8 Tips for Creating Share-Worthy Holiday Card Videos for Your Photography Clients

Video holiday cards are one of the best ways to reach new photography clients during the holiday season since they put your work in front of new potential clients when your current clients share them on social media. If you’ve created holiday slideshows for clients in the past using our Slideshow Video Builder, you might consider upping your game and making holiday videos with our new Marketing Video Builder this year, as Alycia Alvarez did in the video below.

If you want to have a little more control and even more options for your clients’ holiday videos, take a look at some of our tips for creating beautiful holiday cards in a way that’s quick and easy. And if you’ve never created a video with our new Marketing Video Builder, it’s easy to get started — just select “Marketing Video” the next time you create a new project.

1. Start from scratch. Build your video from the ground up by selecting “Start from Scratch” in the upper-right-hand corner. You’ll get to choose from our versatile Marketing Video Styles and decide right from the beginning exactly how you want your video to look. Want a little more help getting started? Try one of our storyboards to see how a completed project looks.
   
2. Customize your style for the holiday. Our Marketing Video Builder lets you set your colors for both backgrounds and text, as well as offering several font options in each style. Choose colors that match the holiday theme or your branding, along with fonts that echo the card’s festive sentiments.
3. Set up a few sample videos. Design a few holiday cards with recent clients or past portfolio work. Then, you can show clients color, style, and text options, and (incidentally) copy your sample instead of starting a new project from scratch when you create client’s video. It’ll allow your client give input and save you time.
   
4. Get some video clips. Set your video card apart from your printed work by adding the movement and liveliness of video clips. Just a few seconds in video mode can help elevate your holiday card and make it really special. You can even add text to your video if you want to comment on the action.
   
5. Group portrait images together with a collage. Keep your runtime down and clients’ interest up by adding a collage of images here and there. It also solves the pesky problem of how to ensure your portrait images look good in the horizontal world of video.
   

10. Adjust your timing. Keeping videos short enough to thrive on social media is a must if you want your holiday card to be shared. You can cut down on your video’s length by taking advantage of the Marketing Video Builder’s timing controls. Rather than adjusting the pace of your entire video, you can adjust each block individually. Choose which images will stay up the longest and how long they’ll stay there for maximum impact.
    

14. Choose a seasonal song. Holiday songs are always a good choice for holiday cards. When you’re selecting songs, check Holiday in the “Popular For” section of our music library for dozens of Christmas carols and Hanukkah tunes that’ll match the seasonal feel of your video card.
    
15. Add your logo at the end. If you want to potential clients to find you once the video’s done, add your logo or a call to action with contact information so they can find you and request a holiday session of their own.
    

Do you have any tips for creating a better video holiday card? Let us know in the comments below, or share your holiday video cards with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram by using hashtag #MyAnimoto.