How to plan a 1 day shoot that creates months of marketing content.
What if you could spend one day creating professional photography and video and walk away with enough content to fuel your marketing for the next several months?
You absolutely can.
The trick is planning the shoot around your marketing needs instead of simply showing up and taking pictures.
After 15 years in photography and video production, this is one of the biggest differences I see between a productive commercial shoot and a shoot that simply produces a handful of nice images.
Start With the End Goal
Before we schedule a camera, I want to know what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
Do you need better website photographs?
More social media content?
Professional team portraits?
Video for your homepage?
Short-form social videos?
New advertising material?
A library of evergreen content?
Once we know that, we can build the production around those goals.
Think in Terms of Content, Not Individual Photos
Let’s say you’re a Colorado business with a team of 10 employees.
Instead of spending the entire day creating traditional headshots, we might photograph the team individually, together, interacting with customers, working in the office and performing the actual services you provide.
Now we’ve created several different categories of content from essentially the same production day.
The same principle applies to video.
A single interview can be combined with B-roll to create a longer website video, shorter social media clips, LinkedIn content, advertisements and other marketing assets.
A Productive Shoot Might Include
Depending on the business, a one-day production could include:
Corporate headshots
Team photographs
Environmental portraits
Products and services
Workplace photography
Customer interactions
Behind-the-scenes images
Website hero imagery
Interview videos
Customer testimonials
B-roll
Vertical social media clips
Short-form videos
Brand storytelling footage
You don’t necessarily need to use everything immediately.
That’s actually the point.
You want to build a library of professional content that you can pull from whenever you need it.
Don’t Forget About Vertical Video
If you’re investing in professional video production, don’t make the mistake of creating one beautiful horizontal video and calling it done.
Today’s businesses need content in multiple formats.
That could mean traditional website video, 16:9 video for YouTube, vertical video for Instagram and TikTok, shorter clips for LinkedIn, and additional B-roll that can be reused in future content.
With the right planning, one production can provide all of those assets.
Create a Shot List Before the Shoot
One of the most valuable things you can do is create a shot list before production begins.
Think about your website pages.
Think about your social media calendar.
Think about upcoming campaigns.
Think about the services you want to promote.
Think about the questions customers frequently ask.
Then build the photography and video around those needs.
This approach makes the shoot much more intentional—and usually gives you considerably more usable content.
Why This Approach Saves Businesses Time and Money
The biggest advantage isn’t simply getting more photographs.
It’s efficiency.
Instead of repeatedly scheduling small shoots every time your business needs something, you can create a substantial amount of content during one well-planned production.
And once that content starts getting used across your website, social media, advertising, email marketing and other channels, the investment becomes much more valuable.
This is also why I offer ongoing content solutions through AMP Imagery.
Some businesses only need a single shoot. Others need a consistent stream of fresh photography and video throughout the year.
Either way, the objective is the same:
Create professional content that makes your business look as good as the business actually is.
If your website, social media or marketing currently relies on a collection of random phone photos and whatever content you can find at the last minute, a strategically planned photo and video production may be one of the easiest ways to improve your visual presence.
And you don’t necessarily need months of production.
Sometimes you just need one really well-planned day.
If you’d like to talk through what that could look like for your business, AMP Imagery can help you build a photography and video plan around your goals, your audience and the places where you actually need content.
