Clicky

Marketing Videos that Stand the Test of Time

3 ways to make a marketing video that’s evergreen.

If you’re spending thousands of dollars on a video, it’s ideal that it can be used for more than a few months. Brands evolve, products get updated, and markets change. So it’s usually not possible for a video to be front and center on your site or social media platform for more than a few years at most. But there are some things you can do so that the video can still maintain a level of relevance to your brand for much longer than its original purpose.

Focus on the Brand

Hopefully by the time you are ready to make a video, you have your brand down. That is, there won’t be major changes to your brand identity. If you’re creating a marketing video, even if it’s for a specific product or service, a video that is predominantly focused on your company’s personality will live longer on your website. Perhaps a small section or two of the video may need to be re-edited at some point, but if there’s brand consistency, then the entire video doesn’t have to be archived when a product or service is updated.

Produce videos that depict your culture, your brand character. Make lifestyle videos that appeal to your audience. Many marketing videos don’t need to be about the product at all. It just needs to make an impression and be memorable. In doing so, even if the original purpose of the video is no longer relevant, it will still be useful in conveying the overall emotion of your brand.

Here’s a good example of a culture/lifestyle marketing video that can remain relevant with a few quick edits.

Stay Away from Trendy Stuff

Trendy stuff will date your video really fast. There’s always a temptation to do whatever is cool at the moment, but before you give the go-ahead to the video production company or artist, take a breath and try to see into the future. Would this pastel color still be cool a year from now? How about this super-retro music, which was cool 20 years ago, and now it’s cool again, but how about 6 months from now? Or different hairstyles or clothes you’ll ask your actors to wear. Think about all these things before jumping into something that will unnecessarily and avoidably make your video obsolete earlier than necessary.

Make Videos that can create offspring.

No, I’m not saying develop some technical husbandry process for breeding videos. The main idea here is to leverage the resources you have when developing a full production. Sometimes a video is created to do one thing and one thing only, but even then, many videos or even parts of videos can be repurposed.

The key is to develop the video with this in mind from the beginning. Whether you’re working with a creative director or a video production firm, ask the question, how can we use this video in other ways down the road? It may be as easy as re-editing product or screen capture segments into a live action video. You may plan on recording certain lines of narration or dialogue in different ways: one specific to the purpose of the current need, and other more generic versions of the lines for future use. You may shoot a video in segments, where each segment can be re-cut for other uses.

A video or film shoot is expensive. Creating an entirely animated video is expensive. So the more you can leverage a production to create multiple repurpose-able assets, the more shelf-life your video will have.

Marketing videos and commercials are more important than ever in this age of content. Even if they are intended for broadcast and paid media, you want them to eventually live on your social media platforms. A product or service may eventually go outdated, but your marketing video won’t become obsolete if it retains that cool factor, is true to your brand, and stays away from cheesy trendy stuff.

Scroll to Top