Are you interested in a website intro video for your business or organisation in the Black Country or West Midlands region?
In the 2020s, nothing beats the power of video for marketing your business or organisation online. Research shows that people spend around two minutes longer on sites with videos than on those that just use text and photos. Every minute that someone stays on your site is a minute’s more exposure to your brand.
A great way for you to start your journey into video marketing is with an intro video on your website’s homepage. A website intro video, as the name suggests, is just a short introduction to you, your organisation, and your brand. You use it to briefly outline your key products, services, or activities and to establish your brand’s identity with the viewer. An intro video helps you to tell your business’s or organisation’s story while also persuading the viewer to linger. So where do I start with making an intro video for my website?
So where do I start?
Just like any other marketing campaign, you need to plan your intro video carefully. You need to be clear about your goals, your audience, and the connection that you’re trying to make with them. For this, you need to be clear about your key messages and the benefits that your activity brings. You also have to inspire confidence and curiosity in your brand, what it offers, and what makes it unique.
Having identified the key messages you want to convey in your intro video, you also need to think about how best to convey them. This includes thinking about style, narrative, pace, and structure. At the end of the day, you need to capture the imagination of the viewer. Even if your main purpose is to inform, you still need to hold your audience’s attention.
Finally, you need to consider the who, what, when, and where involved in producing your website intro video. Making sure you have the logistics clear before you begin will save you time and stress in the long run.
Are there any top tips for making a website intro video?
If you want to produce an effective intro video that generates interest in you and your business or organisation, there are some clear tips for success.
Be clear about the purpose of your intro video.
This might seem obvious, but too often people embark on making an intro video without being clear about what they want to achieve. This can result in a lack of coherence and clarity, making it difficult for the viewer to understand.
- Identify your target audience, what motivates them, and how they communicate.
- Use the above to decide on the messages you want to send and your language/style of delivery.
- Think about how to illustrate your key messages and what features of your business or organisation will do this best. For example:
- Featuring your products or walking through your service process.
- Showcasing your team.
- Showcasing your premises.
- Decide whether you want to persuade, inform or entertain (you’ll inevitably be doing all three to some degree, but priority is important)
Identifying and understanding your target audience is essential.
Keep your website intro video short and focussed.
You want your website’s intro video to entice viewers, not deter them. Don’t put them off with a video that’s too long. Depending on your audience (and their attention span), you should make your intro video around 2 minutes long. Remember that the purpose of your intro video is to grab people’s attention, not to provide masses of information.
At this point, deciding what’s in and what’s out is crucial. Don’t try to cram in every last facet of your operation. You should stick to 3 or 4 key messages, which is plenty for an intro video. By the same token, keep your messages short and sharp. Don’t be tempted to include lengthy explanations and examples. If your intro video does its job, viewers will seek out this information elsewhere on your website.
This info-graphic shows just how rapidly audience attention falls for marketing videos. From this, you can easily see that short is definitely sweet. You can also see that front-loading your key messages is a very good idea!
Show the human side of your business or organisation.
If your business is product focussed, it’s very tempting to simply show what you produce in all its glory. However, making sure that you humanise your brand is important.
Forming human connections with your audience inspires trust and confidence in your organisation. Even if you make machines using robots, you can still include elements that bring humanity to your intro video. For example:
- A human voiceover talking through your key messages.
- Candid footage of your team involved in their job.
- Talking head scenes.
Someone working at their desk makes perfect b-roll.
Try to tell a story with your intro video.
Even factual information benefits from a sense of narrative when you’re trying to grab and hold attention. You may be producing the most mundane product or providing the most basic service in the world, but there’s still a story behind it.
Stories pull us in and make us crave the resolution of seeing how things turn out. Stories have been used to convey knowledge and ideas for countless generations. In short, everyone loves a good story, so you need to take advantage of this in your intro video.
Find out more about the power of narrative.
Celebrate your uniqueness.
You may be one of a thousand companies offering similar things. However, chances are that there’s a unique slant to what you do. Sometimes, that uniqueness is all you need to get an edge in a competitive marketplace, so use it!
Major corporations have been built upon their slightly different or even quirky approach to a problem. When computers were dull grey boxes, Apple carved a niche in the market by turning their machines into design icons. The rest, as they say, is history and to this day ‘think different’ is still a major part of Apple’s marketing story.
(H3) Show your branding in your website intro video.
Your intro video is the perfect billboard for your branding. Hopefully, you’ll have the viewer’s attention for two minutes or more, so make the most of it.
- Have your branding in the background of talking head shots.
- Place branding elements in lower thirds banners.
- Run your logo in the top right corner throughout your video.
But……..don’t overdo it.
End your intro video with a call to action.
Ending your intro video with a call-to-action (CTA) brings your message to a logical conclusion, while also signposting the viewer’s next step. In most cases, leaving your audience hanging detracts from the whole point of your intro video and should be avoided.
A CTA doesn’t have to be an overt instruction, e.g. click the link below to find out more. It could simply point to the existence of further information, or show where your products are available for purchase. As with everything else in your intro video, the style of your CTA should fit with what you know about your target audience.
Whatever your CTA looks like, it should be a clear feature of your planning. Know what you want your audience to do and make sure that your intro video prompts them to do it.
Adding a call to action at the end of your intro video is always a good idea.
Don’t set your website intro video to auto play!
This might seem counterintuitive; after all, you want visitors to watch it, right? True, but you don’t want to force them to watch it. In addition, two things are more likely to make someone quickly navigate away from your website than anything else:
- Having to wait for a video to load with your page.
- The sound track from your video suddenly blaring out unexpectedly.
Much better to have an eye-catching thumbnail and to place your intro video in a prominent position on your website. You could even prompt viewers to play your video with a CTA, of course.
Go for quality!
An intro video is one area where you can’t afford to get cheap. Quality is important because this may well be the first prolonged experience customers have of your brand.
Grabbing any old camera, or worse, grabbing your phone and going for it is likely to be a mistake. In particular, if your intro video involves live sound, this needs to be recorded properly. Lighting is also an often neglected area of amateur filming, with poorly lit scenes being difficult to watch and make sense of.
Learn more about capturing sound for video.
If you don’t have the know-how and resources to do a good job then work with a company that does. You don’t need a Hollywood production for your website intro video, but you do need it to look and sound convincing. In short, you can be authentic without being rubbish!
Learn more about my marketing video production services.
Stourbridge-based Mooma Media offers event audio-visual support, event filming, live-streaming, video production, and still photography services to businesses, the public sector, and other non-commercial organisations throughout the Black Country and the wider West Midlands region. To discuss your project, or for a competitive quote click the button below.
Website intro video production in and around the following:
West Midlands county: Birmingham, Solihull, Sutton Coldfield, West Bromwich, Dudley, Walsall, Wolverhampton.
Staffordshire: Lichfield, Tamworth, Stafford, Cannock,Burton upon Trent.
Shropshire: Telford, Shrewsbury, Bridgnorth, Kidderminster, Ludlow.
Worcestershire: Bromsgrove, Reditch, Droitwich, Worcester,
Warwickshire: Warwick, Stratford upon Avon, Leamington Spa, Coventry, Nuneaton,
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