4 Tips For Beginning Video Marketers

Most marketers agree that video marketing is becoming increasingly more important as we march into 2018. If you are new to video marketing, it can seem very overwhelming. In this podcast “Digital Dave” lays out 4 Key Tips For Beginning Video Marketers.

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Episode Transcript

Hello everyone, and this is Digital Dave, back for another episode of Where Marketing Meets Technology. Before we get started this week, I just want to talk about the fact that winter is here. It actually snowed here. We’re in the Washington, DC, area, and we got snow yesterday, and that’s pretty unusual to see snow here before the holidays, so just thought that was a little fun fact to share with you this week. I’m also extremely excited about next week. Next week, the new Star Wars comes out, The Last Jedi, and I just can’t wait to go see this movie. You know, I’ve seen all of the Star Wars movies going way, way, way, way back, and this is such a great trilogy… trilogy, I guess it’s not just a trilogy any longer and can’t wait to see this new episode. And that brings us into our topic for today, and we’re going to be talking about the four tips for beginning video marketers.

4 Tips For Beginning Video Marketers

1. Be sure to target the market and the media that you want to deliver the video on, and create your video for that market and media.
2. 100% Video quality is not necessary for perishable videos, but 100% video quality is necessary for non-perishable videos.
3. Audio quality is very important for all types of videos, but again 100% perfection is not necessary.
4. DO NOT EMBED videos posted on YouTube on your blog, use a video hosting service.

So this episode is kind of catered towards those that have never really done video marketing before, but know they should, and just want some basic tips to make sure that when they go out there and they do videos and they post them, what should they be doing, and where should they be posting them to get the most effectiveness and the most ROI out of their videos? So I’m going to start off with tip number one, and tip number one is … It’s a really basic tip, but very, very, very critical, in that when you design your storyline or your storyboard for your video, which I highly recommend you do, that you make sure that you really are creating this video, if you’re going to take this time creating this video, to target the market and the media that you want to deliver the video on.

What I mean by that is that, for instance, if you’re doing a video and your market … say your market is younger people, and you’re doing a video, you want to make sure that your video captures the latest techniques and trends that these younger people really like to see in video these days. These videos tend to be, from what I see, very quick, and a lot of movement, a lot of action in them in a short period of time. And that’s kind of vice-versa or completely opposite that if your market is, say, the older crowd, you want to slow your video down, and you want to make sure that you are bringing images and pictures and topics that are going to resonate with older people. I don’t know that older people are going to be so interested in seeing a hipster doing tricks on a skateboard.

So just be very cautious about, when you create your videos, that the scenery and everything you’re adding to your video really is going to appeal to that market, and to where you’re going to deliver your video. What you find is that different markets of people have a tendency to watch videos in different places and on different screens, even, so just be careful that you take some time to analyze this. Perfection is not necessary, and that’s actually our second tip. Everybody still is okay with video quality that’s not 100% super-HD. They’re okay with video that, in some cases, is a little blurry in spots. They’re okay with some shaking of the screen here and there. As long as the message that you’re delivering really hits that target market, it doesn’t really necessarily matter the quality of the video.

Now, I’m going to break this down a little bit, because there is a caveat to this. There are really two types of videos that you are probably going to want to put together over time if you’re going to do video marketing. The first type of video is a non-perishable video, and in these videos, I think it’s a lot more critical to make sure that the quality of the video itself is very, very top of the line, as well as the audio as these, might be … these are videos that are going to reside probably … doesn’t matter where they reside, the purpose of them is that people are going to visit them for the length of time of your business, possibly. So these would be like explainer videos, or videos about your specific products. Those types of videos are non-perishable. These should be very high-quality, and probably wouldn’t even hurt to get professional help in putting these types of videos together.

And then there are perishable videos, and these videos, I think it’s pretty okay to still not make these 100% high-quality. These can fall into the categories of how-to videos that you’re just trying to explain how to fix a problem or how to do something, videos that are related to recent topics, things like the earthquake that we had here out on the East Coast in Delaware a couple … I guess it was last week, or the wildfires out in California. They have a shelf life; they’re not going to sit and be watched forever. They’re probably going to drop off of any type of popularity fairly quickly, and in general, they’re not going to see as many views down the line. They’re going to see views quickly, because these are more recent topics, although the how-to videos kind of have a tendency to be a longer life. So that’s some overall guidelines as far as video quality.

Now, tip number three is about the audio, and audio quality, to me, is very, very, very important. Now, again, it’s really easy to get kind of caught up in perfection when it comes to audio quality, and I’ve heard different audio qualities — I listen to podcasts all the time, and I watch video all the time — and to me, audio quality is important to me, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be … I have to be able to hear the person very clearly, so the quality of the speech, to me, is very important. Now, it’s sometimes hard to maintain that quality, particularly if you’re shooting your video outdoors, and there are outside noises that are out of your control. For instance, we’ve had videos where we’re three-quarters of the way through, and a plane flies over. We’re in a plane route for one of the local airports, sort of, and every so often, the planes will come right over our home, and of course, this is going to make some background sound that’s kind of difficult to remove 100%.

I think that’s okay, as long as you can minimize that, or reduce that somehow, and make sure that the person that is speaking, you can clearly understand what they’re saying and I think as long as you do that, that’s okay. You want to try to minimize echo, those kinds of things. So, again, audio quality is probably more important than video quality in some cases. Particularly on the non-perishable videos, audio quality should be almost perfect for those videos, where the perishable videos, again, it’s okay to have some noise in the background a little bit, as long as the person that you’re listening to, you are able to clearly understand what they’re saying.

And then finally, tip number four is probably one of the most important. This is the most important tip. Once you’ve shot or put together your video, you’ve got this really nice video you want to post out there, where do you post these things? This is really, really, really critical that people understand this, and I had this here on this screen this whole time to illustrate. This is YouTube, and this is the go-to. This is where everybody wants to post their videos, and what I’m here to say is that I’m not against YouTube; however, I am going to tell you that when you post your videos on YouTube, you are helping Google and YouTube out probably as much, if not more than you are yourself in building your brand and your message that you’re trying to deliver in that video.

The reason being is that when you watch a YouTube video, number one, it’s peppered with ads, usually, for things that are related to your video, so there’s distractions. People can click buttons, and they can jump off really quickly. And on top of that, at the end of the video, in general, what you get is a splash screen of other videos. They want you to stay there; they don’t want you to go to your website and spend time on your website. They want you to spend time on their website surfing videos, other videos, maybe other videos on the same topic (on YouTube). So, as the person putting together the video, it’s okay to post your video on YouTube. I would want to make sure that you do everything you can to keep them on your channel, in your group of videos, by doing playlists and stuff like that, but I would not not put this on YouTube with the idea that you’re going to embed this in your website. The reason being is that as I said, it’s very easy for YouTube and Google to drive them off of your website/content to somewhere else, and you’ve lost them at that point.

So we’re going to talk about the video services that are out there today that we recommend you post your videos on these services and not on YouTube. The first one is Wistia, and there’s no particular order of these of importance; you need to go evaluate these on your own. It’s wistia.com, W-I-S-T-I-A dot com, and they’re a video hosting service. They have a group of features that, for some people, I think these features are important. I think this is one of the better hosting services out there today. The second one is Vimeo, and this is actually one that we use. They have … to me, they have a lot of nice features now within their platform. They have things like calls to action at the end of the video. You could actually have a playlist of your own videos play after the video that’s played, which is kind of nice, so you’re controlling the experience. They’re not leaving your environment, they’re not leaving your list of videos, and this is something that’s pretty important. Although, again, Vimeo’s just one of the services that are out there.

There’s Vidyard, which is V-I-D-Y-A-R-D dot com, and again, this is a video hosting service. You just want to make sure that … on some of these, you’re going to get some free stuff out of them. We pay for ours, just because we want the enhanced features. You have to decide, if you’re going to be a video marketer, if that cost is worth it to you. We find it is definitely worth it, so it’s really up to you if you want to go free services or you want to go the premium services. And then the last one is Dailymotion, D-A-I-L-Y-M-O-T-I-O-N dot com, Dailymotion, and they’re also a place where you can host your videos as well. I’m pretty sure they’re free, at least I think Dailymotion is still free. They probably have premium service; it’s been a while since I’ve actually been on and used that video hosting service.

And it’s actually okay, and a lot of people do this as well, to buy one of the premium services from one of these, and actually still post your videos in those other locations. You are going to get some benefit of posting them out there, but as far as embedding them on your website; you got the user to your website, so at that point I think it’s critical you want to do everything you can to not send them somewhere else. That’s why I suggest that you don’t use or embed YouTube videos on your website. Use a service like one of these other ones. Again, just like your content, posting these out to multiple video sites, you may get some traffic, you may get some … if your videos are good, you may get some interest from these other sites just because they watched your video. So there’s really no harm in doing that, but they’re already on that site, but once they’re on your website you want to try to keep them there.

So that’s really it for today’s episode, 4 Tips for Beginner Video Marketers. We hope that this is great information for you and that you can take this and get started using video in your marketing in 2017 and into 2018. We think this is one of the biggest trends out there in marketing which is the move from traditional content to video, particularly on mobile. So this is Digital Dave, signing out this week. We hope you will check the next episode of Where Marketing Meets Technology. Please, if you like our videos or our podcasts, leave us a review, give us some comments. We would love to hear from you. Have a great day.