If you’ve decided to make a video, the most important thing you can do is commit to building the best video you can. Video is unequalled as a tool for engagement. Its combination of moving image, ambient sound, dialogue, music and editing can generate powerful emotions. But that complexity, if handled poorly, can cause a project to fall flat. The quality of videos across the web (and outside of it) is rising, and so are viewer expectations. If you are going to make a video, do yourself and your viewers a service and make a good one. A recent study of 1,200 consumers by the video-hosting firm Brightcove suggests that producing a bad video may be worse than making none at all:

·  62% of consumers are more likely to have a negative perception of a brand that published a poor-quality video

·  57% are less likely to share a poor quality video

·  60 percent say a poor quality video will dissuade them from engaging with the brand in other ways

This doesn’t mean you have to spend vast quantities of money to make a good and effective video. Even if your team is entirely in-house and you’re shooting on an iPhone, practice a few key disciplines:

1. Stay focused. The best videos aren’t trying to do or say everything. Rather, they’re trying to do one thing well: get your audience’s attention.

2. Earn that attention. However long you personally think your video should be is almost certainly too long. (We're all guilty of this—at Take One Creative we once delivered a 4-minute video that we eventualy redelivered as a 90-second video.) Shorter is (almost) always better. Viewer drop-off rates for web-based video jump after about 90 seconds. Ask yourself, would you want to sit through a 10-minute video someone forwarded? 

3. Get someone outside the team to bring a critical eye to bear. Insiders have blind spots. An uninformed test viewer can tell you what’s making sense—and what isn’t. Listen.

4. Kill your darlings. Yes, you love that shot of the bald eagle at sunset, but if it’s not advancing your narrative it has to go.

5. Finally, have a plan for your video. Don’t make it, put it on your website and hope for the best. A video should be part of your larger communications campaign. It’s a great tool—be sure to deploy it effectively.