Most companies use about ten percent of what they paid for, and then conclude that video did not work for them.
The footage was fine. Nobody decided what happened next.
What actually gets delivered
A single shoot day usually produces the main video plus twelve to fifteen shorter cuts, and stills from the same day.
That is a library, not an asset. It should cover a year.
On one project a handful of shoot days produced over fifty finished pieces. One night at an event produced twenty eight videos. One trip produced eighty.
Almost nobody uses all of it. Usually the main video goes on the homepage, one cut gets posted, and the rest sits on a drive.
Where the main video goes
Your homepage. Not buried on an about page. The thing you want somebody to understand should be the thing they hit first.
Sales conversations. Sent before a meeting, not after. It does the explaining so the meeting can do something else.
Proposals and bids. A link inside a proposal reaches the person on the committee who will never call you.
Recruiting. Job postings compete on pay. A video competes on whether somebody can picture themselves there.
Trade shows. Built into a booth loop, and sent as follow up after.
Where the cuts go
The shorter pieces are not filler. They are the thing that keeps you visible between projects.
Post one every week or two. Not all at once. A cut posted in March is doing the same work as one posted in September, and nobody remembers seeing it.
Repost the good ones. Reach on any single post is a fraction of your audience. Posting the same cut three months later is not repetition to anybody except you.
Use them in email. A thirty second clip in a follow up email does more than three paragraphs.
Give them to your sales people. Somebody with fifteen clips on their phone can answer a question with one.
The plan that prevents the ten percent problem
The useful version is simple and takes an hour.
List every cut with a one line description of what it is about.
Assign each one a rough month.
Decide who posts it.
That is it. The reason projects go unused is almost never that the material was bad. It is that nobody owned the next step, and the person who would have owned it got busy.
A question worth asking before you shoot
Where is this going, and who is putting it there.
If nobody can answer that, the shoot is premature. Not because the video would be bad, but because a video with no destination performs exactly like no video at all.
We build that into the deliverables now, because too many good projects ended on a hard drive.
Short version
Most companies use about ten percent of what they paid for.
One shoot day is a library. It should cover a year.
Main video goes on the homepage, in sales conversations, in proposals, in recruiting.
Post the cuts over months, not all at once, and repost the good ones.
An hour of planning prevents the whole problem. Decide what, when, and who.
We make documentary style video for manufacturing and construction companies across Greensboro and the Triad. Happy to come to you.
Dylan Smith is the owner of With A Twist Media in Greensboro, NC. He has been making documentary style video for manufacturing and construction companies across the Triad since 2019.