Many individuals and businesses get into the realm of photography and video / audio production and immediately jump to trying to come up with creative ideas that will interest as many people as possible. Now I am not about to discourage this, especially for those who are naturally creative, but for those of you – like me – who are excited to learn and attempt new skills but lack the creativity to come up with a project to apply them to, let me offer an alternative. Personally, I would much rather see someone gain real skills in the production world instead of “waiting for an idea to hit them in the face.”
So how do you gain those skills? If the title was not clear enough, the answer is one word: document – which applies extremely well to businesses and freelancers. Content for marketing helps businesses extremely well, and the content they have to produce is simple – them making, growing, and/or running the business. By documenting the process of starting a business you are providing yourself with so much. Not only are you able to cut it up into small clips and post it to social media platforms for posts but you are also building a brand image that encourages your customers and community to be more involved. They can feel like they were a part of some of the meetings you have and can comment or like what it is that was said. Additionally, you have recordings that you as the business leader can look back to and learn from or simply be able to show where it all started and how far you have come to your staff and your customers.
As for freelancers, showing the process of being a freelance video producer, photographer, etc. can really make your clients feel connected to your journey and more willing to hire you for work. You may seem more like a friend that they want to support and they get good quality work out of it as well. Even creatives agree that documenting provides many more minutes of content than creating something. When a director says cut and let’s do another take they are spending hours on maybe a few minutes of the overall film whereas with documenting it is all real-time one take and you just cut what you do not want to share / is not relevant to the post you are trying to share.