By Cristian Baratiak

There is a big hype around video marketing these days. It’s big right now, but it’s going to get even bigger. Did you know that 74% of all Internet traffic will be video by the end of 2017 and that number is going to increase year on year? Audience engagements are through the roof for videos, all social media platforms push videos towards the user more than ever. With today’s devices and technology it is so convenient to watch videos anywhere at any time.

We know that producing video content takes a lot of time, but editing those videos actually take much more time than it took you to shoot everything. As a small business owner you probably don’t have the time and resources to handle that on your end.

So if you want to get the best bang for your buck when it comes to video marketing, you might want to consider outsourcing video editing overseas and put more time and efforts into producing video content that your audience will engage with.

Here are handful of tips that will help you outsource video editing without a hustle.

1. Choose a Reliable Partner

First and foremost you want to pick someone who will be there when you need them. Outsourcing work to people overseas can be tricky from this point of view. Working with staff members who live on the other side of the planet might cause more trouble than if you would handle the task in-house. That’s why you want to work with someone who is available on daily basis and who can jump on a Skype call if needed.

Your best choice would be a video editing company, but you can also do really good with a freelancer as well. Just make sure to have a chat first, get to know each other, maybe to a couple of trail projects before you go into production and just try to build a solid, long-lasting and profitable business relationship.

2. Describe Each Project in Detail

Communication is a key factor in any business partnership and outsourcing something as important as video editing makes no exception. Anybody who will edit your videos, no matter if it’s a company or a freelancer will need to get as much information as possible about your project in order to deliver a finished video which meets your expectations.

So each time you plan on running a video marketing campaign create a little document which includes all your requirements and the script of your video. Describe the purpose of the video, the call to action, the target audience, and explain what soundtrack should be playing in the background. Are there any text overlays, any animations, on what platform you plan on sharing the video and so on and so forth? Heck, even making super clear how much raw footage you sent is important. If you are sending over multiple files, maybe coming from different people in your organization, stuff can get lost pretty darn easy.

All these details will play a major role in how your video editor will take care of the footage in post-production. Each type of video has its own specifics and your editing guy needs to know all that upfront.

3. Pick a Style

Video editing is a fairly creative and subjective thing. If you would send the same footage to three different video editors you will get back three videos that have a totally different look and feel. That’s why it is important to pick a theme or a style of how you would want your video to be like.

Maybe you are after a slow paced, nostalgic and emotional type of video or maybe you want something more upbeat. Make that clear for everybody right from the beginning. Providing a couple of examples of videos that you like or videos that are edited in the style that you are after is often very helpful.

Generally speaking, you want to style and feel of the video to match your brand and you want to be consistent with that style for all the videos that you put out for your company.

4. Work Around Deadlines (Plan Ahead)

Oh, deadlines – almost sounds like a broken record in the business world, doesn’t it? There’s a deadline on everything especially on marketing campaigns. From my experience, a corporate video needs to be revised on average 2 or 3 times before we have a final version.

So if your video editing company or video editing guy gives you a 5 working days turnaround time for your next video project you need to take into account that you will probably need another 2-3 days of back and forth to work on a couple of revisions until everything looks just right.

Planning things ahead will make a significant difference on your workflow and on the way everything turns out on the end.

So there you have it, four simple tips that will transform your video editing outsourcing process into a much smoother ride.