For many people, the holiday season is a special time of year. We get nostalgic, we work to reconnect with loved ones, and our hearts are just a little more receptive. To effectively use videos during the end-of-year holiday season, keep the following in mind.
Start Early!
Whether it’s related to Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Winter Solstice, New Year’s Eve, or any other winter-time holiday (or summer-time festivities, if you’re south of the equator), it’s important that you launch your holiday season video production push early. Once Halloween is over, everything moves quickly. Plus, a lot of employees are gone, which can slow down production. The earlier you start, the better … but at the same time, it’s never too late. Get started today! Just be realistic with your schedule. You may still be in time for the holidays, or you may want to aim for the New Year.
Get Creative
As we’ve mentioned before in previous posts, people love stories. During the holiday season, you have the opportunity to get creative and craft stories through your promotional videos that touch the heart and lift the spirit. It’s a time when you can have fun with your videos while remaining culturally sensitive and respectful to your audience. Whether you have thirty seconds, two minutes, or an hour or more of video time to work with, you can tell a heartwarming story to share your brand or uplift your employees.
Know The Audience
Be sure you are targeting correctly. Who is your audience? You don’t want to be creating a Christmas homecoming vignette, for example, if your audience doesn’t celebrate this holiday. Figure out how specific you need to get with a particular holiday, or whether it’s best to keep the theme more generic. There are many ways to tell a story using the props of the season (such as snow, colorful lights, a cabin setting, and so forth) while remaining culturally sensitive and fully aware of who your audience is and how they might react to your production.
Keep It Festive
Whether your video production efforts focus on a specific holiday or exude more of a heartwarming feeling of the season, there’s one thing you can definitely do: Keep it festive! You can always incorporate some of these universal themes:
- Nonspecific twinkle lights or colorful lights
- Family gatherings
- Celebrations with friends and plenty of good cheer
- A sense of warmth, coziness, and enjoying being indoors
- A festive mood imbued with feeling grateful
- A time to reflect on the past year and bring in the new year with hope
These are just a few general themes of the season to get you started. You can come up with more to suit your particular needs, whether you’re creating a new corporate video to lift the spirits of your employees and colleagues, or you’re making a promo video for a particular product or service you offer.