Business should be fun, right? While these harvest workers clearly are hustling and bustling to perform the business of winemaking, even they have fun while moving at lightning speed.

Challenges in producing this type of video include sorting through quite a lot of footage of vineyard workers harvesting the client’s Grenache in record time. While entertainment may be the goal, in order to make it do so effectively a story must be carved out from the many clips to show the entire harvest process.

Add in fun music, make use of stilted footage that didn’t process proper in-camera and voila! A harvest story is born.

eNewsletters remain one of the most successful communication tools with fans and customers. For those with products to sell, e-newsletters continue to garner the highest open rates and click through rates to generate engagement and sales. Shown above are but a few of the e-newsletters I manage for clients.

Of greatest advantage, e-newsletters provide immediate feedback regarding success. Analytics provide valuable data on which items were of greatest interest to recipients. And the ability to A/B split test allows business owners to truly fine tune what keywords, subject lines and products resonate most strongly with recipients.

Last, but not least, depending upon the size of your emailing list, e-newsletters can produce dramatic results on a shoe-string budget. No printing costs, no envelopes, no postage and no 2+ week wait time for results. If you’ve ever wondered if and when to jump into contacting your customer base via e-newsletter, wait no longer! Your customers are waiting to hear from you!

Sneak Peek “trailer” videos often take much longer to create and edit because there is so much raw footage to contemplate inclusion. The primary goal is to garner audience interest. (If they leave after but a few seconds of video, you haven’t served them well.)

Having just shot a number of “Tractor Chronicles” segments about planting the winter cover crop, it became a matter of selecting (editing) the most eye-catching sequences to cobble together into a teaser film.

Topping off the challenges in this type of project is selecting and editing the music. First, it’s necessary to determine what mood should be set by the sneak peek film, and then music can be selected to match the mood. On the techical side, it also requires careful editing to match the music’s beat throughout the teaser.

It’s not unusual to have video footage showing off product without a sense of how it will be used. One of the best ways to build brand-raving fans and [popover title=”Influencers” title_bg_color=”#eaa41c” content=”People who are your biggest and most loyal fans who also create visibility for your product or service by sharing your news with their own social networks.” content_bg_color=”#eadec2″ bordercolor=”#eaa41c” textcolor=”#333333″ trigger=”click” placement=”” class=”” id=””]influencers[/popover] is to keep them in the loop and entertained with the shortest of videos. Keep it light and fun if you want them to come back for more!

Behind-the-scenes: Shot with a smartphone, this was an easy way to showcase the wine in a natural setting – a picnic. It was shot in less than a minute (with other shots or angles taken at the same time). Editing was relatively quick and easy, getting a feel for when a supplementary caption might elicit a laugh or minor explanation. For a minor piece shown on social media channels, the goal is not to make it look perfect or wildly expensive — just fun!

The parent organization’s website was considerably out-of-date, with an inflexible visual design and poor navigation, as well as lacking analytics for tracking site success. The chapter chose to craft their own site. Goals included:

• Employ [popover title=”Responsive Design” title_bg_color=”” content=”Site design that responds to the size of the viewer’s window screen: Site features rearrange and resize on screen to fit the desktop, tablet or phone size being used. Older websites did not offer this feature and required manual zooming in and out to read the text or navigate pages.” content_bg_color=”” bordercolor=”” textcolor=”” trigger=”click” placement=”” class=”” id=””]Responsive Design[/popover] for ease of use on all platforms
• Provide back-end [popover title=”Analytics” title_bg_color=”” content=”Analytics software provides feedback data on site performance. This can be anything from visitor count to traffic flow, e-commerce conversion, demographics and the source from which a visitor came to the site.” content_bg_color=”” bordercolor=”” textcolor=”” trigger=”click” placement=”” class=”” id=””]analytics[/popover]
• Improve the user experience with an up-to-date event calendar
• Merge the existing blog and add multiple content pages

Solutions

• Created WordPress site with [popover title=”Responsive Design” title_bg_color=”” content=”Site design that responds to the size of the viewer’s window screen: Site features rearrange and resize on screen to fit the desktop, tablet or phone size being used. Older websites did not offer this feature and required manual zooming in and out to read the text or navigate pages.” content_bg_color=”” bordercolor=”” textcolor=”” trigger=”click” placement=”” class=”” id=””]responsive design[/popover] theme
• Transferred their blog to new site and added many content pages
• Installed Google Analytics to track all site traffic
• Improved the user navigation along with installing a new event calender module

Results

One of the best features of this new site is that it is constantly evolving today due to ease-of-use. New pages and posts are regularly added; existing content pages are adjusted as needed. And site analytics have proven invaluable in showing how site visitors use navigation and content, directing how improvements are made.

Product description videos are ideal to show off its features and benefits. Tell the audience things that they won’t read about the product in a brochure. (A picture is worth a thousand words!) Use the opportunity to show the product’s motion capabilities. Whenever possible, make the video content fun. Sharing is a key component to video success. So the more entertaining it can be, the greater the possibility of sharing by [popover title=”Influencers” title_bg_color=”#eaa41c” content=”People who are your biggest and most loyal fans who also create visibility for your product or service by sharing your news with their own social networks.” content_bg_color=”#eadec2″ bordercolor=”#eaa41c” textcolor=”#333333″ trigger=”click” placement=”” class=”” id=””]influencers[/popover] increases. Most importantly, keep that information unique and valuable to viewers and fans.

Behind-the-scenes: As there was no video footage available at the time (since the client was in the middle of harvest and unavailable), this video was assembled only using still photos. Challenges included conveying the flavor profile of the wine and the foods it ideally paired with. Finding appropriate royalty-free music and a mood that reflects the client’s brand were also key.  As this was a type of “music video” for a product, the editing time was exponentially longer than a live-action explainer video as each beat required matching exactly.

Selling at Thanksgiving seems rather heartless. But you can reach out to your loyal customer base to entertain them. It’s an added bonus if the “entertainment” provides brand reinforcement. In this example, we had a lot of available imagery for the holiday, a few still shots of the brand’s wine, plus some recent motion footage in the vineyard. The rest of the story evolved from the tale we could craft using the available elements. Necessity is the mother of invention!

Explainer videos are ideal customer education tools. They serve in the function of Hollywood’s old behind-the-scenes slash how-it’s-made movies and trailers that would run before or after a film. For a product like wine, there is considerable mystique behind how a grape becomes the elixir of the gods. That allows for an unlimited number of “explainer” film shorts, each providing a tiny piece of the puzzle of how this tiny berry becomes a magical beverage.

Hazards of filming in the vineyard? Sunlight! It casts deep shadows and reflects bright highlights. Ideally we would shoot late in the day when light is more filtered. But the star of these videos is available to shoot only when he’s available! So if the light isn’t perfect, we make do. Another hazard is the great outdoors: airplanes can wreak havoc with the audio as can wind. If the star of the video is available for only short periods of time, that means I’m left to sift through raw video footage later to determine if I can make cuts around airplane interference or wind. Lastly, on rare occasion the star goes up on his lines! Given the tight timeframe, I often keep shooting and direct a quick rewind to catch the train of thought again. Editing irons out the hiccups!

Sneak peek videos are a great way to grab fan attention. These work similarly to movie trailers, providing just enough intriguing visuals and audio to make the viewer want more. And that’s the key to customer loyalty: keep them wanting more.

Video footage for sneak peeks often comes from recording footage for other purposes. Perhaps it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the story you’re trying to tell but is still interesting visually. Voila! A teaser to keep clients on the hook!

Watching someone mow a yard ((or a vine-yard) may seem as exciting to some as watching the grass grow. So one of the ways in which we get folks to watch a rather simple activity is by adding dramatic music and edit cuts. I’d collected several minutes of mowing between vine rows as well as from several different angles. And while most of it ended up on the cutting room floor (digitally speaking), the best of it made the…final cut.