Categories: Business

How To Find Good Quality Stock Footage For Your Marketing Needs

Video marketing is one of the hottest techniques of digital marketing these days. Your website and content must be visually compelling enough to attract traffic. Although taking videos have become quite easier than earlier— you can take 4K videos just with your smartphones — if you run a small business you might not have a team big enough to help you with the editing, lighting, sound effects and other technicalities of videography.

Here’s where stock footage comes in handy to boost your marketing game. There are several sites where you can royalty free videos for your website. Here are a few tips on how to find good quality stock footage for your marketing needs.

IMAGE: PEXELS

1. Avoid Too “Stocky” Footage

The first and the foremost thing you need to keep in mind is that your video must not be too artificial. It should not seem out of place on your website, like an addition that has been hurriedly made. The stock footage that you use in your website must blend in with its content. Pay attention, whether the footage you’re using fits well with your content.

For example, if your company sells dairy products, you cannot randomly add a video clip with several men and women smiling with shining white teeth and talking to each other. That would be video footage too “stocky,” and your website will not be taken seriously. Choose stock footage which looks natural, so that the users who visit your site feel that it has been curated specially for the specific content of your website.

2. Delve Into The Details

You must know how to apply the proper search words when you’re looking for stock footage to use. You should have a mental idea of how you want your video clip to look like. When you type in the search words, keep in mind what you had picturized in your head. Add the details which you had imagined and press Search. I’ll explain this using an example.

Suppose you want to use a clip which shows a hospital, and you have mentally pictured a hospital room where a doctor is talking to an elderly patient. In this case, instead of typing “hospital stock footage” in the search box, type “hospital doctor elderly patient talking stock footage.” By doing this, you will get quite specific results, and you will get all the details you had hoped for in your clip.

Although a search using detailed keywords will give you a lesser amount of video results to choose from, essentially it will be more effective, of greater quality and take you lesser time. So, try to be as exact as possible. Do not use generic words in the search box. Use as many filters as possible to tweak your search so that it matches your exact requirements.

3. Stay Away From Overused Footage

When in a rush, we tend to choose from the very first results that appear. However, this leads to the risk of using highly overused clips in your site. If your website has stock footage used by a huge number of other companies, there is a high probability that a user who visits your site might have already seen that clip elsewhere. This gives a very poor impression of your business to the visitor.

If you do not want to own a run-of-the-mill website, you need to spend some time and look for stock footage, which is sufficiently unique. Go through a few pages of the search results, depending on the amount of time you can afford to spend. However, as you go down the search results, the link between your search keyword and result reduces, so be careful and don’t end up selecting an unrelated result.

Here is a good tip for you. Suppose you need footage of mountains, instead of typing “mountains stock footage,” try entering “Himalaya mountains stock footage.” In this way, you will not get the same results as other people will get when they type only “mountains.” You will avoid using the same footage over and over again.

4. Try Looking For Different Angles

Often you will find a stock video footage which might suit your needs but looks too generic. In such cases, look for other videos in the same video series (i.e., related videos) and search for the same video taken in different angles and perspectives, which will make all the difference. You can search for a specific angle of your choice while searching for footage. You can add certain keywords after typing your subject matter in the search box to get the desired results.

Use POV i.e., Point of View when you want to use a video in which the viewer feels like they’re watching it from someone else’s point of view;
Areal or Bird’s Eye View when you want to see the video from up above, Worm’s Eye View for seeing it from down below;
Cut Out to show a person or an object on a plain background;
Copy Space to have a video with a part of it completely free of any objects, and Blur (both are good for placing texts in videos);
Landscape mode for wide format;
Full Shot for showing a person standing, with full height;
Over the Shoulder for making the video seem that it has been shot from behind someone’s back;
Close-up and Extreme Close-up to see the person (object of the video) very clearly.

5. License Agreements

When you obtain stock footage, make sure that you know the license agreements of the company or website from which you’re buying (or downloading for free). There are mainly three kinds- Royalty Free (one-time payment for ongoing usage), Rights Managed (one-time payment for one-time usage), and Creative Commons or CC0 License (free usage of otherwise copyrighted footage). It is important that whatever kind of stock footage you use, read, and check the usage restrictions thoroughly and keep a record of the terms and conditions of use.

If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.