A practical guide for brands and businesses on capturing behind the scenes content – and why this kind of content is having a moment.
Behind the scenes content is the cheapest content you will ever produce, because you have already paid for it. If you’re not leveraging BTS content yet here is how to stop leaving it on the floor.
It multiplies the return on a fixed cost. Your shoot day costs what it costs whether you capture behind the scenes or not. The hero images are the deliverable. The behind the scenes footage is essentially free and it can easily produce more individual assets than the shoot itself.
It fills the gaps between campaign moments. Most brands have two or three big pushes a year and forty-nine weeks to fill in between. Behind the scenes content is what keeps the feed alive without commissioning anything new.
It performs where polish does not. Social platforms and the people on them reward content that feels immediate and human. A perfectly retouched campaign image is a signal that you are being sold to. A clip of someone repositioning a plate for the fourth time is a signal that somebody cares.
It carries proof of quality. If your product is well made, well sourced or genuinely considered, behind the scenes footage is where you can actually show it. Claims about craft are cheap. Footage of craft is not.
It works across the funnel, not just on social. Good behind the scenes assets end up in product pages, email, paid social creative, careers pages, retail partner decks, press packs and investor updates. Very little else you shoot travels that far.
It doubles as culture and recruitment content. People want to see the team. This is often the only content that shows them.
And increasingly, it is not the extra. It is the campaign.
Something has shifted over the past couple of years. Brands are no longer treating behind the scenes footage as the supporting act. They are running deliberately unpolished material as the primary asset, and in plenty of cases they are lightly staging the look of it: phone-shot, vertical, flash on, a bit grainy, a bit unresolved. There are a few reasons this is working. Audiences have become fluent at spotting an ad and scroll past polish on instinct, so content that looks captured rather than produced buys a few seconds of attention that a hero image no longer commands. The format is native to the platforms where most brand budget now lands. And as AI-generated imagery becomes harder to tell apart from the real thing, visible human process has quietly turned into a proof point. Showing the room, the hands and the mess is one of the few remaining ways to demonstrate that something was genuinely made, by people, in an actual place.
Most brands interpret this as a photo of the photographer holding a camera. It is much wider than that, and the wider you go, the more useful the material.
Worth capturing:
The most valuable material is rarely the equipment. It is the decision-making. Anyone can point at a product. Showing why the third arrangement was better than the second is the bit that builds credibility.
This is where behind the scenes content usually dies. Everyone assumes someone else is handling it.
Make it a line item. Put it in the brief and the call sheet alongside the shot list. If you are working with an agency or a freelance photographer, put it in the scope of work with a rough deliverable number, for example “minimum thirty vertical clips and twenty stills, unedited.”
Name the person. A social or content team member on set, a second shooter, or the photographer’s assistant. If it is everybody’s job, it is nobody’s job. Give them a named brief and permission to interrupt occasionally.
Sort usage rights up front. Agree in writing who owns the behind the scenes material and how it can be used, including whether the photographer or agency can post it themselves. This is a very small conversation at booking stage and a very tedious one afterwards.
Get releases signed. If models, talent or crew appear in the footage, make sure your standard release covers behind the scenes and social use, not just the campaign imagery. Worth having your legal or HR contact check the wording once so you are not asking every time.
Send this to whoever is capturing on your next shoot.
Four practical rules for whoever is holding the phone:
And one for whoever is leading the shoot: record a voice note before you leave. Sixty seconds on what you were trying to achieve, what surprised you and what you would change. That voice note becomes your captions, your carousel copy and your video scripts, and it will sound far more like your brand than anything written at a desk three weeks later.
Lead with the before. The gap between the empty room and the finished frame is the story. Opening with the polished result gives away the ending.
Give every post a job. Teach something, reveal something or invite something. “Behind the scenes at our SS26 shoot” does none of the three. “Why we shot the whole campaign in a real house rather than a studio” does all three.
Use what was actually said on the day. The strongest hooks are almost always sitting in the raw audio rather than in copy written afterwards. Real speech has a specificity that marketing language rarely matches.
Rotate the format. The reveal, the process breakdown, the honest mistake, the location tour, the talking head, the product close-up. One shoot day, six genuinely different posts.
Spread it out. Behind the scenes content has a longer shelf life than campaign imagery. Release it across the launch window and beyond rather than in one burst.
Do not restrict it to social. Drop process clips onto product pages, into email, into your careers page and into retail or wholesale pitch decks. It works everywhere, and hardly anyone does it.
Your own embargoes. Unreleased product, pricing, packaging and collaborators all tend to have dates attached. Behind the scenes footage is very good at accidentally revealing all four. One approval pass before posting is enough.
The location’s permission. If you have hired a private home never publish the address or anything that identifies it. Most owners are delighted to be featured and will happily share your content on to their own audience, which is free reach.
Styled Home Studios is a curated collection of design-led homes, studios and spaces available to hire for photoshoots, filming, content creation and brand events across the UK. Browse locations at styledhomestudios.co.uk, or get in touch and we will help you find the right space for your next shoot.
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