You’re considering video marketing for your business. That’s great, and we understand your interest. Video accounts for 80% of online traffic. YouTube is the second most popular search engine and third most popular website in the world. The second most popular website is Facebook! There is continued growing interest in video as marketers and consumers. Videos are shared 1200% more than link and text content combined. Video sharing is especially prevalent on mobile devices. And, each year mobile traffic increases by 100%.
Video Marketing, Where to Start?
The process of creating video content can seem daunting. And the last thing you want to do is to make an embarrassment of yourself or your company.
Put your mind at ease. Your first video will be your worst video. No pressure. You’re learning and you will make mistakes. The good part is each subsequent video will build on what you learned. You will make fewer mistakes, the process will get easier, and your videos will be better. But, that can’t happen unless you bite the bullet and make your first video.
Get Your Team On Board
Making video content will be easier if you get buy-in from your team. Having stakeholders and teammates help you produce video content will make your life much easier. Your team may not be a video production crew, but if they can help you in even little ways it makes a big difference. Consequently, it can be difficult to create video content if your team doesn’t support you or is opposed to creating video content.
Get A Video Marketing Plan
You need to answer some basic questions about your video marketing effort. Who’s your audience? What do you want to accomplish with video marketing? How will you rate its success? It can be helpful to identify a problem your business solves and build video topics around it. Most videos come in three types.
Educational
This type of content focuses on practical content divided into actionable chunks to educate your audience. Examples include product demos, topic explanations, and the classic how-to video.
Inspirational
Inspirational content focuses on motivating your audience and giving them a big case of the Wants. This content typically includes stellar visuals and upbeat/inspirational music. Classic examples included inspiring moments caught on video, motivational messaging, and life changing stories. For marketing this can include branding, and evidence as a case study or testimonial.
Entertainment
Feel good content that warms people’s hearts or makes them laugh. Team building, animal videos, and non-profit PR coverage often fall into this category.
Decide on a content format: long (10-25 minutes), short (<5 minutes), or live on social media. Live can be a good place to start because your audience has low expectations for production and it allows you and your team to become comfortable being in front of the camera in small increments.
Time Management
Create a calendar of the tasks needed to take a video from brainstorming to promoting on social media. This will help keep your video content mill working smoothly. You may also want to consider a batch workflow. Doing one step for multiple videos at one time can be a great way to improve content creation efficiency. Wouldn’t you rather set up and tear down shooting equipment as few times as possible?
Get Your Video Marketing Gear
You don’t need thousands of dollars of gear and a team of professionals to get started. You just need some basic considerations to gear, most of which you may already own or have access.
Camera
Most people have a quality camera right in their pocket. Your phone shoots HD quality video and can be a great starter camera for video content. One step up is a Digital SLR camera. This will put you on par with most small budget video content producers out there. The most important piece of camera equipment you will need is a tripod. Even top-of-the-line gear is worthless if your how-to video shakes around like a found-footage movie.
Use this link to get started learning more about using your camera: Camera Basics
Lighting
The best light you can use is up in the sky and absolutely free, just film outside or next to a window. From there it’s about filling in the shadows. You can accomplish this by placing a “fill light” on the opposite side of you from the window, or by using a “bounce.” A bounce is a reflective surface that often looks like a car dash shade. It helps “bounce” light from your window to “fill” the shadows on the opposite side of your face. If you’re looking to upgrade there are a number of inexpensive studio lighting kits for purchase online. If you don’t have a neutral, clean background, consider a backdrop. They often come in sheets or collapsible panels for easy setup and storage.
Use this link to get started learning more about video lighting: Lighting Basics
Audio
If there’s one piece of equipment you should buy for your video content production it’s a microphone. Phones and DSLR take excellent photographs and video, but their audio microphones are quite bad. Many a great video has been ruined and made unwatchable by bad audio. There are three audio solutions that will work well for your video content, each with their own strengths.
Lavalier Mic
Sometimes referred to as a “lapel” microphone. They’re inexpensive and effective. They can easily pick up your voice and not much else. But, they can be suspect to wind making them less than ideal if you plan to record outside. They also need to be plugged into your phone or camera to record audio. The hanging wire can be awkward if you’re not doing a selfie-style video. “Lav” mics are typically paired with a separate audio recording device.
Shotgun Mic
This is the large conical microphone you see attached to cameras. It record audio directly out in front of the camera. Most YouTube professionals use this type of microphone with a DSLR. With a windscreen it works well outdoors in all but the most windy of days. But, it can pick up ambient noise within its audio range. It can also be used as a hand microphone in a pinch. A quality shotgun microphone won’t break the bank, but it will likely be the most expensive piece of equipment you use short of purchasing a camera.
Portable Digital Recorder
These handheld devices have directional recording capabilities like the shotgun mic. They also use two microphones to record in stereo, which may be important if you’re trying to capture moving sounds. They’re relatively inexpensive. Best of all when used with your camera they create audio redundancy. So if your recorder or your camera sound isn’t usable it’s likely you can use the other sources audio. Best of all they can be integrated with any type of microphone you want to use. The only downside is you will need to import and sync the audio track with your video while editing.
Also consider optimizing your video marketing content so it can be understood without sound. This is great if you happen to lose audio on your video, but also means your video can be watched by the hearing impaired and people with their phones on silent.
Use this link to get started learning more about recording audio: Audio Basics
Write Your Video Marketing Script
You don’t need to write an Oscar-worthy screenplay, but it helps to write a video script to organize your ideas. Avoid writing word for word what you want to say and think of it more like bullet points you want to address with your natural language. Your script should also end your video with a strong call to action. This can be voiced instructions, text, or an interactive button/graphic. The important thing is to guide your audience to the action you want them to take after they finish the video.
Recording
With everything all set up and your video script for reference it’s time to record your video. Try running through the video script in its entirety three times. You may be tempted to stop when you make a mistake or flub a line and rerecord it. But, this can break the natural rhythm of your video. If you make a mistake, take a second to reset and keep going. In the editing process you can cut together the individual section best takes without it seeming stilted.
Vertical vs Horizontal Recording
You should shoot your video based the platform/device you want to target the most. If you want to shoot for your website, YouTube, or any sort of laptop/desktop consumption you should shoot in the normal horizontal mode. If you want to make content specifically for social media or phones consider shooting in the vertical orientation. This better aligns to how people view phones and the vertical orientation of social media platform posts streams.
Editing
The sky is the limit on how much you can spend editing your video. From high-spec editing PCs and software to hiring a freelance editor to put together your video, money can be spent fast. But, if you’re just starting out you can use a service like invideo.io or one of its competitors. Like Canva.com for videos, they provide useful templates for editing your videos. This can take your raw footage and turn it into a clean, usable video quickly. As you get more comfortable with creating video marketing content you can explore more advanced editing options.
Use this link to get started learning more about video editing: Video Editing
Share Your Video Marketing Content
Make sure to post your video marketing content on your website, video streaming platform, social media, and even email. This will eventually let you see where your video content performs best. You can then tailor your video content to your best performing platform. A good rule of thumb schedule for promoting content is the day of release, one week later, two weeks after that, one month after that, and one year after that.
SEO
SEO is of critical Importance if you want people to find your content organically. Unfortunately, search engines don’t understand video content at this time. They primarily function using text. Use a title and video description that accurately describes your video and utilizes important, sensible keywords to rank your content. It can help to add a transcript of your video to its page on your website. Making it a mixture of a blog and video all in one.
Advertise
Consider boosting your native social media content featuring your video to reach a wider audience or using it as a video ad on your best performing social media platforms. Video content and ads draw more attention and engagement than traditional text and graphics.
With this information in your back pocket you’re on the right track to making your own successful video marketing content. But, if it all seems Greek to you. Or, you and your team don’t have time to build and learn a video marketing production process it may be time to bring in the professionals. Video is just one of the types of content Bold Entity creates for our clients. Check out some of the work we’ve produced on our video page: https://boldentity.com/video/
