You’re Too Focused on the Price

Budgets matter. No one’s disputing that. But focusing your entire decision on the lowest bidder pushes the creative to a corner it can hardly climb out of. It’s among the simplest mistakes to avoid when hiring a video production company.

Usually, pricing reflects how many people touch your project. How long does it stay in edit? How many times does someone sit down and watch the thing all over again, fixing stuff no one noticed at first? When your first question is about the cost, your second will be about compromises. And they’ll add up.

You won’t always see what was skipped. But the audience does. They feel the compression. Make no mistake: they’re able to sense the rushed cut. And eventually, someone inside your team notices the edge missing from the piece, even if they can’t explain what the edge is.

You’re Not Exactly Sure What You Want

The process should begin much earlier than most teams realize. Vague goals tend to invite vague work. We just want something cool. Unfortunately, that sentence alone doesn’t qualify as a project brief.

Knowing what you want means having a point of view. Not on every frame, but on tone, rhythm, and intent. What should the viewer do next? What kind of energy belongs in the edit? Should the piece explain, persuade, or stay subtle and mildly suggestive?

Production companies aren’t guessing machines. If you don’t hand them something fixed, they’ll give you something you’ll probably find a little generic. A blank input breeds flat output. Every producer working on your project needs a shared north. And that only comes from the person asking for the video.

Choosing the First Company That Sounds Okay

You’ve finally found a team with a solid reel. You liked their email tone. They returned your call in minutes. It’s tempting to sign. But hesitation here helps.

Video work is crowded with fast talkers. Everyone has the right gear. Everyone has the right amount of confidence. But very few companies will study their audience before pressing record. Very few ask why you’re doing the video now and what’s changed since the last one. The ones that do – you’ll want to keep those names close.

Also consider: many teams stretch across cities. If you’ve recently decided to relocate to LA or expand part of your operation there, the instinct is often to get help quickly. Fast hiring can feel like momentum. But if you’re planning to move without losing productivity, make sure your creative support can match pace without draining precision. Ask how they handle projects with incomplete scripts. Ask if they’ve worked with approval chains longer than four people, or if they’ve ever shot in a space that didn’t allow light rigs. The answers are more revealing than the pitch.

Thinking Reputation (Or Experience) Doesn’t Count

It’s pretty common to think video production is purely a present-tense service. You see the reel, you like the colors, you hire. However, behind every polished sequence is a mess that got solved. Or didn’t.

Reputation grows from how problems were handled. And video work – especially commercial – tends to multiply complications at a higher frequency than most creative fields. Gear fails. Clients revise. Locations fall through. Someone forgot to send the asset folder. If the team you’ve hired doesn’t know what that chaos feels like, they won’t have a system to carry the work forward when it happens again.

Tenure matters – who’s stayed with the team longest can tell you what kind of environment they run. A project that nearly fell apart, and the way they pulled it back together – it shows you how they operate under pressure. Their approach to color correction and maintaining consistency across formats gives away how much detail they’re used to holding. All of it adds up to how they think and act and handle projects once the structure begins to slip.

Not Hiring Locally

Many companies assume that video is easily managed from afar. Zoom calls. Google folders. Cloud-based editing. Technically speaking, it’s true. But the closer your team is to the subject, the more specific the work becomes.

Local teams see details faster. They’ll know how light behaves in certain streets. They’ll secure location permits in hours, or they’ll bring assistants who live nearby, not across the state. The way a crew sets up in a familiar place will change how the day flows.

When you hire someone who’s never worked in your city, your video spends part of its energy explaining the setting. When the crew is local, the energy moves into the shot, just by knowing where to stand and when.

Decide. Then Re-decide.

Choosing who makes your video should be the result of more than timing and cost. It should reflect your ability to pause – briefly – and consider whether the team you’re about to trust has done this well, with people like you, under conditions as strange as the one you’re working in.

The most common mistakes to avoid when hiring a video production company begin with overconfidence. They end in emails you don’t want to forward to your leadership. Your audience won’t wait for the next draft. They’ll respond to whatever you show them.

Pick a team that asks good questions. Then let them ask better ones.

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Covid has, of course, driven those numbers even higher. Today’s consumer buys from home, seeks entertainment from home, conducts business from home, and, from the looks of things, many will continue to do so.  CNBC reports, “employers expect nearly 2 in 5 employees will still be working remotely at the end of 2021, compared with 57% who work remotely now, although that varies by industry”–that’s a drop of only 17% in the at-home workforce.

Even those who go-back to face-to-face are likely to continue their online habits. Business Insider noted a doubling of “mcommerce’s” (that is the use of mobile devices for online business) share of the ecommerce market between 2015 and 2019. That means no matter where we go, we’ll likely be conducting business on the devices we carry with us. In fact, Marketing Hub found that “62% of U.S. consumers said they shop online now more than they did before the pandemic.”

What that means for the small business is that if you don’t have at least a website, you’re way behind the trend. To be competitive in the Covid market and beyond, small businesses need to create online presences across multiple social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, and Twitter. As David Caffey, Digital Marketing Manager and Senior SEO Specialist, puts it “COVID-19 has shown how important your online presence can be in times like this, and by that, I mean making sure you have coverage for everywhere (Google My Business, etc.), not just your website.”

Small Business Marketing in a Digital Age

But this is good news for the small business. More than ever, small companies have the ability to compete using the same tools as huge conglomerates. And recent research shows that buyers are turning toward smaller local sourcing in their online activities. If you are a small business looking to build market awareness, here are a few things to consider:

• Keep it clear and short: today’s elevator pitch is conducted online and is often confined to a limited number of characters. In a digital environment, where attention spans are ever decreasing, you only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention.
• Collaborate: working within your community is not only a great way to call attention to your business, but also useful for making connections with other businesses that complement yours. Working together with other companies to create coupons, promotions, and events can benefit all involved and generate a much larger audience. In the online environment this translates to backlinks and “shares/likes” that build website traffic.
• Be a storyteller: you will need to create buzz for your business, and the online environment allows you to offer customer testimonials, build a company identity, and much more.
• Build relationships: it is more cost-effective to keep customers than it is to find new ones, so much of today’s digital marketing is geared toward building trust and offering fast, efficient service with reliable means for providing feedback and for receiving assistance.
• Create a social media presence: Today’s world largely exists in the social media realm. Use this to your advantage.

The Importance of a Social Media Presence

Let’s keep this short and sweet–today’s small business must have a presence in the social media environment in order to remain competitive. Not convinced? Then consider this:

• Social media allows you to uncover business trends in real time.
• Social media marketing analysis allows you to keep an eye on competitors. You are able to monitor the types of ads they create, what strategies they’re using, what markets they’re targeting, and what they’re promoting.
• Social media creates greater opportunities for backlinking and other SEO strategies that improve search engine performance.
• You are able to offer better and more immediate customer care and service by monitoring social media.
• You can create rich content such as video that has proven to generate higher engagement.

Take Advantage of Video

One of the biggest advantages of creating an online presence is the access your business has to video content possibilities. Visual content has been proven to be far more effective than written content when it comes to consumers retaining information. And unlike traditional video production for TV ads, online video content can be produced inexpensively.

You can use video production to create the story of your company through interviews, through virtual facility tours, through background exploration of products. You can also create powerful buzz by posting customer testimonials or chats with workers. In fact, today’s digital environment allows customers to see your company and your product in ways it never could before in traditional marketing forms.

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Ivan Young is a writer from Happy Writers, Co. in partnership with AdvanceOnline, an OSHA training provider.

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