Your Guide to a Hot Drone Summer

After months of being cooped up inside, here at The Grid we’re having ourselves a drone summer - and we want that for you too!

Why? Because drone footage is a remarkably effective video marketing tool that drives audience and customer engagement with unique, can’t-tear-your-eyes-away perspectives.

Read on to see what we mean and get our hot takes on the latest drone video marketing trends, tips, and technology. 

What’s the big deal with drones?

For most industries and businesses, video content is becoming more and more essential to their marketing and customer success strategies. The most popular site on the internet after Google? Youtube.

And folks aren’t only watching local TV news bloopers. Your business’s audience uses video everyday to find solutions for their most pressing problems - solutions you might provide. In fact, according to two recent surveys: 

  • 59% of executives agree that they are more likely to choose video (over text) to get to know a product or topic.

  • 68% of marketers say video has a better return on investment than Google Ads.

Clearly, investing in video marketing is a smart move… but how do you make sure your business stands out from a sea of video content? That’s where drone video comes in.

Drone footage and videos get you behind the scenes, give the big picture, and show before & after transformations on a huge scale. This sort of slice-of-life content from a bird’s eye view is inherently hard to resist. Just try NOT to watch this reel of epic drone footage: 

 
 

See what we mean?

Here at The Grid, we have clients using drone footage in their video marketing strategies to great effect. Whether we’re capturing a pizza oven being airlifted into a new building in downtown Raleigh, or we’re using drones to make a video tour of a new facility in Mebane so dynamic, it makes a warehouse look sexy.

You may have noticed the aforementioned “Pizza Airlift” in the composite reel above at 00:27. To pull off that sweeping footage we used 3 drones: two static positions covering the front and back of the building and one drone following the action for closer shots. 

And the results of this project were two-fold. Not only did they use the drone video internally to create energy among their teams around the big move to the new building (which - surprise! - has a pizza oven), but we also posted it to our Instagram to test the new “Reels Feature” and quickly racked up over 70k views. 

Drones can fly indoors too

For another project, we got the chance to fly a drone all over a new chemical storage facility in Mebane, NC. What’d we do that for? Well, not just for the fun of it. The final video project was an integral part of the client’s ongoing rebrand, helping to bridge the gap between old and new. And now anyone can get a tour of their newest state-of-the-art facility while learning more about their tried-and-true processes.

The drones that make it happen - The Grid’s two cents

It wouldn’t be a drone summer without, you guessed it, some actual drones. We are pretty into these models right now (we even gave the DJI Mini 2 away in our drone sweepstakes) and here’s why.

  • Mavic Pro 2: Over the past 2 years, This is has been our main workhorse. It has everything we like about the Phantom series packed into a smaller body, along with a one-inch sensor and a Hasselblad camera. All this combines to make the Mavic Pro 2 perfect for cinematic scene-setters.

  • DJI Air 2S: This drone is our newest and has a few minor upgrades over the pro. The Air 2S matches the pro's 1" sensor, but also boasts a generous max video resolution of 5.4K. Not to mention the improved obstacle avoidance sensors on top of the drone.

  • DJI Mini 2: This is the easiest drone to fly and to keep handy. We just throw the DJI Mini 2 into the camera bag and have it ready just in case the light hits right for a drone flight. This is the drone we gave away in the spring and the starter drone we suggest to everyone.

Are you ready to level up your video marketing, but not ready for your own fleet of drones? We’ve got you covered. Get in touch and we’ll get you started on your next drone video project! 

Grid