There are more than 560,000 businesses operating across New Zealand. Launching a new business is always exciting but can be often difficult to bring your ideas to life and share them with the world.
However, good ideas aren’t the only thing you need to open a successful business. You will need to develop a creative concept for your products and services. You’ll also need to market them carefully if they are going to be a hit.
So what’s the best way to do this? When trying to articulate exactly what you want a creative concept to achieve, your ideas can become muddled. Presenting your big idea in a short video can help you focus on exactly what you want to achieve while engaging your audience.
Put Together a Creative Brief
Briefs are an essential part of creative concept planning. They help to create a cohesive understanding of your project, which is extremely important for your creative team. A brief also helps you to focus on and refine the core elements of your concept.
Your brief should:
- Outline your campaign objectives and create a headline tagline for your products or services
- Define the problem that you are solving
- Identify your campaign messages
- Detail your campaign objectives and summarise ways to identify that the concept worked successfully
- Highlight any constraints or obstacles to consider
With more than 4.8 million people currently living in New Zealand, you also need to identify your target market in your brief. This will help you to tailor the content of your video to them. Understanding your target market also proves to potential investors that you have done your research.
Brainstorming Sessions
Once you have a creative concept brief in place, you can start generating ideas about the best way to present this in a video.
To do this, your team will need to think about:
- The style of video they want to create
- The communication strategy they want to use
- What really speaks to their target audience
However, even with these things in mind, it is important to come to brainstorming sessions with an open mind. This is a space to throw creative ideas around and figure out what does or doesn’t work. Identifying what you don’t like can also help you to pinpoint the style you are looking for.
It can help to look at other companies’ ad campaigns or creative concepts when coming up with new ideas. You can use these to discuss elements that you like and to ensure that you create a unique stand-alone concept.
Through your brainstorming sessions, you should also develop a concept board. This should feature ideas generated and references for your advertising concept. This will be an invaluable resource as you start to bring your creative ideas to life.
Craft a Storyline for Your Video
Once you have settled on ideas that work for your brand, you can start creating a storyline for your concept video. This outlines how you are going to explore your concept brief during the video and creates important building blocks for the creative concept script process.
For example, you might want to take a chronological approach, starting with your business background and how your big idea came to you. This can be a great way to inject your campaign with a personal touch.
Alternatively, you could develop a problem statement and focus on this at the start of your video. Emphasising the need to resolve this problem demonstrates the demand for your concept. This can be a powerful move if you are looking for investments.
Your storyline should create a beginning, middle, and end that explains the content of your brief in an engaging way. It should also set the pace for your video to keep viewers engaged.
Find the Right Tone for Your Script
After you have your storyline in place, you can start to write a creative concept script. It is important to find the right tone for your script and this will depend a lot on your target audience.
For example, if you are pitching your idea to corporate investors then you will need a more formal approach. However, if you are pitching an idea for a game then you will want to make your video exciting.
It is very important to reflect your brand in the tone of your script. This will help it to stand out against other creative concept videos. So try to keep a balance between the information you need to include and how you present it.
Incorporate Practicalities
Speaking of the information that you include in your script, you want to show people that you are realistic about your concept. Because of this, you need to incorporate your understanding of practical obstacles in your communication objectives.
When developing creative concepts, it can be easy to throw out grand plans and speak hypothetically. This can make your concept feel very exciting but leaves your ideas underdeveloped. Because of this, it is important to show people that you have thought practically about your concept.
There are plenty of great ways to do this subtly. For example, you could:
- Include footage of workshops that you have used to develop your products
- Feature development sketches of your products
- Discuss market growth and how your product fits into this
- Talk about a five-year plan for developing your concept
- Include feedback or reviews of your concept from focus groups
This all helps to demonstrate that you are ready to lift your idea off the page and bring it to life.
Creative Concept as Part of the Process
These tips will help you start with the creative concept and come up with something that captures your brand.
However, when it comes to shooting your video it is a good idea to get professional support and get familiar with the whole production process.