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 Thu, May 20, 2010 @ 01:12 PM
Done correctly, a video testimonial is a very valuable sales tool for your company. Here's a list of do's and don'ts to help you create knockout video testimonials.
First, the Dos:
1. Broaden your vision. 
If you create a video testimonial that's a quick, simple statement about your business, or one that provides generalities instead of specifics, it won't do you much good. It won't give your prospects and leads the information they need to know if you're a good fit for them. So instead of a short, general testimonial, create a video testimonial that functions as a case study.
2. Create a structure for your case study before you start to film. Watch one of our testimonial/case studies to see how we put them together. Of course, you can use any structure you want, but remember that the goal is to lead your viewers through the progression that will help them see that you're a great solution for their problem. The formula we like to use is:
- Name, company name, who are your customers?
- What were your problems/challenges?
- Why did you choose our company?
- How have we helped to solve your problems?
3. Give your subject the questions beforehand,
so they can think about their answers. They'll appreciate your thoroughness, and they'll be less nervous because they know what to expect.
4. Be ruthless when you edit. If your customer likes to talk, you may wind up with half an hour of tape - or more. But your video testimonial must be much, much shorter -four minutes long is a good target. So you'll have to cut out a lot of material. Start with just 30 seconds of the customer telling about their business, and devote the rest of the case study to your main topics -problems and challenges, why they chose your company, and how you solved their problem. Remember that they'll naturally talk about their company a lot - but that's not the point of the testimonial/case study. Don't feel guilty about only using what you need.
5. Construct a Case Study page on your website, and put your testimonial there. 
Use text to make the same points the video does - to give the search engines something to chew on and to give the same information to those who might not want to watch a video. You can also elaborate on things your testimonial subject touches on, if you want to give more detail.
6. Find other uses for extra material from the raw video. You'll probably get a lot more material than you can use in your case study. Don't pitch the rest - go through it and extract chunks you can use in a blog post, or in an email newsletter. Or posted on YouTube.
Now, the Don'ts:
1. Don't settle for general statements or short answers. If your happy customer is a little nervous about being videotaped, he or she may give you answers that are very short. But that won't give you enough to work with to construct your case study. So if you find that you're not getting much material from the person you're filming, change the questions you're asking. For example, instead of asking "Who are your customers?" you might say, "Tell me about your customers. Who are they? What are they like? What do they expect from you?" You might even try just having a conversation with them, to help them loosen up, and then working your questions into the conversation.
2. Don't give in to the temptation to make the edited version too long. 
You may get 30 minutes or more of absolutely excellent material and it may kill you to have to edit it down to four minutes. But remember - people don't watch long videos on the web. No matter how good they are, your viewership will drop off. So keep it short. And use some of that material in other places (see number 6, above)
3. Don't park your finished testimonial on your website and forget about it. Editing your raw tape into a finished testimonial case study is just the beginning. Now you have to use it to connect with many leads and prospects as possible. So put it up on YouTube. Use it on a landing page and write about it in an email newsletter. Send a link to relevant prospects.
Video testimonials are an excellent tool to connect with potential customers. And happy customers are generally willing to help by allowing you to film them. Using these dos and don'ts will help you create knockout marketing and sales assets that speak directly to your leads and prospects, and will help you turn them into customers.
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Fri, Apr 16, 2010 @ 10:00 AM
My husband is a glider pilot with the Greater Boston Soaring Club, and so I am in the loop on some really cool videos about gliders and soaring. This video is one of the most breathtaking I've seen - hang onto something, watch it, and then we'll talk about what a bunch of crazy/brilliant Austrian glider pilots and stuntmen have to do with your business:
While you completely get that this is an awesome video - and you may even share it with friends via email or on Facebook or Twitter - what does it have to do with your business?
Business is about relationships
Cool videos are like little gifts you give your current customers - and those who may be your future customers. Videos that are not overt commercials, but instead have a more peripheral connection to your product/service, are interesting and worthy of conversation. They provide current/potential customers with a good reason to engage with you and to talk about you, and to share your video, which will introduce your company to more people.
The peripheral product connection for this video is to Red Bull, the energy drink. It's hosted on the Red Bull website, along with lots of other remarkable videos about sports and athletes and music and dance. It's a great place to go and get your daily Wow. (And, of course, your daily reminder that Red Bull is a brand that is associated with really cool activities.)
What about budget?
But wait, you say - are you nuts? We don't have the budget for a multi-cam production, with helicopters, in the Alps!
No problem. The beauty of video is that no matter how small your video production budget, you can make video that's fun to watch, and fun to share. Maybe it's a karaoke music video starring your office staff. Maybe you're a car dealer and you bring in your new puppy and take him for a drive in one of your new cars. Or bring in your 92-year-old grandmother and take her for a drive. Or...
You get the picture. When it comes to making videos that are outside the usual serious and all-business stuff, the possibilities are endless - all you have to do is stop thinking about video as a medium that's only appropriate for communicating seriously about your products and services. Instead, remember that people want to have fun. A fun video that's peripherally related to your product can have a place too. It can be cool in a way your strict product videos can't, and it has a far greater chance of being shared, and talked about. But you have to be willing to step outside that comfortable space where your video production budget is always spent on serious, product/centered videos.
The possibilities are endliess - so step outside your comfort zone, start thinking creatively, have some fun, and share your fun.
(...and if you're interested, take a look at some of the videos made by members of the Greater Boston Soaring Club about their adventures in the sky. They'll give you goose bumps!)
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Wed, Feb 10, 2010 @ 07:55 AM
There's a local tech company that paid their video production company (one of our competitors) to create four videos explaining features of their product. The videos are beautiful and the company was very pleased with them. So the company sent the videos to their website people with these instructions: "Put them on our website."
What happened?
Mistake #1: The website people made the videos difficult to find. They put a small text link on the home page: "Click here to view videos." Then they connected that link to a page that starts with text about the product, with no mention of videos. The text explains the same features the videos discuss, and there's enough text so that the videos are now ‘below the fold' - a visitor has to scroll down to find them.
Mistake #2: The videos are framed incorrectly. The website people don't know 
anything about hosting video, so they subscribed to an online hosting company, uploaded the video, and then took the embed code to place video on the page. But they screwed up when they uploaded the video. They must have known it, because they used different upload settings for each video. The result is that one is squashed into a 4x3 frame, though the videos are all 16x9.
Another video has the correct aspect ratio but achieves it by placing big black bars on the top and bottom of the frame, making the video very small. The other two are even messier - stretched, squashed, and black bars. And though the videos have been up for almost a year, no one in the company seems to understand that they don't look right. Or maybe they haven't looked at them, but just assumed that "we have video on our website."
Mistake #3: The videos are all very small. They look like postage stamps. They're too small to see much of the product detail, or to read the text that's in the video. And the viewer certainly isn't noticing the gorgeous video the company paid a lot of money for.
Mistake #4: The videos are placed all on one page. They're stacked, one underneath the other. As though videos are set pieces that can't stand on their own, when in fact they're most effective on their own, one to a page. With four stacked on a page, the viewer sees a swarm of videos, randomly picks one, and ignores the rest.
Mistake #5: The videos were placed and forgotten. The company paid good money to make good videos, and assumed that was enough - that somehow those videos would do the job just because they're good videos.
What should have happened?
The process went wrong all the way back at the beginning, when the company had an idea: Let's make some videos. WRONG starting point.
The right place to start is with a question: How can we use video to market our product?
The answer to that question is:
First, make a video or a series of videos that communicate the right message to the right audience. This means that before you start production, you have to understand the audience(s) you're trying to reach, and the individual messages you want your audience(s) to receive.
Second, understand how you will connect the right audience with the right video(s). How will you make them easy to find? How will you make them easy and fun to watch? How will you focus the viewer's attention on the one single message in each video?
Third, how will you understand whether the videos are doing what you want them to do? What will you measure? Videos are communication tools. To know if they're doing the job you created them to do, you have to check up on them. You have to understand what you're asking them to do, and how you'll know if they're doing their job.
The mistake too many companies make is in assuming that all they have to do is make video that shows off their product and place that video on their website somewhere. And then Bingo! Magic will happen.
In reality, video absolutely can work magic for your company. And it will, IF you understand the rules of video marketing.