New website, new reel, new marketing
Every time I thought about a new website or reel, it felt like a little bit like bragging. That’s what marketing is I suppose, but I always feel like you go to company sites and it’s all about how amazing they are and whatever new word of the day is cool but you don’t learn anything about them or their process. For us, the majority of our business is word of mouth from past clients, so the website has been a good showcase but we weren’t trying to draw in clients. But now, as we keep growing, we want to see how we can help other clients tell their stories and we’re doing it in three main ways.
A New Reel
This one was stressful for me. Not because we didn’t have enough good work to show off, we had too much. But because I was making this reel about my vision and what I want to do, and the best way to do that… Me doing the voiceover. I’m not a pro VO talent, those people have some next level skills. But if I want clients to hire us for personal stories, than I have to make this personal. Editing to your own voice is always painful, but I think it helped complete the story. And I’m very proud of how this reel came out.
New Marketing
The actual campaign will come soon, and have it’s own post, but for the first time since starting AV Collective 10 years ago, we’re doing some actual marketing. It’s not like we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs and have to do it. It’s only March and we’ve already completed 40 videos this year. It’s because we want to tell more stories, we want to launch a documentary series, and we want to connect with new clients who we can help.
I’m really excited about these. Back when I was working at The Marketing Store, we built a custom direct mail piece where we took a DVD player that had a screen built into the top and put our reel in it and built a box for it, at the time it was awesome. We won some awards and got a great response. Thankfully now, direct mail video players are much cooler, easy to use, and impactful. So we’re building out the branding and we’ll be looking for some new people to collaborate with.
New Website
You’re here, so you’ve seen the new site. We had 3 main reasons we wanted to start from scratch on the site. First, visually we wanted more full bleed imagery that was impactful. Second, we wanted to share our process for creating content so that anyone could know what to expect. If you’ve done a million videos or never tried one, we wanted to walk you through the process. And finally, we wanted to share our work in a better way. More case study than flashing images. I think that helps tell the project’s story better but also helps you identify the type of content you want to create and then see it in action right away.