Starting out with video marketing
Looking to start out with video marketing as a means of promoting your company/business and the products or services that you offer?
Well videos can certainly come a long way as an internet marketing solution but the process itself can be quite daunting especially for those who don’t have the slightest clue about what’s important and where to start.
Read on for some great tips that aim to cover everything from producing your marketing videos to optimizing and promoting it online.
First off, you need to ask yourself whether you are willing to produce such videos yourself for your business or outsource the task entirely. The rest of this post will of course assume that you’ve decided to take on the task yourself which brings us to the next step – deciding what type of videos to make in web marketing. Options include Q&A formats and product demonstrations just to mention a few.
Starting out with Q&A comes highly recommended and should be fairly easy to produce than others. Customers and prospects had probably sent you a couple of questions about your products or services. Marketing with videos through the Q&A format presents an engaging and effective way to address such questions and raise brand awareness.
The video marketing process
Now in order to produce videos for web marketing, you will of course need the necessary equipment to do so. If you’re only starting out in video marketing, it would be best to stick with the basics and get a grasp on the fundamentals of producing quality videos which often only comes with experience working with such equipment. You can then invest on additional features and set up should you find the need for them
Here are a couple of things that you will need for basic setup in producing videos for your internet marketing strategy:
- You will of course need a good camera – you don’t really need to get the most expensive ones as they often come with features that you don’t really need. A simple flip camera will often suffice although you may want to opt for an HD camera for the best quality. It would be best to get the ones that have automatic smart video capturing functions as it eliminates all the guesswork involved in its operation.
- Microphones – audio clarity is just as important as video quality and oftentimes camera integrated cameras won’t suffice. It would be best to get a boom mic or any external microphone that can be placed near the subject without causing unwanted distractions.
- Lights – you’ll need a lot more than simple indoor lights if you want to produce good quality videos. Umbrellas and a simple light box setup should suffice and eliminate shadows for well balanced and great looking results.
- A good choice of background – when marketing with videos, you will want something plain and professional perhaps anything of dark color with your business logo on it. Backgrounds that are too colorful or diverts focus away from the subject won’t do you any good.
Preparations
Have the questions carefully picked out and prepared along with your best answers for it. These questions should be right up your ally since it’s all about your business after all. Q&A marketing videos are often non-scripted but take the time to write down and practice your answers for the best results and smooth flow of information. Remember that with enough practice, anything can be done better!
Shooting your marketing videos
Now for most people, being in front of a camera can be quite an uncomfortable experience. Here are a couple of tips that should help you take on the task of being the subject of your marketing videos:
First and most importantly, just be yourself. Speak and behave as you normally would while enunciating each word as clearly as possible
Smile and relax – how can you expect to get your viewers to trust you and be interested with what you have to say when your video wreaks of nervousness and low self-confidence? Just relax and try to enjoy it. After all, you’ve made your preparations and practiced well so what’s left is to pull everything off and make it look easy which will certainly help you gain the confidence and interest of viewers.
Look straight to the camera as if you are actually conversing with it
Post-production and optimization
Okay so you already have your raw web marketing videos taken, so what now? Well the next step is the post-production phase which includes among other things, creating video intros and outros. You can’t expect to just put up the raw video online for you prospects to see do you?
Now there are tons of video production programs that you can use for your marketing videos. These programs can be as cheap or expensive as you need them to be. You can use the basic video editing software often comes preloaded on Mac and Windows computers (iMovie and Movie Maker) or go for premium ones that produce high quality and professional looking results.
Last but certainly not least is optimization! Regardless how amazing your video marketing content is, it’s not going to amount to anything if you can’t get your targeted prospects to actually see it. We recommend producing a transcript for your marketing videos and publishing it along with the video of course.
That way, viewers can also check on the transcripts as they watch your video should they have trouble hearing or understanding whatever point you are making on your video.
Don’t forget the title, category and description tags as well! The idea is to provide everything the search engines need to seek out, index and rank your video. Optimize everything you can with relevant and target keywords as you would any web content.
If you have your video marketing efforts hosted towards video sharing platforms such as Youtube, it pays to have your video optimized there as well by again setting appropriate keyword and description tags as well as selecting the right category for your videos.
So there it is! Basic guide and tips to video marketing from the ground up! Think that we left anything out?
