For some time now, video content has been one of the most dynamic ways to get your audience to stop and listen. However, it’s far from the easiest to produce.
To create a video that ticks all the boxes, you need to make a watertight plan before you even pick up a camera.
Luckily, we’ve made it nice and easy for you. Follow our tips and you’ll be well on your way to launching videos that make an impact.
The right equipment to record the job
Actors or voice over artists
Internal or freelance editors
Video production software
Project management software
You can’t start your video project management process without knowing what your client wants. But what happens if your client doesn’t know what they want? It’s all-too-easy for a company to send you a vague slap-dash message, and that’s only going to lead to confusion, frustration, and a lot of wasted hours.
If you want to do things right, send your clients a form, or leave one on your website for cold requests. Customize your form with deadlines, target audience, design concepts, overall objective, and any other essential fields for you. The best form software will even populate your task management automatically, saving you time once you give your video projects the green light.
When it comes to planning your project, this request form will serve as a reference point. Now, with a rough vision of what your client actually wants, you can move forward with your idea management with confidence.
From script writing and storyboards to voice overs and video editing, it’s a complex process. And what’s the best way to deal with complexity? Detailed planning. So get your team together and set up a meeting with your client, providing a comprehensive agenda beforehand, which should include:
No matter how fast your team works, if they’re running in the wrong direction, you’re on to a loser. Work through the general idea and the script with your clients, making it clear what’s impossible and offering suggestions on how to improve.
It’s much easier to manage video crews when you know what the overall objective is. If you’re looking for a fast-paced promotional for social media, there’s no need to record a hard-disk full of scenic cutaway shots. When it comes to planning, you can refer back to your goals to inform your decisions moving forward.
Despite what your clients may think, videos don’t appear out of thin air. Budgeting helps you set realistic expectations of what is possible, and if you break down your video production process, you can identify sections to remove in order to stay on budget.
Just because we’re in the “creative” sphere, it doesn’t mean you can’t apply key performance indicators. Think about how you’re going to measure your metrics. Do you want people to simply share and interact with your video? Or are you going for clicks, downloads, or conversions? This is what shows your success, and you can use your figures to attract new clients in the future.
One of the easiest things to forget in video production, you need to define the who, what, when, and where of distribution. Launching a social media campaign on a public holiday will make it old news by the time Monday comes around, so make an outline of how you want to release your video before you start. More on this later!
Now you’ve got a clear idea of your brief, it’s time to start assigning jobs. Video project management tools keep all your tasks in one place, with responsible people and an expected duration assigned to every step. Time tracking software helps you measure how well you’ve estimated your timeframes here.
Get a broad view of your process with a Gantt chart. These handy visualizations show you all your tasks in blocks of time, so you can see how everything fits together in the leadup to your deadlines.
Kanban boards are another clever way of laying out your project. Each task is a card that moves as it is completed. On the far left of your Kanban board, you can keep your goals and KPIs as a constant reminder, as well as a backlog of all the tasks that are still to be launched.
Your project management software is also where all your task-related communication should take place. Save your team and your clients the bother of scrolling through their inboxes and keep all updates and modifications recorded within each task.
This is the cheat sheet of video projects — a list of tricks that can speed up your processes.
Especially useful for remote teams, collaborative documents allow your team to work on your storyboards simultaneously, and save yourself a lot of time in the process. Make suggestions, accept changes, lock the final version and send it off for approval.
A lot of your tasks are interconnected, and video project management tools let you link them all together with no effort. Take the rough cut, for example. Once your editor has marked it as complete, a reviewing task can automatically be sent out to everyone who needs it. So even if you’re on holiday in the Maldives, you can rest assured that your job is getting done.
Give your brain a break and let notifications do some of the heavy lifting. For updates, new tasks, and even when jobs are approaching deadlines, algorithms can take care of the boring bits and stop things falling through the cracks.
Of course, every project is different, but that doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch every time. Once you’ve set up a set of tasks that work, save it as a project template. When you standardize creation in this way, you’re just a couple of adjustments away from getting started once the next gig comes around.
One of the major problems facing video project management is when your team leaves a meeting and hides away in silos, only to come together near the deadline to find errors, missing work, or incomplete tasks.
As a manager, you should set up regular meetings to measure your progress. This helps to resolve minor issues before they snowball into bigger problems, and also allows you to keep your stakeholders confident that you’re on schedule. Take one, or all, of the following tips on board:
Brief meetings every morning allow your team to give progress updates and air issues that you can use to tweak your approach slightly.
Getting your clients and team together for a longer discussion at pre-set checkpoints keeps everybody on track and your clients happy. Use this time to confirm aspects that you could not cover in the initial meeting, such as actors and venues to be hired.
With the right software, you can download progress reports that tell you how long each task is taking. Use this information to help your team improve in the future, or to update your project templates.
Starting a a video project is super-easy with Bitrix24. Create tasks, add team members, visualize projects in the form of a Gantt chart, Kanban Board, Calendar or Scrum.
Try Now
If you’ve already cut your teeth in the world of video project management, you’ll be well aware that the back-and-forth of links to external file hosting sites is far from ideal. Instead of sending the video out to your stakeholders, get them to come to you.
With a professional cloud-based drive, you can keep every version of your video in one place, and ping a link to one file, rather than expecting everybody to have the bandwidth necessary to download a new file and keep tabs on how many drafts there have been.
What’s more, you can restrict access to your files to keep prying eyes away from your work in progress.
A great way to manage video crews and make their lives easier is to synchronize how feedback is given. For an editor, there’s nothing worse than a conversation with a colleague here, an instant message from the client there, and an email from your boss that contradicts everything else.
Use checkpoint meetings to make sure everybody is on the same page and avoid pleasing one stakeholder while going against the wishes of another. By getting a consensus on what modifications are necessary, your editor can take feedback notes in a style that makes sense to them, and produce a second draft that works for everyone.
If you’re meeting via video call, you can even record it to pair up what the editor has on the page with any context that may have been missed in the conversation.
There’s nothing worse than launching a video and immediately noticing you’ve missed your brand logo in the corner of your video. When you’re making branded videos, you need to standardize creation, which includes color schemes, intros, frames per second, subtitle font and so much more.
Implement a task into your workflow that covers all of your “must-haves”. Your checklist is living, so if your client’s brand changes, or if you pick up on other areas, update your list and reduce your easy mistakes to zero.
Nobody should be expected to watch a video start to finish, give it the stamp of approval and send it on its way. This is why you need a robust, well-researched checklist that you can refer to throughout your video production process, but especially when giving the final OK.
It’s not good enough having a world-class video if nobody is going to see it, and this essential aspect of video project management is often overlooked.
If you made a rough plan of your distribution strategy at the beginning of the process, good news! You’ll only have to check everything is still relevant, upload the final video to your social media planner, and you’re ready to go.
Tracking your video’s performance is a crucial aspect of distribution and there is an infinite list of metrics you can use. How many people have you reached? How many decided to share and interact with it? Which demographics did it tick with? And are you getting a good ROI?
Running marketing analytics on all of your chosen KPIs is what allows you to identify what works and what doesn’t, and ultimately to move forward as a company. However, many video production companies create brilliant content, but lack the skills to create a buzz around their creation. If this sounds like you, it might be worth outsourcing your marketing to a third party.
Sorry! Your job isn’t done just yet.
The end of your video production project is the best time to look to the future. All those near misses, deadline scares, and communication breakdowns will be fresh in your mind, so get your team together and reflect on how you’ve performed. Were any deadlines too tight? Do you need to hire an external specialist whenever you have 3D animations? Was a line of communication too often blocked?
Your analytics will come into play here. If you’ve been tracking time on tasks, you can see what ran on too long (or even too short!) and adjust your templates accordingly.
Post-post-production is also the perfect time to reach out to your client with a form asking what they would improve. Showing a desire to improve — even if you’re at the top of your game — is a sign of a dedicated team, and yes, it improves your chances of being hired by them again.
So there you have it! 10 essential basics for video project management that you can adopt in your business.
If there’s one key takeaway from our list, it’s that video projects are not a one-person job. But instead of hiring so many people you put your company into bankruptcy, why not try the smart route?
From project management tools and communication channels to automations, project templates, and analytics, Bitrix24 can take the stress out of your video production project and give you the headspace to get creative.
If you haven’t used all these features before, you’ll be surprised at how intuitive it is. Don’t believe us? Sign up to Bitrix24 for free today and find out for yourself.