In this post, we look at a few different video marketing services, including…
- Specialized video companies with the expertise to help you through the conceptualization, production, and post-production phases of making a video asset
- Creative agencies with a professional videographer on staff who can also produce studio-quality results for your campaign
- Digital marketing agencies aiming to help more brands include a video element in their marketing strategy at a lower price point.
Outsourcing your video content to pros like these can free up your time and create a gorgeous final product. But suppose you’re trying to make a customer testimonial video, a product review, or an employee video to show a different side of your company. In that case, a full-fledged video marketing service might be overkill.
That’s why we’ll also cover another option…
- Collecting marketing videos asynchronously with an easy-to-use remote interview app.
In this post, we examine when to use a video marketing service and when to opt for self-service video software instead.
Our tool, Vocal Video, includes all the planning, recording, and editing features you need to produce marketing videos quickly, simply, and affordably. Sign up for your free Vocal Video account today.
When to Use a Video Marketing Service
Companies will often decide to work with a video marketing service if they want to take a bells-and-whistles approach to their content or if they don’t think they can make the video they want with the skills and equipment they can access.
For example, you’re probably familiar with product marketing videos designed to be screened to massive audiences. They might use special effects, soundtracks, and fast cuts to grab the viewer’s attention and make the product stand out. We’ve also written about the prevalence of big-budget corporate culture videos, which national brands are increasingly using to attract top candidates for the open positions at their companies.
It’s almost impossible to achieve results like this without employing a professional video service. This means it’s a good idea to get quotes from a video marketer if…
- You want to produce a highly polished or cinematic video, for example, if your goal is a TV ad or a flagship video to use as the centerpiece of a marketing campaign
- You want to achieve a specific style. For example, tutorial and explainer videos are designed to be easy to follow, but it can take countless takes and seamless edits to pull them off successfully
- You need advice about the best way to achieve the results you want within your constraints. Video production services have insider tips and tricks, and they’ll be able to tell you which of your ideas are achievable and which need to be reimagined.
There are also some more practical elements to consider. It might be time to consider bringing in the professionals when…
- You need access to high-quality video equipment, for example, to film in HD
- You want to film on location, which comes with additional complications in terms of sound, lighting, and even permissions
- You want to use A and B-roll footage or special effects to tell your story
- You don’t have the time to handle the project management yourself, and outsourcing to a full-service video company lets you concentrate on the rest of your tasks.
However, there can also be some downsides to working with a professional video marketing company.
First, the costs. Even short videos can run to tens of thousands of dollars. This automatically puts some video services out of reach for small businesses with limited marketing budgets.
Then, there’s the time involved. It can take months to conceptualize, storyboard, and approve a video project, shoot days can stretch far outside your normal 9–5, and even once the raw footage is in the can, the editing process can take weeks. (If you want to read about the time the Vocal Video founders spent $25k and weeks of post-production on a single video ad, check out this post.)
Finally, there’s the problem of volume. When you have to invest so much time and so many resources, the number of videos you can produce drops off a cliff. If your goal is to get videos to cover all your marketing channels, working with the pros can feel like you’re putting too many eggs in one basket.
So, let’s look at the alternative.
These days, video marketing isn’t just for big-name brands.
Most of your customers and employees have a high-quality camera in their pocket, and more and more of your audience are familiar with the basics of content creation. This puts you in a great position to leverage their stories and handle your video marketing strategy in-house.
For example, with our software, Vocal Video, you can record video interviews remotely and asynchronously to create high-quality customer testimonials, case studies, and review videos that tell your brand story and connect with your target audience.
Tools like Vocal Video are particularly helpful if…
- You’re on a budget, and you need to produce videos while saving money for other aspects of your marketing strategy—like web design, search engine optimization services, or a strategist
- You’re on a tight schedule, and you need to start publishing content straight away
- You need to produce more videos or repurpose your content. For example, while a video marketing agency might deliver a handful of videos cut for a spot, a full-length ad, and a short-form video platform like TikTok, the number of fresh customer testimonials you can collect with Vocal Video is limitless.
Plus, because self-service video marketing platforms use user-generated content, there are some further benefits to consider. When you hand the microphone to your customers, your video marketing campaigns can be…
- More authentic than big-budget, corporate marketing videos
- More relatable because they showcase real people who’ve solved real problems by using your product or service
- More engaging because they’re unique, detailed, and put the speakers’ personalities front and center in your content strategy.
With the latest remote technology, you can produce video content smoothly, quickly, and with an incredibly small team. Here’s how it works.
Take Video Creation In-House With Vocal Video
Whether you’re aiming to make product videos, brand videos, or content for platforms like LinkedIn or your YouTube channel, Vocal Video is an easy-to-use and affordable solution that can transform the way you approach video advertising.
Step 1. Customize a Video Collector to Share with Your Interviewee
All the Vocal Video content you produce begins with a video collector.
This is the interface that guides your respondents through your interview questions. Our software records their answers and gives them tips to make a great video from the comfort of their home, office, or even the spot where they put your product into action.
For example, the Facebook testimonials for the Mountain Sweet Honey Co. are recorded by their customers in full bee-keeping garb, as they show how happy and healthy their bees are in their new homes.
Whether you start with a collector template or build one from scratch, you have total creative control over the questions you ask and the shape of your interview.
Some of our most popular templates are…
- The Customer Testimonial Template, which asks three questions about a time when your organization helped the customer, how your product differs from others, and how they’d describe your business in three words. As you customize the template, you could add more context questions, inviting the respondent to describe the issues they faced in the past or explain why they’d be happy to recommend your product to a friend.
- The eCommerce Testimonial Template, which gathers information on the motivation behind someone’s purchase and their experience so far. This leaves you with space to expand on specific aspects of their experience, like their favorite thing about the product, your online store, or your delivery times.
- The B2B SaaS Testimonial Template, which focuses on a specific time when your organization helped the customer and the features that make your solution unique. Here, you can take the interview to the next level with classic case study questions about the benefits they’re enjoying, or detailed prompts to dive into the faqs you see from new customers.
Whatever your marketing goals, you can build a video collector to help you meet them. We’ve even worked with companies who brought a new lease of life to their digital marketing strategy by asking their team to share their favorite jokes.
Brand Your Videos With a Few Simple Clicks
Companies often believe you can’t make a professional impression without working with a video marketing company. It’s true that overlaid brand elements like your logo can make your content more recognizable and give you a professional edge, but these effects are actually not that difficult to achieve, even if you’re making and publishing your own content.
Before you share your Vocal Video collector with your followers, go to your “Brand Kit” to upload your logo and set your brand colors. We’ll add these elements to your collector so it can be instantly associated with your brand. Then, we’ll automatically apply them to your finished video, so you get pro-level results with zero additional effort.
Step 2: Share Your Video Collector and Start Getting Responses
Vocal Video is just as easy for your customers to use as it is for you to set up. You share the collector with a URL, and they record their response as soon as they can. There’s no need to download an app or create an account; they simply open the link, read your welcome message, and go.
We’ve also made it easy for you to get more responses so you can bring high-converting user-generated content to more aspects of your marketing strategy.
To reach more potential respondents, you can share the collector link on social media, in newsletters, in marketing emails, or as a permanent part of your website. This helps you replace or supplement the one-and-done videos you’d get from an external video marketing service with a steady stream of fresh content.
We’ve also developed Kiosk Mode for Vocal Video pro and enterprise plans. Kiosk Mode is an alternative way of using Vocal Video to collect testimonials at events or at your location. By recording testimonials in-person, you create a unified set of videos that captures the team spirit and atmosphere that’s key to both recruitment marketing and event promotion. For example, check out this set of FOMO-inducing videos produced by the American Lighting Association at their annual conference.
Whatever your marketing needs, Vocal Video opens up more options to use engaging video content to increase your website traffic and boost your conversion rates.
When you use a video marketing software solution that helps you collect videos immediately, you’re free to…
- Create content that responds to (or takes part in) the latest industry trends
- Publish tailored content whenever you have a new product or vacancy to advertise
- Participate in more events online, for example, in the way that Optimizely produced compelling video interviews for International Women’s Day.
Step 3: Edit Your Video without Any Additional Software
When you choose to create your content in-house, video editing often seems like the most daunting stage of the process. But while professional digital marketing agencies work with expensive software, extreme processing power, and years of experience, Vocal Video sends your content to your inbox automatically edited and ready to share.
Our unique process stitches together the responses from your collector and adds attention-grabbing features like:
- Beautiful opening and closing slides with your logo and brand colors
- Informative attribution overlays to show who’s speaking and what their role is at their company
- Branded interstitial cards showing the interview prompts
- Scene-setting music from our library of royalty-free tracks
- Dynamic transitions between slides
- Automatically-generated subtitles.
If you want to make changes, reorder the scenes, or create a highlight video showing testimonials from multiple speakers, you’ll find a choice of intuitive editing tools in your Vocal Video dashboard.
You can change the entire look of your video by switching the video theme, repurpose the video by trimming the length and changing the aspect ratio, or add a call to action as your final slide. We’ll even equalize the sound levels across multiple speakers.
You can see multiple editing features in action in these community videos from Martha Stoumen Wines.
Step 4: Publish Your Video in Minutes
When you’re ready to share your video, go to “Publish,” and we’ll set up the hosting on a public Vocal Video Page. Once that’s taken care of, click “Share” to choose how you want to put your video in front of your potential customers.
Vocal Video includes…
- One-click sharing to social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X
- Video downloads in formats suitable for reels, PPC campaigns, or even digital signage
- Automatically generated embed codes for videos and galleries, so you can add your videos seamlessly to your website’s product, testimonial, or landing pages
- Links to the video’s public Vocal Video page so you can share your content via email or QR codes.
With Vocal Video, it’s easier than ever to make the right video for your campaign. That said, if you’re still looking for the glamor and impact of traditional video marketing, or you need technical elements like animations or a voice-over, this final list will introduce some of the best video marketing services of the year.
5 More Video Marketing Services to Consider
1. Brafton: International Content Marketing Service
Brafton is a creative content marketing platform with locations in the US, Europe, and Australia. In addition to content writing, graphic design, and lead-magnet creation, they offer video services.
Their offerings include animation and whiteboard videos, which are animated explainer videos where complex concepts are broken down in scenes that resemble a classroom whiteboard. Whether you’re looking for a commercial campaign, a series of social media videos, or a high-quality YouTube video, this company should cover all the bases.
2. Burnwe: Video Marketing for Tech Companies & Startups
Burnwe’s team includes a video production expert, an illustrator, a motion graphic designer, a digital marketing expert to take care of video SEO and social media marketing, and a creative writer to handle the scripts.
They list tutorials and educational videos, product launch videos, promotional videos, and demo videos as specialisms on their website, each with a case study to prove their results.
The majority of Burnwe’s content is animated, so if you’re looking for a live-action video, this might not be the company for you. But if you work in tech and you want to connect with an agency that understands how quickly the industry can move, these might be the marketers to help you.
3. WSI: Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Franchise
WSI have offices in North America, South America, and all over Europe. They’re a holistic digital marketing service who also specialize in lead generation and brand awareness.
Some of their offerings are specifically aimed at small businesses who want the impact of video marketing without the price tag. Their website proudly states that professional filmmakers are not required, and that some of the most memorable video content celebrates the quirks of the brands and teams they’ve worked with.
4. The DVI Group: Award-Winning, In-Person Video Marketing
The DVI Group’s portfolio includes more live-action video than the options we’ve discussed so far. This is likely because they’re based in Atlanta, and focus on working with local businesses in-person.
This company has covered almost every type of video you could think of, from testimonials, to eCommerce ads, to videos for human resources and learning and development. Their exhaustive process runs from concept development, through pre-production, production, and post-production, and their clients participate in several rounds of revisions before delivery.
Socially Powerful specialize in social media marketing. Their videos focus on storytelling, and they offer an end-to-end service that sets them apart from some other companies in this niche.
This team has worked in tech, food, fashion and beauty, gaming, and sports to produce and distribute successful social media campaigns based on high-quality video. Their clients include both brands and influences, and their US office is based in New York.
Use Vocal Video for Stress-Free Video Marketing
There are times when you need a full video marketing service, complete with camera operators, a boom mic, and days in an editing suite. But if your priority is to connect with your audience, showcase your happy customers, and deepen your audience’s understanding of your brand in the language they speak, Vocal Video can give you all the tools you need.
With our end-to-end software, you can plan, execute, and publish a pro-level video, without the pro.
Start your free-forever Vocal Video plan today and upgrade when you’re ready.