Today I want to introduce you to the secrets of making more powerful video content marketing. In my book, The Invisible Sale, I interviewed professional video creators to uncover their secrets for making more effective marketing videos. Videos that grows businesses, increases sales and moves buyers to action. They gave me tons of incredible insight and most importantly, three secrets that they all agreed were the cornerstone of every great video.
Invest in Great Storytelling
Video is one place that brands often over-invest in video content production. Maybe it’s the influence of the traditional TV commercial or the influence of full-service ad agencies or just frustrated creatives that want to make the epic movie or viral video — but truly, great video production doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective.
They key, according to season video producer Chis Yates is to focus on storytelling. Storytelling doesn’t require expensive cameras or lighting or even professional actors. Here is a great example of storytelling as created by a 10 year old boy – using nothing other than an iPhone and iMovie.
This simple video tells a moving story of accomplishment and success. It makes you smile. It makes you cheer those young men on to victory and celebrate with them when they succeed. And if you’re a parent, it makes you think, “man, my kid would love to do that!”
Had my 10 year old son planned a bit better, he could have captured a few pics or video of the camp activities that week leading up to the successful sailing of The USS Duct Tape. He could have told a more complete story. A story that showed a beginning, a middle and an end. A story that would have done an even better job of convincing parents watching that video that Tinkering Camp was an incredible place to send their kids for one week during the summer.
Create Stronger Relationships
Video also has an uncanny ability to create relationships between the viewer and on-camera talent. Just look at any successful video podcast or television show and you’ll find likable hosts. Hosts that inspire us, enamor us, or somehow just connect with us as viewers.
This is probably the most overlooked detail in corporate or sales-oriented videos. Instead of focusing on using the video’s host to create a relationship between viewer and brand, companies wrongly focus on selecting the most available or knowledgeable person as on-screen talent.
If you want to create better host oriented videos (such as How To, Instructional, Destination Marketing/Tourism or Cooking) – watch a popular cooking, DIY or travel show and pay attention to how the host plays to the camera. How they seem to talk right through the camera to you the viewer. Try and deconstruct why the show is successful and the host beloved.
Focus on making the audience love your host… not your video.
Invest in Awesome Audio
You can have the best looking How To Video in the world, but if the viewer can’t hear the talent, your video just failed.
As a video content marketer, there are tricks for covering up bad video, but you’re powerless to cover bad audio. So invest in good microphones. You’ll want to have at least three or four different types of microphones.
For basic interviewing, you’ll want a wired lavaliere mic (the kind that clips onto a person’s shirt), a handheld microphone, and a shotgun mic. You will probably want to invest in a wireless lavaliere microphone too, which is also great for tourism oriented videos where a host is showing you a destination because it frees them up to appear further away from the camera.
Regardless of which mic you’re using, there is one simple trick that you should always perform before any video shoot.
Do a few audio samples (video anything so that you can hear how much background noise you’re picking up) to understand the impact of the background noise on the audio recording. If you’re getting too much background, move the shoot. This becomes especially important when you’re doing interviews at conferences or trade shows, both of which can be notoriously loud environments.
Want to Create More Great Content?
This post is just a sample of the 80+ pages of content creation tips, tricks and strategies in my book, The Invisible Sale. Five chapters: one each dedicated to video, audio, text, photography and webinar & product demonstration video creation. Each chapter discusses techniques, software and hardware recommendations and is dedicated to making you a better DIY content marketer.
In the words of social media consultant, Mack Collier, the content creation section of The Invisible Sale is…
the most complete guide to content creation that I have seen since Content Rules by CC Chapman & Ann Handley
photo by Ozont