Three top barriers to businesses harnessing the power of video marketing are

1. Fear of the camera
2. Perception that it is expensive
3. Belief that it doesn’t work

Cure for the second – talk to some video people. Find out what you can get, how much it could cost, how you can benefit, and how they work. You may be surprised. Like hundreds of views and exposure in a magazine for only £250.

Cure for the third – look at some numbers. Find some case studies. Listen to the buzz on social.

Cure for the first? Well, do you have to appear on camera? A slideshow counts as video, as does Camtasia and Animoto – they are all good starting points.

Are you, the person, the commodity your customers are buying, or is the business bigger than that? Could a professional presenter front for you?

Alternatively, one of our approaches is the ‘top and tail’ shoot – the business owner is on camera for the first two and last two sentences of the video, the rest is voiceover. Is that still too scary?

Are their business owners out there that would happily go in front of a webcam but not a professional lens? The audience still sees you (but looking much nicer in front of a decent camera). Is the cameraman judging you, hurrying you? Or is he helping you, coaching you, acting as a live audience and validating whether your words achieve the desired result?

Is he adding more value than discomfort? Would that be a cure?

“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing you bought it to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it’s aswell to add something for the risk you run. And if you have to do that, you will have enough to pay for something better. – John Ruskin (1819-1900)”

I saw this quote on Facebook this week and it really resonated with me. I’ve written before about the ‘£99 video’, and the DIY effort of a longstanding business to generate its own corporate video, and ‘you get what you pay for’ has never been more true.

Every business needs to monetize their own time and understand whether DIY is the best and most cost-effective approach. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage vlogging and videos made by business owners on their own camcorders. These can be really effective ways of communicating with the audience. But there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Time is money. A company producing its own video(s) MUST know how much that is costing. If an executive is spending two hours shooting and editing, what has that cost the company? Is that his/her best use of time?

More importantly, what is the return? Value, as well as cost, needs to be understood. What leads has the video generated, how many customers? Even, at a basic level, how many people have seen the video?

I’m sure that if more businesses took a hard look at their View count on YouTube, they ought to be having a light bulb moment that says “Is this worth the effort?” Or is the response really “It doesn’t matter, it didn’t take much time”? If it doesn’t matter whether a marketing effort has succeeded, why was it undertaken in the first place? Failures are not free, they cost money, both in time and lost opportunities. Yes, they are educational – mistakes are good learning points. A good point to learn is that you usually can’t pay a little – or nothing – and get a lot.

It isn’t just video too – it applies to doing your own website, making up your own flyers in Word, or getting free business cards off the web. Your customers will find you out. You – like the professionals you should be outsourcing to – should sell on value, not cost. Everyone can have a stab at doing everything themselves  (well, expect maybe brain surgery.) A professional can’t work for free, but can probably get a much better outcome than a client who takes a zero-cost marketing approach.

Is ‘free’ costing you?

As online social and sharing platforms continue to grow, there’s no excuse for not giving your corporate video the most exposure you can, and signposting it in as many places as your potential audience might come across.

Here’s my Top 10 places to link or showcase your video;

1. YouTube. The daddy of them all. But only if you spend time on the optimisation.
2. Your website. Obviously. But somewhere visible, not squirrelled away through a chain of drop-down menus.
3. Vimeo. Accounts are free – be sure to take advantage of HD upload to maintain their superior quality.
4. LinkedIn. On your profile (assuming you are the business owner).
5. LinkedIn Company Profile. You do have a company profile, don’t you?
6. Facebook. Linked via the YouTube plugin, and also hyperlinked through a post that is pinned to the top of your business page.
7. Email. Hyperlinked through your email footer, to your website or YouTube.
8. Pinterest. Pinned on one of your boards. You do know how fast Pinterest is growing, don’t you?
9. Google+. Having your video here might be useful, what with Google being, well, Google.
10. Offline. Yes, offline exists too. Put a copy on your iPad, your laptop, or playing on a loop on a TV at your trade fair stand. You never know when you might bump into a potential customer.

Be everywhere, be seen, be found.

One of the fields you need to complete when uploading your video to YouTube is the Category.

Personally I think it’s one of the weak links on the platform, and belies its origins of video entertainment for the masses – it’s not geared up for businesses. As a business user of YouTube, you might find a Category that fits well with your product or service, but many companies will have to make do with ‘People and Blogs’, which is my suggested default.

The key thing is that when you have selected a Category for your first video, you should keep on using it for all subsequent uploads. This may sound counterintuitive if you are branching out e.g. a business in the professional services sector which wants to upload a video about a corporate event they attended, instead of their normal How-To series. But YouTube (and Google) want you to be consistent, so they know in which sector of life you operate. It’s related to the bigger picture of creating a pool of content with a common theme and related keywords so the algorithms behind the scenes know what you are about.

The second tip is that you can set this Category as a default within your Channel Settings. Did you know you could set defaults to make the Upload process that little bit less painful? It also means you’re unlikely to forget your prevailing Category and make a mistake. There’s a few other good defaults you can set there too – take a look.

So, Categories may not be perfect, but make best use of them.

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Social media icons are becoming a staple part of website pages, as business owners invite visitors to connect with the company through all its online channels. ‘Follow us on Twitter‘ and similar are appearing in email footers. It’s logical to set up as much cross-linking and backlinking as possible, to give as much opportunity for social and online connectivity as possible, and to help with SEO too.

Seldom properly exploited, however, is YouTube. On the right hand panel of your Channel is a section for adding links to your online presences on other platforms. If you have a YouTube icon on your website homepage, inviting visitors to go to your videos, why would you not have a corresponding backlink on your YouTube Channel? And the same goes for connecting to your other profiles.

Click the ‘Edit’ button on the right hand pane and put in the key places you’d like visitors to go to. The title is freeform, so don’t just put in the hyperlink and hit return – as this creates awkward-looking links, or make do with ‘Our Website’ – use it as an opportunity for a call to action. Cover all the headline social media sites, and more than one link to your website.

I reviewed my list and realised that I too was missing some opportunities. For something that takes just a few seconds, it’s too good to pass up.

Remember, to paraphrase Field Of Dreams, If you don’t build it, they can’t come.

Film studios do it. TV channels do it. YouTube ads do it. Even authors do it.

Trailers.

Generating advance public awareness of a forthcoming product, service or event. Setting the marketing machine in motion, warming up the buyer, getting people interested, loosening the purse strings.

It sounds like it might be a decent idea for a business.

With the growth of social media, and the ease of communicating quickly to the masses – and at negligible cost – is there a place for the trailer to be adopted as a valuable marketing tool for non-media companies?

At London Corporate Media we shoot a lot of conferences and events, and the aim for many of them is the same – to get a promo video which is both a retrospective and an opportunity to generate advance publicity for the next time around. The key – as with any video marketing – is to get the promo in front of as many eyes as possible.

With the event promo it is about 2 shots at that – getting the video online as soon after the event as possible so that is not ‘old news’, and showing those who weren’t there what they missed. The big win is then saving the video and releasing it (or re-showcasing it) in the lead up to the next instance of the event – e.g. 9 months later in the case of an annual event.

This year we are taking last year’s video of a trade expo and amending the closing portion as a call to action to get footfall this year. We also shot an invitation from the organizer to potential attendees and standholders. These feed into the online and social media marketing effort.

In 2011 we shot a ‘behind the scenes’ video promo for a rugby club calendar. The first thing released was a 20-second teaser trailer to grab people’s attention. Then the full version came later, when the calendar had been printed and gone on sale. Not only that, we alluded to the forthcoming UK Olympics to pique viewer interest at the start of the video.

Video trailers are short, engaging, and much more likely to stick in the mind than a posted invitation or email newsletter. They can be very inexpensive to produce, and you can afford to cut loose a little with the approach. Then they can be pushed through many online and social channels.

A word of warning though – be mindful to remove the content when it is no longer applicable. Viewers clicking away from irrelevant content can damage both your SEO and your reputation.

How could you use trailers in your business?

I was talking with two colleagues this week, and the subject of the iconic Dollar Shave Club video came up. What I like about this video is that it illustrates a number of important points about video marketing;

• It has gone viral but without being designed to go ‘viral’. There just isn’t a formula for that.
• It’s a viral video that is actually selling something. Home movies on YouTube of skateboarding cats are all very well, and they obviously get into the public conscious, but as businesses they are not models we should aim for.
• Going viral is not the important point. Millions of people watching your corporate video may make you feel good about yourself, but millions of people buying your product is a much better outcome. Or even thousands. The beauty of the Dollar Shave Club video is that it had an astronomic impact on sales.
• The cost of producing the video is hugely disproportionate to the result. The production values are high enough to soar above a ‘home movie’ approach, but are still affordable, and it allows the viewer to connect with the company in a personal, friendly way.
• The idea is key. It is not derivative of its sector, or bland. It is creative, but it is not ‘flash over substance’.
• It is short and the pace never lags.
• It succeeds in selling because it focuses on the USP, and it knows what its audience wants to hear.

Creativity is an overused word these days. Being famous is accessible to anyone. Going viral is seen as a holy grail.

Just work on informing, connecting and engaging. Miracles take a little longer.

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On a recent client shoot, one of the great lines in his script was a quote “Whatever got you here won’t get you there”. It’s an encapsulation of the need to move forwards, try new things, and not rely solely on old methods to move your business to greater heights.

So when you are hiring, which is more important, skill and adaptability, or experience in your particular niche? I believe when it comes to video marketing, it is the former. There is the risk that if a business is looking to produce something that is ‘of its industry’, it will just blend in with all its competitors.

We have a project in pre-production where I have little experience in the client’s business niche – and I am open about that. What I saw in the initial conversation was a risk that we would produce a corporate video that used a stock approach and fell flat – that would have been the easy way out. Actually what happened was that my memory was sparked of a scene from a short film I worked on, and how we could apply a fictional scenario to a factual piece.

I am reminded of the time I lost a bid due to lack of a portfolio in a specific industry. That hurt. But I wasn’t grilled about experience before I produced a very specific promo for a local organisation – a video which has excellent audience retention figures over its 10,000 YouTube views. Skill and adaptability were much higher on my CV than my experience of huge trade fairs – yet a client who was looking for a relatively generic promo video product in this sector said “I was amazed at how well you understood the brief. The footage is really good and it is without a doubt the best promo video this industry has ever seen.”

If you are outsourcing, you can’t teach skill and knowledge, but you can communicate what YOU want to help your business move forwards, and that may not be anything your industry, your competitors, or you have ever tried before.

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Creating a good looking shot is as important in video as it is in photography.

Even if you are shooting video yourself and you don’t have a great environment, it is a good idea to at least put yourself in the right position within the frame of view.

When we are shooting relatively close up, there are three basic shot sizes we look at:

• Head and shoulders
• ‘Breast pocket’ – as above
• Waist upwards

Those 3 are fairly self explanatory. What seems to go wrong a lot of the time – you can even spot tourists doing it in the ‘Mum in front of art gallery’ or ‘Auntie in front of landmark’ shot – is leaving enough space for the subject to put on a top hat.

It’s not a good look.

If you aim for one of the 3 shot sizes above, and put just a bit of clean air above the top of the hair, then that’s about as simple formula as I can give you.

By all means have fun when you’re out and about with your pocket camera, but when it’s business at stake you can do your image a power of good by taking a moment to make sure You’ve Been Framed.

Twitter ‘eggs’, uncompleted LinkedIn profiles, unbranded websites. A serious business would never allow that to happen. But the equivalent happens on YouTube all the time.

Did you know that YouTube (and by implication Google) has changed its algorithm to increase the importance of Channels (i.e. profile pages, brand placeholders) in comparison to single videos. Doing the minimum to just get your corporate video onto the platform is not enough. Any visitors will see your presence there as ‘not a serious player’, in the same way that any social media profile that is not fully completed is a sign that a business is not truly embracing content and social media marketing.

There are 8 great YouTube branding tips here, which I would urge to to read and act on to keep up with the pace of change and growing importance of video – and YouTube marketing – in connecting with customers and communicating what you do.