just how effective this approach can be.

Video Production Oakville – The Captain’s Blog

Why are your Video Production Thumbnails Important?

Your video’s thumbnail is the equivalent of a movie poster. A good thumbnail will attract the attention of viewers and persuade them to click through and watch your video. Because corporate video production in Toronto is so highly competitive, don’t ignore this underrated asset. An effective custom thumbnail can make all the difference when it comes to a viewer choosing to watch your video, or deciding to watch another. Many companies in Toronto and elsewhere fail to take advantage of this optimizing feature.

Most hosting platforms automatically generates three optional thumbnail images whenever a video is uploaded, but often these images don’t truly represent your video. A good “rule of thumbnail” is to manually select a still that is visually striking and accurately depicts your video content.

Nothing beats a custom thumbnail image that ties in with your video, your channel message and your brand. Apart from making a quality video production that viewers want to watch, companies should follow some basic guidelines when creating and optimizing its thumbnail.

Watch for our future blogs with more tips to optimize your thumbnails and attract more viewers.

Video Production Oakville – The Captain’s Blog

About Face

While online video production in Oakville continues to expand into new horizons, it’s important to understand that not all videos are created equally. Depending on your products, services, and message you’ll need to properly plan out your video production strategy prior to getting the cameras rolling.

For instance, new research is showing that it best to include faces in your videos. Faces capture attention and build a sense of familiarity. This is because human brains are hardwired to recognize faces. But the importance of having a person speaking in your video goes much deeper than simple familiarity. A study by Princeton psychologists found that in just a tenth of a second, we form impressions of strangers from their faces alone. Our amygdala automatically responds based on how trustworthy we determine a face to be. Once this quick judgement has been made, our amygdala then begins to alter brain processes and coordinate appropriate responses, depending on whether we decide to approach or avoid that person.

So how can we make the spokesperson in our videos seem trustworthy? A combination of factors appealing to both the visual and auditory senses can have a significant impact on the whether viewers will trust your spokesperson or not.

Tips for your on camera spokesperson:

. Be truthful with what you say. Make sure you’re delivering information clearly, so it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to hide details.
. Be yourself. The audience can sense if you’re uncomfortable, and they’ll mirror that feeling.
. Caring for people. If you’re wishing someone well or caring for your audience, they’ll notice it.

Other important tips to make it easier to hold your audience’s attention:

. Keep your background free of distractions. You want the focus to be on the speaker and not, for instance, on the dog running around in the frame.
. Put important points in onscreen text. If your video is on the longer side, it’s easy for people to zone out and forget the main points. Emphasizing larger points in text onscreen will also give your video more structure.
. Mind your body language. Your body language speaks just as loudly as your words. Make sure to stand tall and gesture with confidence.
. Use verbal cues. Say things like “once that’s done” or “next” to direct the flow of the video, so it feels like things are moving.

These are just some of the points to consider if you are producing a video and planning on incorporating an onscreen spokesperson. As we all know, a video production can be a very powerful sales and marketing tool… but as we have stated in our blogs for years, videos need to be produced properly in order for viewers to believe your message. And in that regard, it is always best practice to hire a professional Oakville video production company for all your video marketing needs.

Video Production Oakville – The Captain’s Blog

Video Metrics Benefit Influencer Marketers

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to expand your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you can inspire, hire and pay influencers to get out the word for you.

Influencer marketing often goes hand-in-hand with two other forms of marketing: social-media marketing and content marketing. Most influencer campaigns have some sort of social-media component, in which case influencers are expected to spread the word through their personal social channels. Many influencer campaigns also support a content element in which either you create content for the influencers, or they can create the content themselves. Although social-media and content marketing often compliment influencer campaigns, they are not synonymous with influencer marketing.
What all three do have in common is the use of some or all of the following:

• Video production
• Video animation
• Corporate video(s)
• Videos for business
• Videos for company marketing
• Video profiles
• Video calling cards and more

The ability to identify the right influencers for your business should not ever be underestimated and the right influencers should know how to combine “reach,” “resonance,” and “relevance.”

• Reach is the measure of the total audience or the number of subscribers that go into this metric.
• Resonance is the measure of the amount of activity generated plus the level of interaction with the content.
• Relevance is a measure of how relevant a topic is and how much the talk about it. Videos that incorporate keywords increase relevance.

Other metrics that are important influencer marketers to consider are:

• Conversation rate or the ratio of comments per video to overall followers. The video must be interesting enough to spark a conversation?
• Amplification rate or the ratio of shares for each video to overall followers. Is the video of such an incredible value that viewers will forward it to everyone they know?
• Applause rate or the ratio of favorites per video to overall followers. Is the video content interesting enough to attract followers, even if they don’t comment on it or forward it?

Conversation, amplification, and applause rates help to measure the real active engagement of users with your influencer marketing campaign.
Behavior is another important component for influencer marketing agencies and teams. They are increasingly being asked to connect their social media marketing metrics to business outcomes. To do this they need to connect what they’ve accomplished in YouTube, Facebook, and other social media with Google Analytics, then they can accurately calculate the economic value of an influencer marketing campaign.

Using video production and connecting social media marketing metrics to business outcomes is how you can connect what’s been accomplished with YouTube videos, Facebook videos, and other video platforms with Google Analytics. Then it’s easier to calculate the economic value of an influencer marketing campaign.

Video Production Oakville – The Captain’s Blog

Unboxing Videos

Toronto consumers are increasingly turning to YouTube to help them shop. Twenty six percent of shoppers say online videos are their main source for gift ideas, and 32% of shoppers say they plan to use online video more this year for holiday shopping, according to Google/Ipsos MediaCT’s 2015 Consumer Holiday Intentions Study As people continue to turn to YouTube for their purchase decisions, “Unboxing videos” have become a growing phenomenon.

Unboxing videos feature the unpacking of new products, especially high tech consumer products. They provide a handy service to viewers who want a behind-the-scenes look at a product before they commit to buying it. Finding a reviewer that is prepared to walk you through every feature of that device is priceless. To keep viewers engaged, Unboxers often bring a unique style to their product category. Some put their own personalities front and center, turning their faces into a trusted brand, gaining followers. Others have a specific shooting style that might feature time-lapse style footage set to catchy music, or close-up beauty shots of a new product.

In 2015 alone, people in the U.S. have watched 60 million hours of unboxing videos on YouTube, totalling 1.1 billion views, according to YouTube data. The research also shows that Youtube has become an important part of the purchase process for consumer electronics. A surprising 64% of consumer electronics shoppers watch consumer electronics videos on YouTube one week before they purchase and 65% do so the week after they purchase, according to a Google Millward Brown CE Study in December 2014.

With 2.7 million subscribers, Unbox Therapy takes a deep dive into the latest electronics on the market and gives the consumer a thorough insight into a potential purchase. Its unboxing video of the iPhone 6s and 6s plus generated 1.5 million views and 126K engagements, proving there’s a real appetite for this kind of content.

There are a number of very effective ways that brands can take advantage of this booming trend:

Hire a media production company and create your own unboxing videos for Your Products

Companies have started uploading their own unboxing videos to official YouTube channels. This clip of the new Xbox One from Microsoft that has been watched more than 3 million times.

Ikea also took full advantage of the unboxing trend this September when they launched their own parody video around the launch of the new iPhone range.

Another very effective practice is to use Youtube’s TrueView feature on your unboxing videos.

TrueView specializes in helping viewers shop directly from the videos they’re watching. With TrueView, ads appear as an icon on the top right corner of the Unboxing video. When users click on the icon, Cards will drop down, and users will be able to scroll through images and pricing information about products featured in the Unboxing video. If users are interested in purchasing, they can simply click the image and they’ll be taken to the retailer’s website to learn more, read reviews, or click to buy.

As consumers in Toronto continue to seek out Youtube for gift ideas and insights on products they are interested in, it makes sense for marketers to take full advantage of the power of video and Youtube.  If you’re looking for a new and effective kind of video marketing campaign for your company, Unboxing videos may be the way to go. This holiday season, a good Unboxing video campaign on Youtube may set your products and brand aside from your competition and help give your sales that extra boost to finish the year strong.

Video Production Oakville – TrueView for Youtube

While many marketers in Oakville are still struggling over view-ability of their videos, YouTube is offering something much more valuable than just views. In March of 2015, YouTube launched Interactive Cards, which enable creators to share product information directly within their videos. Then, in May, YouTube took this feature to the next level with TrueView.

TrueView is a feature that specializes in helping viewers shop directly from the videos they’re watching. Similar to YouTube Interactive Cards, with TrueView, ads appear as an icon on the top right corner of the YouTube video/ad. When users click on the icon, Cards will drop down, and users will be able to scroll through images and pricing information about products featured in the video. If users are interested in purchasing, they can simply click the image and they’ll be taken to the retailer’s website to learn more, read reviews, or click to buy. Virtually any brand can now transform their videos on YouTube into a digital storefront.

TrueView provides direct sales of products like apparel, shoes, sunglasses, handbags, watches, custom goods, media, video game software, and books. This is potentially bigger than QVC and HSN put together because YouTube overall reaches more consumers than any cable network in the U.S.

TrueView has quickly and dramatically increased the importance of video production in Toronto and has created quite a buzz among marketers. In the coming months and years, you can expect the TrueView feature to become an essential tactic in e-commerce.

Video Production Oakville – Video Marketing Strategy

It’s no secret that video production plays a massive role today in online marketing. In fact, according to HighQ, 52% of marketing professionals worldwide regard video as the type of content with the best ROI. A good video marketing strategy is an essential key to success regardless of the type of business or organization you’re in.

However, as with any other marketing strategy, video marketing must be done right to achieve success. It’s all about strategy. Today, one of the most effective strategies being used by many of the leading brands is the Triple H strategy. Triple H stands for “Hero, Hub, & Hygiene”. This strategy was created by Youtube and has been used by many top brands and household names worldwide. Many marketers today are creating whole Youtube channels around this strategy. The Hero, Hub, & Hygiene strategy actually combines three different kinds of video content together into one channel.

Hero content is the more traditional video marketing approach. Hero videos are large-scale events or programs that drive mass awareness; oftentimes around product or event launches. Hero content builds awareness at a much broader scale to reach the mainstream. According to YouTube, Hero content is something that should be produced on average 1-2 times a year for a brand and will entertain and inspire the viewers with emotional storytelling. This usually generates a large boost in both traffic and brand awareness. Hero content is usually big-budget and often brings in big-name talent, or stunts…. something that can’t happen often.

EXAMPLES:
Volvo Trucks’ “The Epic Split”:

Redbull’s “Stratos”:

Pepsi’s Joe Flacco Football Party:

Hub content is meant to entertain and keep an audience coming back. According to YouTube, this content should be “regularly updated,” “valuable and engaging,” and should encourage people to “Subscribe, Like, and Follow”. It is regularly scheduled “push” content and is really the content that your core audience should want to come back and enjoy time and time again. A great example of this would be “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”. The channel regularly posts the most popular bits from the show to not only drive viewers to the channel, but back to the television show as well. This is the core business of most traditional YouTube channels: posting, entertaining and engaging content on a regular basis to keep their audience coming back.

EXAMPLES:
The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon:
https://www.youtube.com/user/latenight
Who is job 2.0?:
https://www.youtube.com/show/whoisjob20
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtFAi84ehTSYSE9XoHefig/videos

Hygiene content is more searchable content intended to draw in viewers who may not already be watching your videos or buying your products. Hygiene videos are created around the core interests relevant to the ideal viewer or target consumer. Oftentimes this content is specifically created to capture viewers searching key terms related to the brand. For example, if you’re a computer software company, your content could be how-to videos helping your consumers navigate your product. People tend to find hygiene videos through search when they’re looking for answers to a specific question.

EXAMPLES:
Gillette How to Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlistlist=PL5urOKdhITFTNYhuNtWQGVr6c8c5Wt-iH
Home Depot How to Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/user/homedepot/playlists

Today, video marketing strategies demand a highly intricate approach. Gone are the days when Oakville based companies would depend on the success of a viral video for their entire video marketing campaign. Today, brand channels need to have a solid foundation of Hero, Hub, and Hygiene content to draw viewers in and turn an audience into a community. This may take some time, patience, and effort creating your video content and developing your audience. However, in the long run, the Triple H strategy will deliver tremendous ROI to your company and can bring your brand to the next level.

Recap: The Triple H formula:
• Hero – large scale videos that reach the masses at scale
• Hub – regularly scheduled content geared around customers’ major passions
• Hygiene – always-on videos that are optimized to viewer’s intentions
and interest

Video Production Oakville – Globetrotters Video

Eight performers from the off-Broadway “Stomp” fixture recently joined forces with Globetrotter stars Bull Bullard, Cheese Chisholm, Firefly Fisher, and Handles Franklin to create a truly amazing viral video. If you’ve been following our recent blogs about the triple-H video marketing strategy, this video is a masterful example of what is called Hero content.

Hero videos are large-scale events or programs that drive mass awareness; often times around product or event launches. Hero content builds brand awareness at a much broader scale to reach the mainstream. According to YouTube, Hero content is something that should be produced on average 1-2 times a year for a brand and will entertain and inspire the viewers with emotional storytelling. This usually generates a large boost in both traffic and brand awareness. Hero content is usually big-budget and often brings in big-name talent, or stunts . . . something that can’t happen often.

In this 2-minute, high-energy video published on October 27 2015, Stomp performers and the Globetrotters come together to display their remarkable skills in a truly spectacular way. In the video, the performers dribble basketballs in rhythm, pass and fold into each other. The Globetrotters do complicated dunks and plenty of finger spins, while the Stomp dancers make a soundtrack with basketballs. This entire video was captured in one single take. This is true showmanship but also an excellent example of the inspirational power of Hero content!

Facebook video ads yield amazing results for Oakville corporations, marketers, and small businesses (including Oakville video production companies like us) who leverage the platform effectively. Whether your objective is to close sales, build a list, or gain a large amount of new followers, fans, likes, and clicks; Facebook video ads provide a powerful path to targeting your ideal viewers with engaging content. But which Facebook video ad formats are the most effective?

We’ve looked at pages from national brands, dozens of Oakville marketers, and Oakville businesses. We evaluated the success of the video ads based on their publicly displayed views, likes, comments, and shares. We discovered that all the top ads fit into 3 major video formats.

#1 Educational/Informational Shorts

These fast-paced, short-form instructional videos have been made popular by media giants BuzzFeed, Tastemade, and Food Network. Smaller creators too have jumped in on the game with exercise videos, crafts, and even makeup tutorial versions of these popular videos. These videos are fun and highly shareable because viewers can watch the entire video quickly. Their short durations (30 seconds on average) fit in perfectly to this new age of social media video sharing. Stylistically these video ads usually incorporate time-lapse demonstrations and incorporate text and images so that the audience knows exactly what is happening without having to turn on the audio.

#2 Gifs

This video ad format refers to the animated Gif and is an animated image or series of images that move like a video. The Gif leverages one of the web’s most popular forms of viral media with sleek movements that catch and retain attention. This style was made popular by Facebook Insights, Corona, and Time Magazine and is now being utilized by many leading Toronto companies and agencies. The best GIF ads use a collection of still images that are animated inside larger content. They can incorporate sound effects, music, and camera animations to provide a sense of motion and reality. Animated Gifs can generate a wealth of views and deliver a ton of shares … but they have to be created properly.

#3 Worksafe Ads

Worksafe videos use text or captions to tell the story without having to turn the volume on. This makes the video safe for work environments like cubicals areas where playing audio would be disruptive. This expands your viewership to those individuals sitting at work, riding on the bus, eating lunch in a restaurant, etc.

As Facebook began to roll out the captions feature, savvy creators like Buzz Feed saw opportunity to engage viewers by adding titles and narrational text without any audio at all. Worksafe videos use titles to help tell the story. The captions feature can help you reach an international audience of non-English speakers. We are now seeing this style of video being posted from a variety of companies throughout Oakville.

These top three video ad formats for Facebook perform incredibly well. While each of these formats are being used by major Oakville corporations and brands, the style of video translates well for smaller Oakville businesses too. As Facebook continues to mature as a video platform, Oakville marketers who gain reputation early on will reap the rewards of being positioned early. Always remember that with any video you create, always use a trusted professional video production company with proven results. Whether your marketing on Facebook, Google, or any other social media platform, your video production success in Toronto will always depend on the quality of your videos and their ability to capture your viewers’ attention.

Successful Video Marketing in Oakville

Until recently, the most important objectives for Oakville companies with successful video marketing strategies were to educate their customers, expand brand awareness, and increase online engagement. Today, it’s well known to Oakville marketers that online video production can also increase website traffic, leads, and ultimately, sales revenue. However, these results can only really be achieved by creating quality content with proven effectiveness; this is the first step to success with any video marketing campaign.

Trusting the part time wedding videographer in the office with projects with this kind of sales potential would be a serious mistake. Oakville companies that enjoy the most success with video marketing almost always hire professional video production companies to produce their content. In fact, Vidyard in partnership with Ascend2, recently fielded a survey and it turns out that 93% of North American companies outsource MOST of their video content production, another 21% outsource ALL video content creation, while only 7% create video content entirely in-house.

Being a corporate video production company in Oakville for over 20 years, we at Groovy Concepts understand the reason for such one-sided statistics on this matter. To begin with, it’s important to point out that, according to the survey, companies with the most successful video marketing strategies get the most ROI from customer testimonials. This can’t be that surprising since customer testimonials are a savvy way to provide viewers with the proof that they need that a company’s products or services are in fact “great”. Customer testimonials are seen as twice as effective as case studies, showing the psychological impact of customers vouching for a company’s products or services compared to a company boasting their own products or services.

The only problem for Oakville companies planning to dive in and create testimonial videos is that these are among the most difficult videos to produce… especially if your customers are scattered throughout the country or continent. From the video production standpoint, conducting professional testimonial interviews is an art form in itself. From shot set up, framing, lighting, and cinematography, to using the right choice of mics and audio recording equipment…. and let’s not forget post production editing, sound, and effects. A thorough knowledge of contemporary media aesthetics, branding and how these practices translate into the video production medium is also essential.

Then there is the interviewer-interviewee interactivity that is required at the shoot. Professional interviewers have the ability to put the interviewee at ease quickly, they help them to forget about the camera, and are able invoke powerful emotion, statements, stories and sound bites from their interviewees. Contrary to popular opinion, it is nowhere near enough just to send the interviewee a list of the questions in advance of the interview. Interviewing is a true art form, not to be entrusted with a novice. A video production company in Toronto that can provide a talented and experienced interviewer to an interview shoot is invaluable.

In Oakville, the keys to victory with video marketing begins with outsourcing your projects to a qualified video production company. Long past are the days where companies can get away with simply pointing a consumer grade camera at someone and hoping for the best. Today most viewers will only watch videos they find engaging and that have a high level of production quality. In the subject of “how can we afford to hire a professional video production company?”… the real question is “how can we afford NOT to hire a professional video production company?”.