Cost Saving Tips for a Down Economy
A down economy means budgets are tight. It also dictates that many businesses must rethink their business model, branding, marketing, and advertising. This often necessitates creating new multimedia to support those changes. In a time when competition is at its highest, businesses can’t allow their media campaign to fall short of their competitors’. For this article, we’ve put together some tips for saving cost when planning your next media production project. While any media production studio can advise you on specific ways to tighten the budget on a project, this article will focus on the more common ways.
Photo Animation
Short marketing or product demo videos utilizing existing or stock photography and text animation are very common forms of media on the web today. They are utilized by major companies like Microsoft, GE, and BMW. They are also less expensive to produce than other forms of media production. These aren’t your amateur photo slideshows either. Photo animation demos can employ complex graphical layers, rich animation, narrated information and music, and 3D text effects. From a production standpoint, they often require less production staff, time, planning, and asset creation to produce.
Enhanced Presentations
Growing your brand means communicating to your customers effectively. Often this is done through presentations at trade shows or special events. Graphical Powerpoint or Flash presentations can be an effective, cost-saving method to deliver your message. These presentations can employ custom designed pages to match your new branding, animated graphs or statistical data, short video clips, and photos. Through Flash presentations, you can have moving backgrounds, eye-catching transitions, and even launch your presentation from the web. Through custom presentations, you can deliver your message in a style that is consistent with your branding – not rehashed from a template. You can catch the eye of your customer and exceed the competition. You can see an example of this type of presentation at presentations.rapideyedigital.com.
CEO Interview
Sometimes instilling confidence in your customers takes showing them that your business is run by real human beings that are down-to-earth and understanding of their needs. A CEO interview style video is a common way to accomplish this. The new CEO of Sprint launched a campaign of straight-forward commercials, speaking directly to the camera. Those have ranked high in customer appeal. These type of videos can also be less expensive to produce. Video interviews take a couple of hours to record, typically require less setup, and editing can be streamlined for simplicity and cost-savings.
Smart Planning
With any approach to media production, planning ahead can save time and money. As we’ve mentioned in previous articles, a video shoot costs about the same to produce if its one hour or 4 hours. By thinking ahead, you can schedule a series of videos to be shot at once. The production cost might be about the same as shooting just one interview. For example, shoot 3 versions of your CEO Interview. Pay for them to be edited as money allows and launch them one by one over the course of the next few months. This will give variety to your marketing campaign while extending the value of the multimedia services you pay for. As a second planning tip, try contracting with your media producer for more projects ahead of time. They’ll typically award your commitment to future business with discounted rates. Their knowledge of what you plan to do now AND in the future will allow better production management.
The R.E.D. Team
www.rapideyedigital.com
www.rapideyedigital.com/blog
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