Video is the most engaging marketing asset a business can own — and one of the easiest to waste money on. Here's the six-step process that keeps your video pointed at a business objective, from planning and storyboarding through to promotion and measurement.
Updated for 2026.
Video is the most engaging, versatile marketing asset a business can own — and one of the easiest to waste money on. I've produced commercial video for businesses across Cumbria and beyond for years, and the difference between a video that pays for itself and one that just sits on a homepage is almost never the camera. It's the thinking that happened — or didn't — before anyone pressed record.
Here's the six-step process I use, whether the client is making it themselves or bringing us in to do it.
Most businesses have the video idea first and look for a justification second. They know they "should be doing video", and maybe they'll even make a decent one — but unless it serves a wider business objective, there's no benefit in making it at all.
Your marketing exists to move the business somewhere specific. So before anything else, ask: what do you want to happen as a result of this video?
Then decide how you'll know it worked. Revenue, enquiries, subscribers, bookings — pick the metric that genuinely evidences the objective, and make sure you can actually measure it.
Finally, before moving on: what's your budget, and when does it need to be done? (If you don't know what a sensible budget looks like, I've broken that down in how much does a commercial video cost in the UK?)
Almost all of your marketing flows from knowing who your ideal customer is. If you haven't written that down — who they are, what they struggle with, where they spend their attention — do it now, even if version one is educated guesswork:
You can't craft a message that lands unless you can get inside their head.
There's a brilliant depiction of this exact discipline in the film Operation Mincemeat. Colin Firth's team invent a complete back story for a fictional Royal Marines officer — because they know German intelligence will interrogate every detail before believing the documents he's carrying. They build the persona so thoroughly that the deception holds. That's the standard: know your audience well enough that nothing in your message rings false. (It's also just a great film. Watch it for the marketing tips if nothing else.)
With your customer profile in front of you:
One big trap to avoid: don't build the story around features and specifications. Lead with the emotional payoff — what changes for them — and let the facts support it. People act on feeling and justify with logic.
And decide what you want the viewer to do when the video ends. The call to action is as vital here as in any other marketing. Don't leave it as an afterthought.
Filming is the expensive bit — and it gets super expensive when nobody decided in advance what shots were needed. Tell a videographer "go and make us a video about X" and however good they are, something will come back wrong, and re-shoots cost real money.
The storyboard is the cheap, office-based insurance against that. It can be as simple as a ticked-off shot list, or as detailed as illustrated frames with lighting, mood and camera notes. The more decisions you make on paper, the fewer you'll pay to re-make on location.
This is also the moment to fix the practical constraints:
If you're doing it in-house: work the shot list and tick everything off before you wrap. The nightmare scenario is discovering a missing shot at the edit desk — and that's only ever a planning failure.
If you're hiring someone: ask for example work, case studies and testimonials, and check they're asking you about objectives and audience — not just kit and dates. Production outfits range from solo operators to broadcast-grade agencies, and price scales mostly with headcount. Bigger isn't better; matched to the job is better. At the end of the day this is a return-on-investment decision, so choose whoever will get you the best result for the money.
A note on A.I.: editing tools have got dramatically faster and cheaper, and a lot of producers now lean on A.I. templates for cutting and captioning. Used well, that efficiency should show up in your quote. But templated production shows — so ask to see work that was made to a strategy, not just made for a feed.
The video's made. Now the real work starts: getting it in front of your audience — repeatedly, in as many forms as you can extract from it.
You paid for every second of that footage. Mine it.
Spend 20% of your effort making the video and 80% promoting it. That ratio — not production values — is what determines your return.
Track your analytics before and after: reach and views if the objective was awareness; the journey from view to enquiry or purchase if it was conversion. That's how you know whether the video met the objective you set back at step one — and what to do differently next time.
None of this is complicated, but it is work — and it may not be the best use of your team's time. Most of the risk in commercial video isn't in the filming; it's in skipping the thinking at steps one and two. That thinking is exactly what we do.
If you're weighing up a video project — whether you make it, we make it, or someone else does — book a call and we'll talk it through. No fee, no commitment, and if going it alone is the right answer for you, I'll say so.
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Finding the root cause, then fixing it. Lake District based, working across Cumbria and North Lancashire.
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