What type of technical equipment do you need?
I still use the camera that I bought from eBay for 20 quid. It was a ZI Kodak camera, ZI8 it was, and I still use that. So it depends on your brand really, but I just bought it 20 quid, it was second hand on eBay and I started making YouTube videos in my living room. Yeah, I mean but that was fine for my brand. It depends on what … I suppose on how you want people to view you. But if you can afford, if you’ve got a budget just to bring in an external company or to… Even if you want to make your own, then that’s fine. I would say that the one thing that is really important is your audio. I think even if you’ve got quite a basic camera or you’re making videos on your phone or your iPad, you know, that might be alright for your brand, but never ever compromise on audio, always invest in a good camera and a good microphone.
What are your best tips and tricks for video marketing?
If I just focus on YouTube maybe, firstly, cause there’s little things that I think that there’s a lot of platforms you can use, but firstly with YouTube.
A lot of people ignore the description area but I always think it’s important to blog in my area because people do read that. So if you are going to make a really good video then you want to add keywords, obviously and a title, you want to make sure that the title is really good. So numbers work really well, so “Five steps to…” or “Three ideas for…” Q&A titles work really well. But also, yeah, blogging in your description area. So making sure that you’ve got a link on YouTube, maybe a link to your website or a link to a really funky lead page where you can capture somebody’s email address and obviously implement that into your email marketing campaign to then build relationships with people. Optimising tags, that’s quite an obvious one on YouTube.
I always talk about the 12 second rule. You know what it’s like when you meet somebody and you make your mind really, really quickly but it’s still like that in video, so you have to adopt the same stuff that you would if you were in a room with somebody. You know, if you want to ask some questions, engage with them or you still have to do that on video so I always think creating movements is really, really good with videos.
A call to action, I think a lot of people forget to do that. I definitely forgot to do that, I made lazy, lazy videos in the beginning when I was at 20,000 hits, but nobody was coming to my website and I was like, “Why not?!” But I wasn’t asking them to.
Another really wonderful thing to do, which I haven’t done but I am so going to do it, it’s on my to-do list, it’s creating a video advising people or suggesting why they should subscribe to your channel. And Gary Vaynerchuk has got an amazing on his one which is “Why you really need to subscribe to my channel”. It’s like, “Guys, seriously, if you are not subscribed to my channel, it hurts me. And it hurts my soul.” And he just talks about the value you’re going to get from subscribing to his channel. Because your subscribers are up, that’s basically people who are just out there waiting for you to upload new videos. That’s amazing. You don’t have to worry about being found. They’re going to get an email straight to their inbox when you do launch a new video, so that’s really, really good.
Encourage comments as well. I know a lot of people that produce videos for YouTube and they just think, “Oh, but I disabled the comments” And I get that, considering how many views I’ve got on YouTube, for every 30 beautiful ones for comments, I do get the odd ones somebody says that they hate my Welsh accent so much they want to punch me in the face until I bleed or, you know, something horrendous like that. I would always say that if you’re worried about comments damaging your brand, then you can always switch them to ‘Approved’. But encouraging comments, so actually saying to people, “If you’ve got any thoughts on this video, or you’ve got any questions, please…” And even point down, you know, “Please add something in the comments”.
How do you promote your videos once they are uploaded?
One of the things – obviously I would think most people listening to this will be totally familiar with – making sure that when you are producing this content, that you’re sharing them on your Google+, stick this on your Instagram, your Facebook, your Twitter. Once you get to a certain amount of hits on YouTube, that video will just promote itself. I think one of my videos, it got, it took about a year to get to 25,000 hits but then once I got to that, it’s getting about 20,000 hits every quarter now. So YouTube will do that.
You can also pay keyword advertising on Google for videos but I think it’s being really, really smart with how you’re doing it. So in terms of blogging and collaborations again. One other thing is interviews, if you’re interviewing somebody within your industry that has got quite a big social media platform, then obviously they’re going to share it with their markets and their network, and then they go back and they see your YouTube channel so they might look at your other videos. I always think that this is something that I am doing at the moment, is putting your YouTube channel or your Wistia channel in your email signature. I think that that’s a great way to get more of your videos views.
Using LinkedIn, actually embedding your videos into your profile on LinkedIn, I think a lot of people don’t tend to do that, they just use text but that’s a wonderful thing, you can add your videos in there. Allowing people to embed – not a lot of people put the embed section off, so I get people… I know for a fact that there are loads of videos, careers websites out there that have got every single one of my videos embedded into their websites. So then you think, from a commercial point of view, why would I allow that? Because there’s no reason for people ever to come into my website and buy my products. Because they can watch my stuff on other people’s websites and you know… But I do believe that allowing embeds will encourage other people to obviously share your content maybe on their blogs or their websites.
Playlists… if you can create playlists so that when one video finishes it doesn’t go to a video that YouTube have chosen, it goes to one of your videos. And making sure that you have really, really good titles as well. But I think a lot of it comes down to just finding influences within your industry that can share your content and people that are going to create real value and then using your marketing expertise and your marketing knowledge to build those relationships.
