Regardless of your company’s size, or its marketing budget – the fact is video costs money.  There’s no way around it. So if you’ve committed to making some media and you can only do one it should be a piece you can get some real mileage from.  Enter the Business Profile video.  Somewhere between a commercial and an interview piece, this type of video allows you to speak directly to the client about your goals as a company in creative ways relevant to your industry.  It should be short, dynamic, and not overwhelm the viewer with too much information – people want to be entertained as they process facts.

If you introduce facts and figures, bring them in as text – with a professional voice over where possible.  Numbers go down more easily in a visual format.  You should aim for a max. of 60 seconds of video if possible – any more than 90 seconds and your viewership drops off exponentially. That gives you enough time for two people to speak, one can establish your business proposition and the other can validate and build on it. While these speakers are narrating, you can introduce some dynamic b-roll of your business doing what it does. Even something as mundane as data entry can look interesting if shot properly so don’t worry that your industry doesn’t translate to a visual medium. Your profile video can also be an animation, an especially effective medium for technical information.

Some well-chosen royalty-free music, a graphics treatment and your polished visual business card is ready to be deployed – but where? Everywhere and anywhere you have a digital presence: goes without saying it should be on YouTube,  Twitter, shared with your LinkedIn contacts on both a business page and your own personal page, Instagram, Facebook and the list goes on.  Important to note: make sure the links you share on all of these platforms lead the viewer back to where you want them to be – case in point your website, or a landing page – don’t just send people back and forth between your social media accounts – you want to talk to them from home base: your site.

Do you take part in trade shows? Bring a screen and show your video. Have a storefront? Throw up a tablet and loop that bad boy all day long. You will get your investment back many times over if you leverage your media properly, and produce it in a way that gives you the greatest amount of options for display and sharing.