There’s no question that videos are a key aspect of any company’s marketing strategy. In fact, we’ve written a blog post on this topic – check out our insight on why you should be upping your video marketing game this year. However, there’s nothing worse than when you have a great vision for a piece of video content, but your new idea is hindered by your video looking sloppy and unprofessional. Messy, amateur-looking video undercuts your professionalism and interferes with your messaging – but not to worry! There are some quick and easy strategies that you can utilize to elevate your marketing videos and increase their quality without spending tons of time or money.

Capturing quality footage

The most important step you can take to make sure your videos look professional is to capture quality footage. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to shell out a ton of money on a top-of-the-line video camera that will end up collecting dust on your shelf – there are several simple strategies that will make even computer camera or phone footage look much cleaner and clearer. Check out this video where Mike and Rachel discuss strategies to improve your webinar video quality – many of these tactics can also be applied to video marketing content, such as ensuring that you shoot in a well-lit area, use an external microphone to capture sound, and making sure your video background is clean. If you are ready to make an investment into new equipment, check out Julia’s blog post discussing our preferred in-house video setup!

Editing

Once you’ve captured quality video footage, it’s time to edit! You can utilize any editing software that you have access to. Most of GAAP Dynamics’ videos are created in Camtasia, but you can use Premiere Pro, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, or any other software with which you’re comfortable. A simple update that makes any video look more polished is adding intro and outro scenes to the front and back ends of the piece. This can look like something as simple as your video’s title fading in and out of the screen, or as intricate as a logo animation over company b-roll. Another simple touch that adds a level of professionalism to a video is the use of lower thirds. When a person appears onscreen, adding their name and/or title provides helpful information to your viewers. Likewise, adding simple fly-in animations of any notes or annotations that a viewer could find useful – i.e., the name of a new product flying in when it appears onscreen – makes a video more informative and helpful to your viewers and potential customers.

YouTube

Finally, when adding your videos to your company’s YouTube channel, there are a few quick and easy steps you can take to make sure your video stands out amongst your competitors. Adding a thumbnail image to your video makes it appear cleaner and more appealing when appearing on your page or within a viewer’s search results. Perhaps most importantly, utilizing closed captioning is essential to ensuring your video is accessible to more viewers. YouTube generates automatic closed captioning, but doesn’t always guess every word correctly – make sure you manually edit the captions to ensure that they have proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.  

About GAAP Dynamics  

We’re a DIFFERENT type of accounting training firm. We don’t think of training as a “tick the box” exercise, but rather an opportunity to empower your people to help them make the right decisions at the right time. Whether it’s U.S. GAAP training, IFRS training, or audit training, we’ve helped thousands of professionals since 2001. Our clients include some of the largest accounting firms and companies in the world. As lifelong learners, we believe training is important. As CPAs, we believe great training is vital to doing your job well and maintaining the public trust. We want to help you understand complex accounting matters and we believe you deserve the best training in the world, regardless of whether you work for a large, multinational company or a small, regional accounting firm. We passionately create high-quality training that we would want to take. This means it is accurate, relevant, engaging, visually appealing, and fun. That’s our brand promise. Want to learn more about how GAAP Dynamics can help you? Let’s talk!

Disclaimer  

This post is published to spread the love of GAAP and provided for informational purposes only. Although we are CPAs and have made every effort to ensure the factual accuracy of the post as of the date it was published, we are not responsible for your ultimate compliance with accounting or auditing standards and you agree not to hold us responsible for such. In addition, we take no responsibility for updating old posts, but may do so from time to time.