Posted by Catie Foertsch on Thu, Jul 08, 2010 @ 09:05 AM
Whether you make your video assets yourself or hire a production company, they're costing you. It just doesn't make sense to park them on your website and hope people find them. Better to let them out of their cage so they can work even harder for you.
Here are six ways to do just that:
- Use social media to get people to watch them (put them on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, and send people to them via Twitter).
- Include image and text links to your videos in your email newsletters and updates.
- Use video during your sales process by sending links to specific, appropriate videos to individual prospects.
- Embed a video in your in-person sales presentations. Everyone likes a video, and starting your Powerpoint slide show with video is a great way to put people in a receptive mood.
- Include them in marketing packages you offer for free in exchange for contact information.
- Re-purpose the content by using chunks in new videos.
These six ideas are designed to get you thinking about all the different ways you can make your video assets work for you. Placing your videos on your website is just one way- and if that's the only way you're using video right now, then you're not getting your money's worth. So let those videos out of their cage! Send them out into the world and you'll see your ROI soar.
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Thu, Jul 01, 2010 @ 10:59 AM
If you're thinking about using video to market your business, good for you. Video's interactivity and rich content are very effective for engaging, communicating and connecting. But before you invest time or money (or both), it makes sense to be sure you aren't just making video for the sake of having video on your site. You want your video assets to work hard for you and justify your investment, don't you?
Here are the top four questions to ask before you begin shooting. Consider them thoughtfully, and you'll have the answer to the really big question: what kind of video should you make?
1. What do you want your video (or videos) to do for you? This forces you to get beyond the very general "We just want to have video on our site" and define your goals. Be as specific as possible. Here are a few examples:
- streamline our customer service process
- introduce our key people
- inject humor into the early stages of our sales process
- move people through our sales funnel
- demonstrate how our product works
- provide different ways for visitors to understand who we are and what we do
- provide in-depth learning experiences
2. Who are your audiences and how do they learn? Who will watch the videos you'll make? This question will help you define what style of video to make. If you're connecting with 19-year-old males, you'll make a different kind of video than you would for new mothers or retired golfers.
3. What is the message you want to deliver to your audience(s)? If you make them correctly, videos are like arrows. They deliver a specific message to a particular target. Figure out what message you need to send. If you have more than one audience, don't use the same video for all of them. Instead, create different versions of your message so that each group sees and hears exactly what they care about.
4. How will you measure success? It's not a good idea to invest in assets and then leave them alone because you trust (or hope) that they're doing what you want them to do. Better to know how you define success so you can determine if they're working. If they are, great. You've figured out what works, and you can continue to create video assets that do the job. If you find that they aren't doing what you want them to do - understand why not, and then try something different. The goal is to create assets that achieve your goals and contribute to your success. You won't know if that's happening unless you measure and analyze.
Take the time to answer these four questions before you begin production, and you'll have the information you need to make video assets that are powerful and effective communication tools. They'll work hard for you, and they'll do the job you made them to do.
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Mon, Apr 05, 2010 @ 10:30 AM
More and more, companies are using video at trade shows. And that's a good thing - video allows you to connect by showing your product or service in addition to talking about it. But sometimes companies make a mistake - they take a video they've created for another purpose (usually their website) and loop it on their booth TV screen.
Now, using a pre-existing video may seem like a good idea. After all, your company has invested in this video and everybody really likes it, so why not use it in the trade show booth?
- First, your website video has sound. But the purpose of a trade show is engagement. If people are listening to, or trying to listen to your video (trade shows tend to be very noisy), they're not engaging with you.
- Second, if your video was created with narration or talking head-style interviews, that sound is critical to your video. You might think that you can use your existing video and just turn down the sound, but that will leave you with moving images that are difficult to understand.
- Third, video that's created for the web is specifically designed to be played in a small format. While some people do choose the full-screen option, most still watch website video in its original player, as it first appears on a web page. So, everything in web video has to be relatively large. But if you take that web video and play it at a trade show, elements that look great at 480 or 640 pixels wide on your website will look giant. And you may be wasting real estate. All those large images may not be the best use of your video space.
Well, you say, we spent a lot of money on our website video and we can't afford to produce another one specifically for our trade shows. But creating a trade show video shouldn't be expensive, because you already have all the video you'll need. Just eliminate the audio track, rearrange the video so that it tells your story visually, and add the on-screen text that will help to orient the viewer.
And here's another tip, courtesy of Robert Hackenson, VP of Marketing & Sales for TMG Exhibits, a company that specializes in trade show booth design. "At a trade show, you can target your video toward the specific potential prospects attending the show," Hackenson said. "The video should attract them with information about the product or service they're interested in." If the trade shows you exhibit at attract more than one type of attendee - be It end users, high-level management types, homeowners, etc. - create versions of your booth video that speak specifically to them. And again - creating different versions of your video should not be expensive if you perform a relatively minor re-edit of the video you already have.
So - if you absolutely have no budget and must use your website video(s) in your trade show booths, turn the sound down and go ahead. It's better than no video at all. But if at all possible, re-edit your video specifically for your trade shows. You'll give your viewers the best possible chance to connect with the story of your product or service.
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Mon, Jan 18, 2010 @ 08:10 AM
Among the projects we're working on right now are two that are similar. In each, we're filming a business man giving a presentation. Each presentation will then be broken up into several short clips for posting to YouTube and to the respective websites.
Before the presentations, we were asked what each speaker should wear: suit jacket with shirt and tie; jacket and shirt but no tie; shirt and tie without a jacket; or an open-collared shirt. In both cases, as in all projects like this, our answer was the same: Who's your audience and what is the image you need to project to them - before you even start speaking?
Case #1 - A Technical Speaker
In the first case, the company provides training to technical people. All-day 
seminars are conducted in person at hotels and conference centers. The people who attend the presentation generally wear jeans or khakis and polo shirts or open-collared shirts. The presenter never wears a tie or jacket because it's important that the people in the audience feel as though he is a tech person like them.
The target audience for this set of videos is the same set of people who would attend the training. In this case, the best choice is an open-collared shirt or a branded polo shirt. A tie, or a jacket and tie, would identify him as not-a-tech-person, which would undermine the message he wants the videos to send - that he's a good fit for delivering the technical training his audience needs.
Case #2 - A CEO
In the second case, the CEO of a small start-up is giving a presentation about his company's product - a complex machine that saves time and money in large manufacturing plants. The audience for this series of videos will primarily be high-level managers and CEOs of mid-sized and larger companies, particularly in the Midwest.
Though this CEO mostly wears an open-collared shirt to work, our advice was to wear a suit and tie for the filming. Manufacturing executives at the level he's aiming for - and especially in the Midwest - tend to be conservative. To connect with them as a CEO he needs to project an image of being a CEO who is successful - as they identify success. It doesn't matter that he's completely confident and successful as a CEO in khakis. What matters is the judgment his audience will make about him even before he begins to speak.
What about women?
Women's wardrobe choices are far more varied than men's, but the rules are the same: dress so that what you're wearing conveys the right image to your target audience.
But, while the rules for clothing are the same, women
have much more to worry about than men because their hairstyles are more varied, and they tend to wear more jewelry. And both hairstyle and jewelry will contribute to the visial impression that's created.
So choose your jewelry carefully. If your target audience is conservative, simple jewelry usually works best. If you want to project an image of being fashionable, you can wear more and more interesting jewelry.
Hair also makes a statement. If you use color or highlights and it's been several weeks since your last salon visit, make an appointment for a few days before your shoot. And if at all possible, give yourself extra time before the shoot so that if it's a bad hair day, you can re-do your hairstyle. Not only will you look better - you'll feel much more confident, and that confidence will come across on video.
Whether you're a man or a woman, it's important to plan how you'll look on video very carefully. Get inside the heads of those in your target audience and look at yourself through their eyes. What assumptions do you want them to make about you based on your appearance? Because, before you even start to speak, your viewers will make a judgment about you. And it's your job to make sure that they arrive at the correct judgment.