How to create a promo video or ad for your business on a low budget. Let's face it, as a business owner one of your biggest challenges is to get your offer in front of enough people and let the world know you exist. I'm sure you have a great product or service. Just think for a minute. If you could get your offer in front of 10,000 prospects, 100,000 prospects or even a million, what type of outcomes that would produce. Unfortunately, not getting in front of enough people can be a hurdle that many businesses don't get over and can be a dream killer. Creating a powerful brand awareness video is an important weapon to have in your arsenal on the road to becoming a household name and if deployed correctly can be a game changer. The Shaver Club created a promo video that blasted their brand into the stratosphere getting them 12,000 new customers. The ad was credited for taking them from zero dollars in sales to 4 years later selling the company for a billion dollars. Ideally, we want to get the video ad in front of people who are looking for your product or service and influence their decision when it comes time to buy. What is good about this type of video ad is we just want to let people know about you; we are not trying to get them to drop everything and sign up, buy something on the spot. Rather we just want to let them know that we exist and have something for them. Usually, these videos are short and sweet. Anywhere from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. They can be longer, but I recommend keeping it short, as the method for using it best suits a short form video. A longer video will take more production, cost more and be harder to get people to watch unless, for example, it's highly entertaining. Ultimately, it comes down to your objectives, but for this article we are going to concentrate on a short inexpensive video ad. Imagine for a second you are a golf lover and you are watching a YouTube video on how to improve your swing. Then an video ad comes on for a new driver that allows the average person to hit the ball straighter and longer. That is more likely to convert into a sale as opposed to a cold audience with less intent. Remember the golf enthusiast is there to watch a video on their swing, so technically we are interrupting them quickly, letting them know about your offer and what you've got. Unlike other video ads or promos, we may have a stronger call to action. Again this is just about quickly making an impression and letting them know about you and your offer. Recently at Smoochit, we created a brand awareness video with the purpose of running video ads on YouTube to an audience that is interested in, you guessed it, promo videos. Being a startup, we didn't have a massive budget, so were looking to target an audience with this topic in mind. Of course, if you have a massive budget, then you can play your video ad at the next Super Bowl and blast it out to a world-wide audience. If you're like most businesses, that's not going to be an option right now, and you'll need to focus your efforts on finding a smaller more targeted audience. You'll be looking to generate a high ROI and get as much out of your ad budget as possible, and look to scale up your efforts based on traction. I'd like to share with you the process we used to make our brand awareness video for Smoochit. We launched a Project on Smoochit to make the video ad. The first thing we did was figure out where we wanted to show the video ad and who we wanted to target. We felt it was important to reverse engineer the video ad like this, as then you have a better idea how to position the ad. For example, as just mentioned, we wanted to target people who were looking at video marketing and how to make promo videos. We figured if someone was learning or interested in this, that would indicate some intent to have a video like this. Another example of this would be if you sell, let's say, a golf driver, target people who are watching videos about how to improve their swing. There are many ways to target audiences these days. Do a Google search and find one or two target audiences you like and use that as a starting point to create your video ad. We decided to make a 15 second video that was designed to create some awareness about our service. The reasoning behind this was we just wanted to very quickly let people know if they wanted a promo video to promote their business online, they should go to Smoochit and easily access top video creators to make it. We are not trying to take their attention, and keep it, and get them to do something, like join our mailing list or take advantage of a special offer. Just a quick interruption, if you will, and let them know quickly who we are and what we do. We decided to write the copy ourselves. Being a 15 second video, aim for about 30-35 words. We wanted to have a professional voiceover guy narrate, to give it that professional feel. We paid a voiceover Freelancer $75 dollars, and he returned the recording back in a one day. If you don't fancy writing your own script, you can look for a writer on Smoochit to write the script for you. Being a short video ad, you'll need to communicate your offer clearly and succinctly. Smoochit - Awareness video ad script / 35 words Need a promo video to boost online sales? Just Smoochit! Go to Smoochit and find a video creator to make a sales driving video for your business today! Smoochit; Video creator services at your fingertips. Once we got the voiceover back, we launched our project and ended up working with four editors, as we wanted a few promo videos using the same brief to showcase what our Freelancers could do on a low budget. The main thing you have to do is write a great brief to arm the video creators with as much information as possible. Having the voiceover track ensures the production doesn't stray too much from your concept. But as you will see in the videos below the right mix of editing, music and stock footage does make a big difference to the end result. Below are the four videos the editors made The total cost of each video was around $200. When you are ready to make your own promo or ad, go to www.smoochit.net and sign up for a free account.