Chapter 1

1. Welcome to Video Marketing

Video marketing has many definitions. In this book, it’s described as “a resource for reaching your business goals.” Video is the only medium that combines written and spoken words, graphics, music, form, color, light, movement, message, story, action, drama, and emotions into a form of communication that can be accessed at any time and from almost anywhere in the world.

Video marketing communicates your company’s value to your target audience. It connects you with your current customers and people who want to be your customers. Everything you do with video marketing—from identifying your target audience, crafting the right message, and producing the video to distributing it and measuring the results—is about that connection.

Video marketing by itself will not solve all your marketing needs. It’s most effective when applied within the context of your marketing master plan. Video is arguably the most powerful medium for transmitting content, but it is just one part of your overall content strategy.

Despite the power of video, companies miss out on its power by neglecting to use it anywhere, including the most obvious place—their websites. Take a look at your company website and the websites of your competitors. Many rely on text, images, and photographs to communicate with their audiences. Worse, a lot of sites still use stock images instead of their own photos or artwork, which is a missed opportunity to communicate authenticity.

Companies avoid using video for a lot of reasons. The main reason is their lack of experience and awareness. They don’t even know how to get started. The typical marketer doesn’t understand the cost or the effort involved, and they don’t know how to measure the results. Some marketers are simply afraid of doing it wrong, which is understandable if you’ve never done it before. But with the right preparation and strategy, you can design a video marketing plan that’s within your budget and meets your business goals.

Why Video

People love video. Teens and adults spend more time watching YouTube videos than television broadcast shows.11 When given the choice between reading text and watching video, people usually choose video because it transmits content faster. It combines voice, sound, and moving pictures to transmit much more in less time than other marketing media. Unlike radio or podcasts, where viewers hear your message with their ears, or print media or text, where they see it with their eyes, video is experienced through sight and sound for a richer cognitive experience.

New clients often come to me because their competitors are using video, so they think they should be using it too. This isn’t a bad reason, but it is reactive, and waiting for your competitors to “go first” isn’t necessary—you don’t have to wait. You shouldn’t wait. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll begin building your audience, getting to know them by analyzing their behavior, and allowing them to get to know you in a way you’ve never done before.

Video transmits the culture of your company to the public, and it changes your company culture. When you make your company more visible, and you include your employees in video, you are engaging your employees in what your company stands for. For this reason, it’s a good idea to consider how job candidates feel about video when you’re hiring new people. You will want to include as many staff members in the video as you can, and so the more enthusiastic they are about it, the better. Consider adding language in your hiring contracts letting new employees know that you use video marketing. You might also include a model release form for them to sign, so that if they appear in a video, you can use it while they’re employed and if they leave, too.

The Advantages

Video marketing allows you to differentiate yourself in how you present your business to the audience you want to reach. It separates you from the competition, whether they’re using video or not. It allows you to target customers at a very granular level. By evaluating your goals and value proposition, analyzing your desired audience, and developing specific “persona” profiles of the people you want to reach, you can create content that reaches the right people in order to achieve your business goals. This is important, because people are subjected to a lot of media “noise”—marketing that they have to get past to find the messages they’re looking for.

You can communicate your value proposition to your audience, but more than that, you can share your culture. Every choice you make for your videos conveys a message that tells your prospects and customers if your company is for them or not. It shows them what your business and the people who work there care about. Video shows people what you believe in and what you have to offer to make their lives better. It can evoke emotion, nurture trust, and create a bond between you. Video marketing creates a sense of togetherness and promotes loyalty between you and your customers.

The enhanced power of connecting with people is one advantage of video marketing, but it can also be used for branding your business. By using the same color palette, graphics, narrators, characters, music, logos, and even font in your videos, you familiarize yourself to your audience. They get to know you and recognize you immediately. This is another reason that video marketing should be part of your content strategy—a style guide for all your other marketing content can be reflected in your production, amplifying your brand and the power of your marketing campaigns.

With video, you can tell an emotional, memorable story that sticks with the viewer. You can also include a call to action with written and verbal contact details and directions on what to do next. Calls to action can be placed at the end of the video or sprinkled throughout the video.

Video stays in your long-term memory better than other media. Jim Kwik, who is a world expert on memory improvement and optimal brain performance, notes, “Information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory.”13 When you do this with video—deliver content while evoking an emotional response—you create a potent combination that stays with a person. Information on its own will be remembered for a while, but if you add emotion through story, music, or imagery, it lingers in the viewer’s memory. Think about your own most vivid memories from years past. Why do certain events remain in your memory while others drift away? They stick because they are bound to emotion. You were feeling something—happiness, sadness, compassion, irritation, hopefulness, worry, something—during those moments. It’s the same with video. Your viewers will remember what you tell them when you wrap your message in an emotional story.

Another advantage of video marketing is that it’s measurable. A simple test of your website statistics with and without video can tell you a lot about its effectiveness—how many visits and unique visitors you have and how long they stay on your page during a set period of time. Look at how many engage and how many conversions you have. Then add video and measure the statistics again.

Video is one of the most important ratings boosters on Google, because the search engine rates website with video higher and it will also rate sites higher if people stay on them longer.

Customers Don’t Shop Like They Used To

The popularity and success of video marketing didn’t happen by accident. People today are expected to make decisions much faster than we used to, and video helps us make those decisions quickly. Think about how much time you spent, years ago, researching a big purchase like an appliance, car, or even a home. You might have taken time off from work to meet a salesperson, and they’d show you all the homes on the market or let you test drive any car on the lot. Today you can go online and find out everything you need to know before you buy. For many items, you can make your purchase online and have everything delivered to your front door.

Along with all this useful knowledge that’s now available at our fingertips is an overwhelming amount that we don’t need—noise—so we put up filters to guard against it. We might do this consciously, but often we do it unconsciously. And we keep out people we don’t trust. By using video to build trust with your customers, you are less likely to be filtered out and more likely to be let in—and considered in customers’ buying decisions. The key is building trust without adding to the noise. This is where a video professional can help with your strategy and message.

Recently, a prospective customer in the entertainment industry came to me who needed help with his company’s video campaign. Building trust with his customers was important, and he knew what he wanted his video to say to establish that trust. I was excited to work with someone with such a clear vision. So when I visited the company’s website for the first time, I was a bit shocked. Nothing about it communicated...