How to Make Commercials for Your Business

Did you know that over 63% of marketers said that a majority of their content contained visuals? Visual content has seen an increase of between 71% of 100% for companies.

Chances are, your competitors are using visual content for their marketing strategies, so how can you compete? Marketing should often, if not always, include visual content.

Content that fits your audience is the key to success. If a commercial fits into your marketing plan, you’ll need to know how to create one.

Keep reading to learn how to make commercials.

Consider Your Target

Part of knowing how to make commercials involves considering your target audience and the target intent for the commercial.

Any ad should inform your audience about services or products and tie your name to those things. You’ll have to decide on a tone for your ad that matches the personality of your business.

What do you want your commercial ad to look like? Consider this question before you start so you can better visualize how to bring your intentions to life.

Create a Budget

To make a commercial, you’ll have to establish a budget beforehand. You’ll probably want to spend as little as possible to avoid going over your business budget.

Define what you can afford to spend so that the costs of the production don’t get away from you. Budgeting allows you to prioritize where money is spent and help you identify areas where you can save extra money.

There might be parts of the production that you can do on your own. If something is outside of your expertise, it’s best to spend money on it.

Pre-Production

Pre-production involves everything up until the time of shooting. This includes the following things:

• Script
• Storyboard
• Locations
• Talent
• Technical planning

Unless you are experienced in production, you should hire a commercial production company to handle these tasks for you. You can also hire a director, cameraman, or writer directly.

Doing so will lead to professional results and save you money in the long run.

If you want to write the commercial script yourself, these tips can help you with your story:

Conceptualize With a Brief

Creating a brief over your commercial can help you and your team gain answers to important project questions. Everyone can get involved in creating a commercial during this step of the writing process.

You don’t want to be in the midst of editing when someone realizes they don’t like part of a commercial. You also don’t want to miss out on shooting any important details.

Predicaments like this can stall the project’s progress but having a brief can prevent these issues. A brief will have your goals outlined so that you don’t miss a step while filming.

Answer Key Questions

During the creation of your brief, answer key questions that can help you craft a video script. This is what you’ll need to define within the brief:

• The goal of the video
• The audience of the video
• A narrow video topic
• Key takeaways from the video
• Call-to-action

The most important things to consider are what viewers should learn after watching your commercial and what they should do after it.

Know the Script Writing Essentials

Once you’ve picked the topic and created your brief, now is the time to dive into scriptwriting. The video script doesn’t need to be extravagant.

In fact, you’ll want to make it easy to get your message across while sounding credible and natural. It’s also important to write in conversational English. Don’t write in the style of a marketing research report or college paper.

Write in the perspective of the video’s presenter and define how that individual should speak.

Script Every Word

When writing a script, you need to include more than dialogue. A commercial script should include the different shots in the video, characters, scenes, and information about stage actions and the set.

If a wardrobe change is necessary for your commercial, add those details into the script as well. Basically, if there is ever a change on screen, the script will note it.

There are certain script-writing words you can learn to make the transitions easier to read.

After finishing what you think is the final script, we encourage you to read it over and over again. Not only will you be able to spot any errors, but knowing the script by heart can help you stay organized during filming.

In general, shorter commercials are better than long ones. You can’t expect to grab your audience’s attention for more than 30 seconds. If you intend on creating a short commercial, it will need a short script.

Any script less than two pages is a good sign. If you can create a script on one page, more power to you.

Plan a Table Reading

If your employees are the ones in the commercial, they might feel more comfortable saying their lines on camera after already going through a table read.

A table read is a good chance to read your script out loud to ensure that it sounds right. Sometimes, words only look good on paper.

The table read process gives you the chance to get rid of anything that sounds improper, too wordy, or even robotic. Make sure everything that is read fits into the message you are wanting to convey.

Shooting

With the pre-production process out of the way, you can start the actual shooting of the commercial. A professional director and cameraman are going to spearhead the operation for you.

To facilitate the work property, it is important to be there during the shoot. Work in the plan created during the pre-production process on screen.

Post-Production

Shooting a commercial is easy, editing it to fit your vision is not so much. Choose an editor who knows how to use editing software and preferably has experience editing commercials.

The elements of the commercial like the sound, edited video, graphics, and voice over will come together to create the final product.

How to Make Commercials the Right Way

Learning how to make commercials is an easy process. The difficult part is taking what you’ve learned and making the best product out of it.

To get your message across how you want it, you’ll first need to consider your target. From there, you can create a budget and start the pre-production process.

Write a script that fits your ideals and start filming! After the post-production process, you’ll have a product that you love.

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