Hi.
I'm Mike Essex, and today I'm going to look at the whys, the whens, the
hows, the whats and the thens of video marketing.
Why should you do video marketing?
Well over the last few years people have spent so much time
saying, "You've got to do content.
You've got to make as much content as you can.
You need a blog.
You need to write content.
Do it."
That's been really interesting.
and it's allowed businesses to expand the amount of
information they put out there and the way they interact with people.
Text is not the only medium as has been seen through the increase in
infographics.
Having design and visual elements can really help build your
brand and build awareness.
Video is kind of the next step to that.
Video is what you use to help show the human side of your business, I like to
say.
The reason we do videos at Koozai is every member of our digital marketing
team has made a video, and each new employee usually makes a video within
a couple of months.
That allows us to show people that these are our
team.
They're real people.
We don't outsource to somewhere else.
These are our guys, who come in and use the same board as everyone else and make
a video and they're knowledgeable on topics.
We don't try to have just one face talking about every single topic.
If someone's an expert on PPC, they will do the
best video on PPC.
Then we can send that to existing clients to show them
that "this is the person you work with and here's what they're talking about.
They're knowledgeable people."
Also in the sales process we can use that just to show, "These are our
team and who they are."
Of course, with blog posts, you can have people's faces and you can still
have that human element.
But the good thing about video is that there's this constant image of that person talking
to you as I am now.
If you ever meet them at a conference or you see them
somewhere else, you've got more recognition of who they are, what they do,
and the company they represent.
That's one really good benefit of video.
The other benefit is that video allows you to present information that you
couldn't necessarily do in a blog post.
So when Anna does her video walkthroughs of how to use
Analytics, yes, we could get her in [front of] the board talking about how to do
things.
Yes, she could make a video of screenshots, but a video that
walks you through a live demonstration is far more useful because it's realtime
and the user can pause it and check that their screen is the same at
every point in that process.
That's something we couldn't do in a blog post.
So that's another advantage of video.
Likewise you can do product demonstrations.
So you can take a product out of the packaging, which is very popular now,
show people how to use it and the main features, which is more visual than
just writing about them with images.
You can also do industry interviews, and really the sky is the limit.
Anywhere you can take a video camera and put [something] in front of it could be a
video.
Likewise, don't be afraid to think that just because video is a different
medium that you should never repeat blog post content in a video.
We've certainly done that before.
We've written blog posts and then a month later
gone, "Okay, we want to do a video on that topic," and pretty much done the
blog post as a video.
But the video still gets the same number of hits as a
new video that's original a lot of the time, which kind of goes to show
that there are two separate audiences and you should never assume because
you've made a blog post you can't make a video.
Bear that in mind.
That's why you should do video.
What should you film?
We've also just discussed.
Who should do a video?
Like I say, at Koozai every employee does a video, and a lot of them were really scared
at first.
I was scared.
If you go back and see some early videos of the
team and compare them to now, you've got Sam who went from her first video,
where she was really nervous, to speaking to 1000 people at Brighton SEO
within the space of about 6 months.
She was really confident at Brighton SEO.
That just kind of shows how video is really helpful to take people
from being afraid of talking to audiences and cameras into building them up
into someone who's far more confident.
Yes, your first video may not be great, and it may be that you never air
it, that you never put it online if you really don't like it.
But with our team, every single video they've done, there's usually
a few takes at first, but we will always get a video in that day and
when they've made their first one we put it online.
We very rarely had people criticise videos that they didn't
like.
Even the videos by really experienced presenters rarely get
criticism.
So you don't have to be afraid, really, about people saying
nasty things.
You can always moderate them if they do.
On YouTube, for example, there's quite a lot of sexist, derogatory
comments.
So we don't have any of that on there.
Otherwise, you usually find there's a nice, natural discussion.
It's quite good to put your face and your name out there.
The other thing you should consider in your case is getting your CEO to do
a video.
That's always really powerful to have someone extremely high up in
the company to come on camera and do a personal interview about the
business, where it's heading, what new products you've got launching.
That really helps put a human face on the brand,
which is very, very helpful.
I read a book recently.
I can't remember which one.
But it essentially said that people are less interested in the products
you make and more interested in how you make it.
Video is another way of showing that there's real people making this product.
It's a chance to see who's a human person, not just a faceless business that's just taking
your money.
How should you film?
Actually filming a video is relatively simple.
In our case, we've got five lights, which are around
me now, a whiteboard wall, which is painted on but a standard whiteboard
is fine or obviously if you're doing a product demonstration, you
don't even need a wall.
You can just be showing stuff on a table or in just
your CEO's office if you're filming him or her.
Then we've got a camera on a tripod.
In our case, it's not exactly a fancy camera.
It's just a consumer camera worth about 400 pounds.
Most of those cameras have got really good HD quality feeds now.
There's a microphone pack, so I've got that here and that goes wirelessly
to a receiver.
That's probably the most expensive piece of kit out of everything, although
I can't emphasise the importance of having really clear audio.
If you turn your volume all the way up on a video and
you still can't make out what they're saying, then you're not going to watch
all the way through.
So definitely consider your audio.
Consider your visual elements.
You need a lot of lighting.
Even if you're not doing it with a whiteboard, you do need
lighting.
Natural lighting is awful on videos.
The whole thing would probably cost you under a grand if you want to do it
cheap.
You can always test it, do a test video on a camera an employee's
already got to get internal buy-in to then get the budget.
That's something I'd recommend if you just heard me say a thousand
pound and you were thinking, "Whoa, that's too much to get started."
Fundamentally you can do them on the cheap, but I'd say you need to
spend at least 1000 to 2000 pounds to get a setup that you could be proud
of and put out videos that you are proud of.
Where should you put your videos when you film them?
We always put our videos on YouTube.
What we do with our videos is we have Koozai.com/tv, which is the Koozai TV Channel on our site.
Every video goes on there exclusively for a period of a month.
The reason we do that is because we want to get any links and discussions around
the video on our website and direct it to Koozai.com to build up our business
and the association with us.
I would recommend that.
If you want a video that's about brand building, showing off who you are,
put it on your website first.
Then after a month we put it out on YouTube, and then it gets the wider audience, the people
who aren't necessarily already aware of us.
Then at the end of those videos, we try and encourage
people to visit Koozai.com and sign up for our newsletter.
Then they'll come to that entry point rather than YouTube.
If you're watching this on YouTube and you want to get videos a month
ahead of this, go to Koozai.com/tv.
Anyway, enough marketing spiel.
That's a really good way to do it, and there doesn't seem to be any issues at the
moment with duplicate content, at least in this case because we put the video
on our site first for a month.
If there was any issue, the YouTube video would be the one that
wouldn't rank as well because that obviously appeared a month after the
origin date of the original video.
Rather than our site getting hit, the YouTube one would get hit.
That doesn't seem to happen.
For example, Sam's video ranks number one on YouTube for PPC,
and that was on Koozai.com a month before YouTube.
So it can work really well.
In terms of putting them on our website, we use software called Wistia.
It's about $99 a month.
So it's not cheap, certainly not cheap compared to
free options, but at the same time it's not ridiculously expensive to spend
that much on having a reliable hosted solution.
That allows us to embed them on our site without any adverts so people
can come and absorb our content, and we know we're the only brand
they're going to see when they watch it.
Then what do you do?
When you've made your video, what do you do after
that?
What's the next step?
What we do when we've made a video is we always make a transcript.
We use Speechpad.com, but there are plenty of other
providers.
The reason that we use them is because they're really quick and
pretty cheap.
They're a good price for what we use, and SEOmoz use them as
well, so we were inspired to use them also.
That means not only do you have your video, we can put it on a
transcript.
If you watch it on YouTube as well, we upload the transcript so
you can actually see live text at the bottom of the screen whilst I'm
talking, which helps our YouTube ranking improve because we've gone to the
extra effort of making a transcript so YouTube can index that content and
apply it to the video rather than just trying to guess what we're saying.
If you've never seen YouTube guess what people are saying, you can do it on
the machine transcripts.
It's way, way off.
They're a long way off understanding human speech perfectly.
[Making] a transcript allows YouTube to see exactly what the video's about.
Also, if you put it on your site, then Google crawlers can see what the video's about
as well.
You should never just put a video on a page without any other
text because that's crappy content.
That's [thin] content.
So you will always need a bit of text with your video.
Even if it's just an introduction and a summary of what's said,
you need something on there.
It also helps you comply with the Disability Discrimination Act, meaning
that anyone can understand your videos.
Even if they can't physically watch them, they can still read a transcript, have
a transcript read to them from the computer.
It's another tick in the box for ensuring you're compliant
with the DDA, which is always a good thing.
Then you can also use sitemaps, video sitemaps, to help your content get
found.
Wistia has one built into it which is fantastic.
That's another benefit of using them.
But you can also use generators out there, video
sitemap generators that you can use, and essentially it's just the same as
a normal sitemap.
There's just a few extra commands.
Do a search for how to make a video sitemap, and you'll find lots
of great ways to do that.
You can also wrap schema around your video.
Again, Wistia does it for you, another reason to use them.
That will allow you to say how many comments the video's had, how long it is, who made
the video.
Don't forget to put rel="author" on your videos as well.
If you put them on your website, just add rel="author" to the actual page content,
which we do.
When that actually works in the results, it means that you get
a video snippet and a snippet of the person's face and your text.
You have a super big listing in the rankings, which means it's really, really
useful.
Also, as well, you don't have to just put videos on blog posts on your
site.
You can put videos on your service pages as well.
For example, Confused.com have videos on their service
pages, and that means they've got a more multimedia rich page when you search
for car insurance, which if Google is considering factors, such as the
type of elements on your page and the mixture of elements, it may help you
rank better as well.
So it's a win-win to have the video on there.
You'll potentially rank better, and if you don't rank better, you might have a bigger
snippet in the listings for your company, which also helps you stand out.
Video's awesome.
When should you start filming videos?
Well, fundamentally, I would say as soon as you can.
As I suggested, there's got to be someone in your company
who's got a video camera, unless you're really small, in which case do a
video on your smartphone and just test it out.
Just stand in front of a board or just stand anywhere, get your camera
out, film yourself talking about a topic that's relevant to your industry,
relevant to your business or your products or services, and just try
to put across what's unique about you so that people want to watch you,
learn more about your business, learn more about you as well.
It's great for a personal brand to go out there and do videos as well as being good
for the company.
Just give it a go.
We talk a lot more about video marketing on Koozai.com, so please visit our
website for more information or check out any of the social media profiles
at the end of this video.
Thanks for watching.