Promotional videos are a brilliant way of establishing your brand and reaching a wider audience. Even if you’re not making a huge promotional piece, making small videos with your staff and talking about your products or showing your facilities.

But these have to be done right. Otherwise, they can end up doing more harm than good for your business. We’ve seen many companies do poor quality videos, mostly due to lack of experience, or the right equipment. So, to help those of you looking to make your own little videos, here are the three accessories which are essential to making great company videos:

• Tripod

Nothing says amateur like shaky handheld camerawork. If you’re at all serious about making professional looking videos for your audience, then you need to invest in a tripod. You can purchase these at a relatively low price for camcorders and photo cameras, and smaller tripods and clamps for mobile devices and tablets are also available. Investing in one of these will make your videos look a million times more professional than if you were just using your not-so-steady hand.

• Microphone

If your employees are going to be talking into the camera, or interviewing a customer, relying on the camera’s built-in microphone is a guaranteed route to disaster! Background noise and low voices can ruin your video! External microphones are available for almost every type of camera and mobile devices. Having great audio is arguably more important than great looking video, so by recording the sound via a camera attached microphone, or even an external recording device will make it clear to your audience that you’re serious about making videos, so they’re more likely to take you seriously.

• Lights

“Lights?!” You might be thinking, “We don’t need those, surely?!” Well, that depends whether you want your videos looking professional or amateur. While your eyes might be able to see enough to make it seem passable, what a camera sees can be very different, and it will become apparent when you play the video back. Basic lighting sets are available and are relatively simple to set up, there is a slight learning curve when it comes to setting them up, but it is relatively easy to master, and having great lighting will add credibility to your videos.

So those are three pieces of equipment needed if you want to make videos for your company.