Video Marketing Tips: Part 2 – Video Marketing Made Easy
Hi Welcome back, I'm Melissa Ladaire founder
of Gain Crowd Media. You're watching video #2 in my three part
series on how to create an easy video marketing campaign for your business that really works! In the last video, we talked about the benefits
of including video marketing in your online marketing campaigns. I shared with you what YouTubers learned by
experimenting on Youtube and how what they learned, helped them build massive numbers
of views and subscribers to their channels. AND, I described how YOU can apply these same
techniques to your video marketing strategies. I also shared with you the 6 pillars to more
effectively creating engaging video content. If you missed that video, please go back and
review it now before moving on, so you don't miss any valuable information. Now, I think you're going to love the content
I'm going to share with you in this video, because I'm going to reveal to you the most
important videos that you should be included in your video marketing campaign.
And I'm going to give you the step by step
formula for structuring quality marketing videos for your business that will help keep
your audience engaged and moving down your sales funnel. In the end, it's all about engagement. If you make great videos but nobody watches
them or stays engaged, who cares, you've wasted your time and money. Your not safe from avoiding this pitfall even
if you hire a professional videographer, because there are a lot of great videographers out
there, that don't understand video marketing for business, so this video structure is going
to be a great tool for you to understand and follow. I'm also going to share with you the assets
you'll need to produce, to include in your videos AND keep handy to help make your ongoing
video production faster and easier.
I'll explain the best way to host your videos
and how to ensure they are found in online searches. I'll also explain some of the pitfalls to
avoid in your video production. So let's get started! We're going to produce video content for engagement. That's the goal. Engage our audience! Because, when your content is engaging, people
like it, share it, and talk about it with their friends.
Which in the online world, means all your
back-links, rankings, views and most importantly, your brand awareness grows automatically,
faster than you could ever engineer yourself. Engaging content has the greatest impact on
traffic, leads and sales and luckily for us, nothing is more engaging than video. In the past, most businesses were completely
profit focused, and profits are of course still very important, but people want to do
business with big hearted businesses that care about people and the planet. They want to know that they are dealing with
companies that have a conscience and who care about the greater good. They want to feel emotionally connected to
the businesses they support. So your big heart is actually your competitive
advantage. When you share your values, knowledge and
passion for your business through video, you help create people who care about you and
your business and who are willing to invest in your success through supporting your business,
products and services. When you show that you have integrity, you
are honest, and you live to serve others, you will create loyal customers that will
not only support you, but will take the time and effort to refer you and your business
and help you grow.
So how do you create engaging content in your
videos especially, when on the surface at least, your business may seem a little dry
or boring? Well, you focus on making your videos educational,
sincere and entertaining. You make videos that solve problems and provide
valuable information to your audience. This is how you gain a crowd of followers
and get them begging for more. You give them Value! and you don't hold back. One of the most common misconception in business,
is that if you give away too much information, that people won't need you or your expertise
any more, because they will simply do it themselves. But on the contrary, when you give away lots
of valuable information from your knowledge base, you are actually creating a sort of
dependency with your audience and customers, because they begin to see you as the "go to"
expert in your niche, and they begin to feel that they can't live without your expertise.
They start realizing how valuable your products
and services are, and how much there really is to know about your niche. This takes the focus away from price and puts
it on value, making your sales funnel shorter and easier. Quickly, your prospects begin to realize,
that they are much better off, leaving this job, to you, the expert AND that they would
rather work with you over anyone else. In order to achieve this, we are going to
want to shift our perspective away from the message WE are eager to deliver and instead
gain an understanding of the information and solutions our audience and prospective customers
are looking for online. We're going to do this by starting off with
a search using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool.
There, we're going to find the key words and
phrases that people are looking for in our area that are directly related to our niche,
our products and services. We're going to avoid broad highly searched,
competitive words and phrases and focus on highly targeted key word phrases that are
closely related to our business that still get some good traffic. For instance, if you run a house keeping business,
you might find that there's a lot of search volume in your target market area for the
phrase "house cleaning service", but this phase will probably also be highly competitive
and difficult to to rank for.
So we want to look for other search terms
that are going to have good search volumes, but not a lot of competition AND search terms
that will help us identify our target market. Specifically people who are interested in
our expertise. So let's say your company prides itself on
the integrity of your house keepers. Your employees are bonded and insured against
theft and you carefully screen your potential new hires with background checks. Now there might be 5,000 monthly searches
for the phrase "house cleaning service", but there could also be 700 local searches a month
for the phrase, "how to hire a housekeeper that won't rip me off". If we make a video around this key word phrase,
it will be much easier to rank your video on the first page of a local search. And since the click through rate with video
is so high, we are bound to get a lot of great targeted traffic from people who care about
the same things we care about, making them a much more targeted potential customer.
So are you starting to understand why pre-production
planning is an important part of our video marketing strategy? So Let's talk about the most important videos
that every business needs? Because I am focused on traffic and engagement,
my list is based on how people search for products and services online. 90% of online experiences, start with a search. So what are people looking for? Well, one of the main things people are looking
for are products and services to solve problems they're having. They often start out by doing a search for
a local business. These searches often begin with a search query
like, "the best… massage therapist in my area, or the best place to get my dogs teeth
cleaned. etc. Once they've found a business that seems to
have the products or services they're looking for, the look for the company's online reputation.
After they feel satisfied they've found a
company with integrity, they look for extra value, discounts coupons or specials. And don't think this only happens for service
businesses like restaurants, because people search for coupons for everything, even if
your business is B to B, because nobody wants to pay more, when they could have gotten a
better deal. The nice thing about these people is, they're
ready to buy. That's why they're looking up coupons. But don't think that I'm saying you have to
discount your products and services in order to sell them online, you can give value in
other ways, like providing additional valuable information that these people might need. Which leads to another type of search people
do, that we already touched on a bit. They try to find information. So instead of searching for "the best place
to get my dog's teeth cleaned", they might search for "how to clean my dog's teeth?"
and if you are a vet, you might want to create a video showing this audience how to "clean
their dog's teeth" and at the end of your video, let your viewers know that you offer
professional deep teeth cleaning for dogs that is convenient, safe and affordable and
yes, you might even offer a coupon for this service or at least direct them to your website,
where they can find your current incentives.
But the very best videos engage your audience
by telling a story. So video #1 is your story video. It tells the story of your business, your
products, your services, and most of all your passion for what you do and why you do it. This is a short video, just 2 minutes or less,
but it digs deep and helps people connect with you and your business and THIS is the
video that we want to come up in searches when people are looking for products and services
in their local area. It's also the video that lives on the home
page of your website and is clearly visible in a light box in the upper fold of your website. This is the video that will help people decide
to stay longer than 3 seconds on your website. We want them to quickly and easily recognized
that there is a video there, because we know that 60% of the people that see a video on
a landing page will click it and watch.
So don't burry this video. Often when I'm reviewing companies websites
I find that people don't have video on their front page, or if they do, it's often a link
or a small video light box, way down on the page somewhere. Don't do this. Make your videos prominent, front and center
so people find them in that first 3 seconds they arrive on your site. Video #2, Is the Testimonial, or customer
success story Video. Because we know that people search for reputation
online, give it to them in the words of your favorite clients, or your own words. It doesn't matter. Don't hold back from making this video because
you can't seem to capture that perfect testimonial from your client. Sure, if you have the opportunity to get it
directly from your customer, grab it, on your iPhone if you have to. The fact that the video may not be high production
value, sometimes makes these testimonials even more believable.
But this video doesn't need to come directly
from your client's mouth. YOU can share their story, while keeping them
anonymous. You can share their challenges AND their victories
after working with you. The important part of this video is the storyline
aspect once again, because it will create the connection and the engagement we're after. Bring success stories to life that your potential
customer can relate to and you'll have an engaged audience that will begin to trust
you. On to Video #3, The "How to" Video By now, you understand that this video is
not randomly selected from your knowledge base about information you think your potential
customers might be interested in, instead, it's based on what your potential clients
are searching for online in your niche. By creating a video that provides a solution
to a problem your potential customer is having, you begin to establish yourself as the go
to expert and you build more trust with your audience. They also often feel grateful that you've
helped them solved their problem and will further engage with you or even refer you
to others.
So each of these videos are going to be short,
less than 2 minutes. Now, I'm going to give you the Simple Formula
that can be used to create each of the videos to keep your viewers engaged and it goes like
this. Step 1. Identify a problem you can solve Step 2. Brand your company Step 3. Introduce your product or service Step 4. Wrap it up by telling how your product or
service is the solution Step 5. Create a Call to action And that's it! Now we'll be breaking this down into more
detail, but this is basically the formula you can use to create your videos. Now, how good do these videos need to be? Well they need to be polished enough so that
you look and sound like a professional. After all, these videos are representing you
and your company and are going to be an example of your attention to detail.
But, having said that, the production value,
does not need to be over the top. Viewers on Youtube are ok with less than epic
video production. In fact, if your videos come across as too
polished, it could actually negatively affect your results, because people want real. So what is good enough? What will people accept and not click away
from? The number one thing that the statistics show
that people will click away from is poor sound quality. If people can't hear you clearly or there's
lots of background noise, people won't stay. They also won't stay if the lighting is really
poor, if the video is dark, it doesn't look friendly and inviting and lastly, if the script
development is bad. If you can't engage your audience quickly,
they won't stick around to find out what happens. So let's breakdown our video further into
components so you can really understand the specific structure of a good marketing video. The First 5 – 10 seconds of your video are
crucial. You need to grab your viewer's attention quickly,
because just like with your website, viewers will make decisions very quickly about whether
or not they are going to stay to consume your content.
So, reveal the main benefit of watching your
video with a quick teaser of what's in store for your audience. Think big benefit here. I suggest reiterating the exact key words
or phrase you are trying to rank for in this quick early reveal, because if your viewer
landed on your video after searching for your keywords and you immediately reinforce that
in your video, your viewer will know they found the information they're looking for. Next, Brand your company with an Intro Bumper. This should take between 4 and 7 second. Use a high resolution image of your logo and
consider including your tagline. To look professional, I suggest creating an
animated graphic of your logo, otherwise known as a logo reveal that fits your brand image,
with your look and feel and color scheme.
Add an audio elements, perhaps some cool sound
effects or a catchy and you've got a start on some nice branding for your video. Here's an example of what a logo reveal looks
like. They can vary in the complexity, but the most
important aspects of your logo reveal is that it's produced using a good quality image of
your logo. The reveal should be quick and match the look
and feel of your companies branding, and be appropriate for you industry. You can create this logo reveal using software
such as After Effects or hire someone to do it for you. But, I'll warn you, After Effects can be a
bit challenging to master and the cost of hiring someone can vary dramatically based
on who's doing the work, but never fear because in video #3 of this series, I'm going to show
you how Gain Crowd Media can help make your video branding a breeze and how once you have
these branding elements in your tool kit, you can continue to use them in your ongoing
video production.
On to the next Section of your video. The Content – This is the meat of your video. It's where you're going to give your audience
what they came for. Real valuable information that will make their
life easier, solve problems, motivate them, engage them, entertain them, enlighten them
and so on. In a sales video, this is where you are going
to Identify a problem through story narrative. Then your going to go deeper into that problem,
and really agitate it, by reminding people of the reasons this problem is such a thorn
in their side. Then your going to identify the solution,
and get your audience to agree with your solution.
Really help them feel how this solution could
change their lives for the better. And lastly, your going to show how YOUR products,
services or business provides this perfect solution. Your going to clearly demonstrate the results
and benefits of your solution and talk about what it will do for them. It's best if you can include social proof
of your claims such as endorsements, testimonials, case studies or reviews, but you don't have
a lot of time. So this is why it can be helpful to create
additional videos for each of your products and services. This main content portion of your video, should
take up 1-5 minute of your video. As I said, it's not a lot of time and you've
got a lot to do. That's why good script development is key. It's best to keep your videos short, especially
your first videos before you've established an audience, but as you build an audience,
your "how to" and instructional videos can be longer, as long as you are providing engaging,
valuable information.
In these first three videos you'll be making,
I suggest keeping this section from 45 – 90 seconds. Next is your "Call to Action". This is where you lead your viewers down your
sales funnel, so it's really important that you have thought that through. What exactly do you want your viewers to do? What will help you get the highest conversion
rate from this content. What action can your viewers take that will
lead them to become even more engaged in your content? Is it subscribing to your Youtube channel,
is it visiting your website or your landing page, is it commenting on your video so you
have feed back from your audience? Is it subscribing to your email list or your
blog? The answer is based on your goals and how
your sales funnel is set up.
If you haven't figured this out yet, this
is something we can discuss in a one on one strategy session. But whatever your conversion goal is, make
sure you don't waste this opportunity and make sure that the action you ask your viewers
to take creates more engagement with your online brand. You can include a unique verbal call to action
in each of your videos but also include visual calls to action. Tell them exactly what you want them to do,
WHY they need to do it and specifically how it will benefit them. After your call to action, I suggest an Outro
Bumper and an end card. This brands you again and reinforces your
call to action. The outro bumper can be the same version of
your logo reveal you used at the beginning of your video to brand, but adding the end
card helps to visually direct your viewers on how to specifically take action to continue
to engage with you. The end card can help keep your viewers on
your YouTube channel by offering up another video from your channel with the ability to
click on it right from within your video to immediately view.
YouTubers are the first people I witnessed
doing this, but I have to smile now when I see big brands like CNBC using this exact
same method to keep their viewers engaged. Here are some examples of end cards. And lastly, a great way to end your
video that is also a fun thing to do, is to include Out-takes. Not everybody chooses to do this, and out-takes
may not be appropriate for ALL your videos, but they can be a great tool for training
your audience to stay to the very end of your video and can help reinforce at personal connection
with your audience. Out-takes are kind of like a little reward
you give your audience for staying to the end of your video and most people really enjoy
them if they're done tastefully and they don't go over board. The idea is that you're giving and revealing
more of yourself and your personality to your audience. You're letting people know that you are the
real person behind your business and that you make mistakes and can laugh at yourself
AND you can have some fun in your business.
Remember, people like doing business with
people that they like. And that is the detailed structure you can
use over and over again to build and engage audiences. Of course we start with good quality sound,
lighting and imagery. We support with great content, smooth transitions
and graphics to keep people engaged. There are also some things we can add in the
editing phase of your production that can help add even more engagement to your videos
such as background music. I usually prefer adding music to only a portion
of the video so it doesn't feel too distracting when your delivering important content and
the music doesn't start feeling too monotonous. The best time to add music is when you're
revealing solutions or inspiring someone to take action. We can also add supportive b-roll to your
videos. B-roll is additional video clips that supports
the narrative in the video. So if you're that vet, talking about dental
health for dogs, you could show images of dogs playing, biting and chewing and footage
of the dental cleaning procedure itself or whatever footage supports what you're saying.
B-roll can add another element of engagement
to your videos that will help keep people interested. So we've captured, edited and branded a great
video. And we've talked a lot about engaging viewers
and we've even touched on how to help your videos be found by your target audience in
online searches, but creating a video about what people are searching for isn't all you
need to do in order for your videos to be found online. In this next section, I'm going to reveal,
how to distribute, upload and optimize your videos to be found by your target audience. The first question is, where should you be
hosting your videos? Well that depends on your goals. If you are creating videos that you only want
your paying customers to see, or training videos for your employees, then Vimeo might
be the right platform for you. But in this video, we're talking about video
marketing for business. We're looking to find new potential customers
online and create more traffic to our websites, so our goal is to be found by the search engines.
Since Google is the most popular website in
the world and YouTube is the third most popular and owned by Google, YouTube is the logical
choice. We also want to upload directly to the #2
most popular website in the world, Facebook, because their video platform is becoming very
important as well. But in this video we're going to talk primarily
about Youtube. In the very early days, it was fairly easy
to get views on YouTube because there weren't a lot of video uploaded yet, but think about
it. Since YouTube's launch in 2005 millions of
videos have been uploading to YouTube in fact, currently, about 100 hours of video content
are being uploaded worldwide every minute. 100 hours! That's a ton of content And, NOTHING is falling
off the backside! Let's think about that for a second. I like to use this analogy. Imagine a dump truck, that's continually depositing
loads of sand on a huge stretch of beach, then someone trying to locate a single, particular
grain of sand.
Each one of those grains of sands represents
a video on YouTube and asking your viewers to find your video in this mass of videos
isn't going to be easy unless you have a very clear strategy. So you can probably understand now why people
that upload videos to YouTube and don't do any work optimizing their videos and then
wonder why their videos aren't getting any views, or think that video marketing just
doesn't work, haven't considered the massive about of content that exists on Youtube and
they haven't implemented a strategy for getting their videos noticed. Most of us understand that in order for our
websites to be found online, that we need to optimize them for online searches. But many people don't realize you can optimize
just about anything, images, podcasts, thumbnails, blogs, and yes, you can optimize VIDEO AND
video is easier to rank than websites are because there is less competition with videos
and Google tries to offer up a variety of content for any given search including images
and video.
So if you want to be found in online searches,
you need to optimize your videos and your Youtube channel for online searches. There are a lot of steps to optimizing your
videos. It's not particularly difficult, but it is
time consuming and you have to know all the steps and be thorough in your approach. There are a lot of videos on Youtube that
explain how to do this, and I'll also be making some videos on this subject and uploading
them to my channel, so I won't go into great detail here in this video, but I'll give you
some of the highlights. Beginning with video optimization, your video
title and description should be optimized using your key words and phrases you are trying
to rank for AND there are specific strategies for doing this. Your video description needs to be rich and
long about 2-300 words. Most people make the mistake of only add a
short sentence and don't include their key words. You should also include links to your website
and landing pages you're trying to drive traffic to and provide a means for your audience to
contact you.
By providing your company's phone number in
this first line, it will show up directly in the search results. Make sure to set your video category and transcribe
your video so that everything that's said in your video can be recognized by Google. Set your tags and create a custom thumbnail
for each of your videos and optimize the thumbnails as well. Videos with clear and descriptive thumbnail
images generally convert much better than videos with thumbnails that are chosen by
YouTube from your content. It's a good idea to add annotations and active
links to your videos as well. To optimize your Youtube channel, create and
set your channel header so visitors get a great visual of what your channel is about. If you don't, you'll have this boring gray
banner that will do nothing to help your branding or promote your channel. Add information about you and your business
in the about section and set up and optimize your video playlists on your channel.
Verify and connect your business website to
your Youtube channel. Set your channel settings including, your
video location, your country and your language. Set your uploading defaults including keeping
your videos private until all of your optimization is complete and your videos are ready to launch. Down the road you can create featured channel
content, a channel ad and possibly a link to your Google Ads account. Now I've gone over this quickly and I'm sure
I've left a number steps out, but I don't want this video to get to long and as I've
said, I'll be going through all this content in more detail in other videos, but the important
point I want you to understand here is, Don't expect your videos to get traffic automatically,
without you doing any post-production work.
Your videos and your channel need to be optimized
and your videos need to be shared online to create back links. So be sure to actively share your videos on
your social media sites and make them visible by influencers in your industry like bloggers. Now if you think your going to skate around
this part by using quick and easy spamming techniques for ranking your videos, trust
me when I say, they don't work.
At least not in the long run. They may get you some quick traffic, but it
won't be the right kind of traffic and it won't last. YouTube and Google are looking for real human
engagement and they have some pretty intense resource to ensure this. So stop thinking in terms of optimizing for
search engines, and start optimizing for real people. So I hope I've emphasized that the post production
work is just as important as the pre-production and the production work. Let's quickly review what some of the most
common mistakes many businesses make in their video marketing efforts. 1. Poor production value… Poor lighting, bad audio, boring talking heads. 2. Poor strategy
They fail to make videos about what their target audience is searching for online. 3. Poor engagement. They don't follow a video engagement structure
formula. They make sales videos that don't speak from
the heart and are dry and boring. They don't look directly into the camera,
they don't tell stories and they don't reveal their true personality. They don't include b-roll, background music,
text graphics and other devices to help keep their audience engaged.
4. Poor branding
They don't brand their company professionally. 5. No direction
They don't include a call to action. So it isn’t clear what viewers are suppose
to do after they watch their video. 6. They don't include a strategy to be found. They don't optimize their videos and their
YouTube channel and they don't share their videos on their social media channels and
with bloggers in their niche, and they don't create conversations around their videos. We've covered a lot in this video! But really, we've just touched the surface
of video production because we haven't discussed in depth, cameras, sound, lighting, location,
editing, software and a host of other aspects to video production. If before, watching these videos you thought
you would tackle video marketing for your business in your spare time, or hire your
nephew to make your video, you might be rethinking it at this point. I warned you in the beginning, there is a
lot to video production. But before you start feeling like you've bitten
off more than you can chew, you should be relieved to hear that in the next and final
video of this series, I'm going to reveal to you how you can pull it all together and
make video production fast, easy and affordable so you can get the core videos you need working
for you and continue to create ongoing content so you can build channel authority and an
online reputation as an authority in your niche.
Solutions are on their way. I'm Melissa Ladaire from Gain Crowd Media,
and I will see you in our next video..
