The Video Marketing Blog

Business Video Content and Blueberries: There's a Connection

One spring, several years ago, I had an impulse to plant blueberry bushes. I went to the garden center and bought six big, healthy bushes. I was thrilled at the thought of fresh blueberries just a few feet from my back door. I planted them, gave them lots of water, and waited for the blueberry bounty.

The first year there was some new growth and a few berries, which the birds got before I did. The second year there was little new growth and so few berries that the birds just laughed. In subsequent years, the bushes got smaller, not larger, and stopped producing berries altogether. The leaves started to come in yellow and sick-looking.  A few bushes died; the others were dying.

Then I happened to complain about them to John Nourse of Nourse Farm in Westborough MA. He mentioned the importance of acid soil for growing blueberries. I remembered something about soil pH, but I had been in a hurry to get the bushes in the ground and just trusted that everything would work out. Which it didn't, of course. Blueberries won't do well in neutral or alkaline soil, and no amount of hoping and believing will change that. If you want blueberries, you need acid soil.

Which brings me to video. Specifically, to the video content businesses make for their websites, and the performance they expect. Some businesses are like impulsive blueberry-bush-buyers. They want the results, but they don't take the time to develop a plan. They don't ask important questions, like these:

• What kind of goals do we have for our videos?
• What specific kind of videos should we make to meet those goals?
• What will we measure to know if we're meeting our goals?
• How will we get the right eyeballs to watch our videos?
• How will we get our videos to spread?

They just rush into making video, they pop it up there on the website and on YouTube, or maybe just on YouTube, and then they wait. And wait. They're confused when nothing happens, when nobody says to them, "Great job with the video!" And when nobody says, "I bought your software (or dog jackets or accounting services or you-name-the-product) because of your videos!" So they conclude that while video works for some, it obviously doesn't work for their kind of business.

If you make the decision to invest in video for your business, congratulations. There's no better way to engage people on your website, tell your story, and begin a relationship. But video content isn't enough - just like blueberry bushes aren't enough. You also need to understand what your video content needs in order to bear fruit.

For blueberries - you need acid soil. For video content - you need to start with important questions, and then you need a plan.

(...and fyi, I am in the process of moving my just-barely-alive blueberry bushes to a different part of my garden, where the soil is plenty acid. I've also bought some new bushes, just in case my old ones are too far gone to make it. I have a plan in place to keep the soil as acid as it needs to be, AND I have a plan to keep the birds from gobbling next year's blueberries.)

Will your website video get stale?

Had a great conversation with sales guru Peter Dennis this week about what video can do for websites. Peter asked a terrific question: does video on a website get stale?

Usually, businesses that decide they're ready for video on their site want to jump right into production. They feel a sense of urgency - maybe their competitor has a video-rich site and they've decided they need to keep up. Or maybe they've visited a site, clicked on a video, and suddenly they got it - that most people do the exact same thing. Most people see a video, click on it, and watch it. And that company wants the same thing happening on their site. Now.

But before the rush to production, it makes sense to stop and ask good questions. To Peter's point, a very good question to ask is, What can we do about our video getting stale?

Unfortunately, just like your other website content, video content will eventually get stale. If you're lucky, your video production is ramped up to constantly generate new video, in which case shelf-life isn't an issue for you. When something feels a little dated, you'll just replace it with fresh video. If, like most businesses, that's not your situation, then a smart thing to do is to create video content that has the longest possible shelf-life.

Some things to think about:

• Specific dates. We've all been to websites with a ‘Current Events' link, clicked on it, and been directed to a page where the latest event was a year old or even older. That kind of experience tells you something about the company - they're short on resources and can't keep their website updated, their website is an afterthought, or they're disorganized and lose track of things. Whatever you take from the experience, it's never a positive, trust-inspiring message. If you create a video that names a specific date, either in the video itself or in the video's text, be aware that after that date is past your video may feel stale, not because of its content but because of that date. You can get around this by not mentioning a date, and not putting a date in the video's text. Title your video "Sales Seminar, Dallas, Texas" instead of "Sales Seminar, Dallas, Texas June 2006"
• Specific types of video. Brief clips from seminars and presentations are a great way to show you and your people in real life. These tend to have a long shelf life as long as the content stays relevant to your business. Again, for your presentation, dress timelessly. And while your barber may think that gelled spikes would be a good look for you, you might want to consider a haircut that's less fashionable and more ordinary (at least until after your seminar).
• Customer testimonials/case studies also hold up well, if your business doesn't outgrow the content. For example, the customer testimonial that features the three-employee business you helped grow into a six-employee business will stay relevant as long as this is the market you continue to serve. If, however, your business grows and changes, and you now only work with firms with 50+ employees, that testimonial is very, very stale.
• Fashion. In videos with real people in them, try to dress the people in timeless clothing. As every woman knows, fashion constantly changes. On video, wearing clothes that are fashionable may make you look great today, but six months or a year from now you'll look dated. Depending on how fashionably you were dressed, you may even look silly.

 

The thing to do when you're planning your video content is to understand that it's unrealistic to make video once and then keep that video content forever. A better approach is to be aware of the stale factor, and to plan your content so that you're not making videos that have a short shelf-life.

Video marketing on YouTube

I attended the monthly NPVA (National Professional Videographer's Association) meeting on Monday night and was priveleged to hear Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR present a compelling overview of video marketing on YouTube. Greg's new book is called "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day" and it's coming out in August.  

Greg's message:

• 152 million Americans watched 16.8 billion online videos in April 2009.
• If you're not using video to market your business, you're missing the boat.   

YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world. The higher your videos rank, the greater the chance they'll be watched by lots of people. Greg talked about YouTube's algorithm for ranking videos - the known factors are: title, tags, description, number of views and ratings. Some simple things you can do to optimize your video:

• Optimize the title.
• Put lots of words in the description, as you can include up to 1,000. (Yes, that's right: one thousand!) The more words you include, the higher your chances of being found.
• Tags - obviously, put keywords in as tags. One way to get effective tags is to copy tags from successful videos.

Greg also talked about casting a skeptical eye on the number of views. While your ego feels great when you get lots of views, if the wrong eyes are watching your videos then what's the point? Far better than measuring the number of views is tracking the spread of your story. YouTube makes sharing easy, so spread your story through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other sites. And do some digging so you can measure if and how others are spreading it too.

During the Q&A after Greg's presentation, Michael Kolowich of DigiNovations talked about his experience with corporations that hire a production company to create video. Unfortunately, said Michael, the responsibility for overseeing video production tends to get delegated to Marketing's low man on the totem pole. Unfortunate because video production isn't integrated into strategy, but is procured as an afterthought. The lesson is that video has such great potential for marketing your business that it's a mistake to make video because the whim strikes, rather than creating a strategic video-based media plan as an integral part of your marketing strategy.

Greg's book won't be out until August, but in the meantime you can download two chapters for free.  They are well worth reading.

 

 

You Need a Video-Based Media Plan

You wouldn't build your website without a plan. You wouldn't launch an email marketing campaign without a plan. You wouldn't create a blog without a plan.

Why would you add video to your website without a plan?

Adding video to your website can be done in one of two ways: you can proceed when the mood strikes, hiring a production company to make a single video (or making your own) when it occurs to you that a video would be a good idea. Or, you can start by creating a plan for adding video-based media content to your website in a systematic and efficient way. Starting with a plan means you'll understand what you're asking your video content to do, you'll know what kind to make, you'll know when it's doing its job, and you'll save money. By contrast, proceeding when the impulse strikes means you'll wind up with a hodge-podge, you won't know what you want it to do, and it'll cost you more money.

You should start creating your video-based media plan by asking questions. Here are ten great questions to get you started:

1. What are your goals for your video content? Your impulse may be to use video to promote your products, but straight promotion - aka advertising - is a really bad idea. People will know it's advertising propaganda and they'll stop watching. Worse, they'll understand that your website isn't about them, it's about you, and they may very well leave and not come back.  People don't care about you. They care about themselves. So here are a few better goals: to provide visitors with an engaging experience that educates them about your product or service; to create feelings of social connectedness between potential and existing customers and your company/your people; to give visitors an enjoyable or emotionally powerful experience that they will pass on to friends and family; to 'clone' yourself and deliver your message to many more people than you could possibly speak to in person.
2. What kind of video-based media should you create? Your goals will probably help to answer this question. Here are a few ideas: you can create humorous, viral-style videos. You can create short, informational webinars that combine PowerPoint presentations with a narrator. You can do straight talking-head videos. You can do customer testimonials, and you can use those testimonials in video case studies. You can show processes. You can demonstrate equipment. You can videotape seminars and post short excerpts.
3. How economically can you gather your raw video? Instead of traveling to each of four customers' locations for testimonials, is it possible to bring them all together in one location? Do you need a professional camera crew or is a single videographer enough? Should you buy a company camera and shoot some of your material yourself?  If you're bringing a videographer to your location to shoot a specific event or process, why not use him or her to shoot other material you can use in a different video? You don't necessarily have to make additional videos right away - but when you are ready to proceed, you'll already have the raw material.
4. How many different ways can you use your raw video content? The key is to look at your raw video as a resource that can serve multiple purposes. For example, when you're taping a customer testimonial, you can engage that customer in an in-depth conversation about the specific product they use. You can then create a short video for that product's page on your website. You can also create a slightly different and possibly longer version for your sales people to use during the sales process. If you get enough good material from your customer - a funny story about someone in your company, an interesting insight into the product - you can create another version to post to your blog.
5. How will you place your videos on your website? Some companies prefer to place their videos on a hosting site such as YouTube (or blip.tv or viddler or similar sites) and then embed in their site. This can work very well for embedding video in your blog, and if you plan to create a series of lessons or tips. These sites will give you basic analytical information (how may clicks). For more in-depth analytics, or to build stand-along landing pages for an email video marketing campaign (if you don't have a content management system that lets you do it), you can use a service like flimp.
6. How will you get as many of the right people as possible to watch your videos? While placing your videos on YouTube may get you lots of views, it's important to separate ego from functionality. Lots of views may make you feel like a star, but that's not really your goal. Instead, develop a strategy for distributing your videos to reach your target - and include a social media strategy that lets you spread your content through relationships you build on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
7. Can you use your video content in your email newsletters? Study after study shows that people engage with video far more than they do with text. So crafting videos that you can embed in your email marketing campaigns is a great idea. But because video cannot play directly in an email, you'll want to place a jpg with a ‘play' button on your newsletter, and then connect that link with a page on your website that will play the video. A landing page with a call-to-action is the best option; you can also send people to the video that's already embedded in your blog or on another page on your website.
8. How will you know if your video content is doing what you want it to do? In other words, how will you measure your ROI? The answer is related to what you're asking your video content to do. Maybe you're looking for growth in your donor list because of your emotionally-engaging videos; maybe you want your sales people to close more sales because of the case study videos. Maybe you're looking for more engagement on your blog. In all cases, measurement is key. Plan how and what you will measure, and how you'll define success.
9. How can you make as many videos as possible within your budget? Given how effective video is at communicating your message, this should be one of your goals. Bring it up with your media company or videographer, and ask them to get creative. Maybe you'll need to purchase a company camera to shoot some of your own video. Your media company should be willing to help you understand what kind of camera to buy and how to improve your shooting technique. And, they should be willing to edit \your raw video.
10. How quickly do you like to move? Some companies want their video media created yesterday, while others move at a slower pace. Make sure to explain your style to your media company or videographer so they're prepared to meet your expectations.

Creating a video-based media plan is the crucial first step to successfully integrating video content into your website, and to making sure that content performs. Once you've created your plan, the next step is to begin the fun work of making your video!

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