Custom stock footage is a valuable asset for businesses looking to improve their marketing, communication and learning efforts. With the rise of video, it’s essential to have high-quality footage that accurately represents your brand and products or services. But why should you invest in custom stock footage instead of using generic stock footage? This article will explore the benefits of custom stock footage and the process of producing it.
Why you need custom stock footage for your business
Custom stock footage is footage that is tailored specifically to your business’s needs. This means that the footage is shot with your brand, products, and services in mind. It’s an effective way to showcase your business in a unique and authentic way. Using custom stock footage ensures that the footage is an accurate representation of your brand, making it more relatable to your target audience.
Benefits of producing custom stock footage
Custom stock footage has several benefits for businesses. One of the main advantages is that it’s unique to your business, which makes it stand out from the competition. The footage is also shot with your locations, people, brand and products in mind, which means it’s more relatable to your target audience.
Additionally, custom stock footage can be used in various forms of marketing, such as social media, website, learning platforms, internal comms and video marketing.
How can the footage be used?
Custom stock footage can be used in a variety of ways to promote and enhance your business, both internally and externally.
Internally, custom stock footage can be used to create training videos for employees, promotional videos for internal events or product launches, or to create a company culture video that can be shared with new hires or on the company’s website.
Externally, custom stock footage can be used to create promotional videos for products or services, to create a brand image video that tells the story of your company, or to create a video that highlights your company’s values and mission. It can also be used in social media marketing campaigns, website landing pages, and other external communications. Additionally, it can be used in TV commercials, infomercials, or other types of advertising.
The process of producing custom stock footage
The process of producing custom stock footage can be broken down into several steps:
- Developing a detailed shotlist – This involves identifying the specific shots that you want to capture.
- Identifying locations, people, and products/services – This involves scouting locations, casting ‘talent’ whether that be your team members or actors, and preparing products or services for filming.
- Developing a filming schedule – This involves creating a schedule for when and where the footage will be shot.
- Filming – This involves the video crew filming on location, whether it be a half, full, or multiple days, with the right equipment such as high-end cameras, lighting and audio.
- Ensure multiple camera angles are captured – This is important if there are sequences of events involved.
- Post-production – Rather than uploading the large raw camera files, we take it to post-production. We do basic editing to trim down the footage to remove unnecessary content.
- Grouping content – We combine multiple clips relevant to specific scenes.
- File names – We ensure that each of these new files are named correctly for quick reference.
- Exporting video content – We export the footage in a high-resolution format, such as mp4, that is easily used by people on their own system.
- Storing the files – These files are then stored on your own internal media system or intranet for easy access by anyone in your team.
How your team can access the video content
In terms of accessing the custom stock footage, it can be stored on your own internal media system or intranet for easy access by anyone in your team. This allows for easy access and use of the footage in various forms of marketing, such as social media, website, and video marketing.
Also, you can share the access to the custom stock footage with your agency or video production team for them to use in their creative process. In addition, it’s important to keep the custom footage organized, named and tagged correctly, so that it’s easily searchable and retrievable for future use. This will save time and effort in finding the footage that you need for a specific project.
As time goes on, you will find more requirements for custom stock footage to be captured and added, using this process. It’s a cost-effective solution, but the rate will be higher than if you were to hire a camera operator to come out and film then copy over the footage there and then. Our rates include the pre-production, basic editing and uploads.
And of course, use that media library to store footage your own team has captured, such as those smartphone clips.
In conclusion, custom stock footage is an essential asset for businesses looking to stand out in the market, by representing their brand, products and services in a unique and authentic way and it can be easily accessed and used by anyone in your team, agency or video production team, with the added benefit of being organized, named and tagged correctly for future reference.
If you’re looking for custom stock footage for your business, contact us at Visual Culture or send me a DM on LinkedIn. Our team has the expertise, equipment, and crew to produce your top-quality content.
