Many of our clients think that video means huge time commitments, expense, and potentially embarassement. Almost nobody likes to see themselves on video, or to hear their recorded voice.
And yet, in a market saturated with text and images, video can be incredibly powerful. I get the camera-shy John on-camera to talk about the possibilities.
Transcript – Do I Have to do Video Marketing?
[MUSIC]Announcer: You’re listening to aviation marketing Hangar Flying. The community for the best sales and marketing professionals in the aviation industry. Your hosts, John and Paula Williams, are your sales and marketing test pilots. They take the risks for you and share strategies, relevant examples, hacks, and how-tos. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes so you won’t miss a thing.
Paula Williams: Welcome to aviation marketing Hangar Flying episode number 23. Today, we’re talking about video and why you should include video in your marketing strategy.
John Williams: Why not?
Paula Williams: Why not?
John Williams: [LAUGH]
Paula Williams: [LAUGH] If you’re seeing this on the Internet, you are seeing our smiling faces. If your are hearing this as a podcast then, of course, you are not seeing our smiling faces.
But we are actually using a video setup that we put together for a client and thought we would take advantage of the situation, being the resourceful souls that we are, right?
John Williams: Well, we already have the entire situation setup. We don’t have a permanent video studio yet.
Paula Williams: Right.
John Williams: For several reasons, not the least of which is once you get in the game, then you have to keep upgrading to keep up with the technology.
Paula Williams: Exactly, and in fact, every time we rent a video camera and the associated equipment, it’s 1,000 times better than it was [LAUGH] the last time we rented a video camera and the associated equipment.
John Williams: Easier to use, higher quality, everything.
Paula Williams: Exactly. So we do this in two places, one is in our office and the other is at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Park City, Utah, where they have some very nice conference rooms and setups, where we can do the larger projects and things that take multiple days and things like that.
So there’s a couple of ways that we use video. One is, of course, in marketing materials and the other is in helping our sales guys develop their sales presentations. Because when we video someone and we go through the video with them with the checklist, it’s torturous, it’s a horrible, horrible process.
[LAUGH] But it really is the very best way to get through some of the issues that they’re having with their presentation and some of the things that are kind of tripping them up. So it really helps a lot when we do that a few times. And by the end of the day, they’re fantastic.John Williams: Yeah.
Paula Williams: Yeah. [LAUGH]
John Williams: Well, but you can take multiple takes without ever stopping the camera.
Paula Williams: Exactly.
John Williams: All you gotta do is say, okay, that’s enough. We’re gonna start this over at page three or line one. Give it a couple of seconds of space and go for it.
Because it’s very easy to slice them up anymore, you just put it in iMovie or something, and-
Paula Williams: So we end up with very polished marketing materials for people, if that’s the intention. Or if it’s for training purposes, then of course, the video is just to show our client, here’s a way that you could do this more effectively.
John Williams: Exactly.
Paula Williams: Exactly. So I’m gonna show you a couple of statistics, and of course, you can prove anything you want with statistics, but I actually agree with a lot of these. So.
John Williams: Well, that makes it right.
Paula Williams: Of course it does. [LAUGH] So videos provide a 74% increase in a visitor’s understanding of a product.
John Williams: I could probably buy that one.
Paula Williams: Yeah.
John Williams: Cuz it’s a lot easier to see what somebody’s doing than have them write it down on a piece of paper and then try to follow along.
Paula Williams: Exactly, it’s a lot easier to show someone than tell them, especially if you’re demonstrating a video or demonstrating a product or a concept, right?
John Williams: If you remember the old adage, what is it, a picture’s worth 1,000 words?
Paula Williams: Mm-hm.
John Williams: Think about a video, is you get at least 30 pictures per second. [LAUGH]
Paula Williams: Right, that’s true. Here’s another statistic, 45.5% of Internet visitors or users view at least one video over the course of a month.
Is that true?
John Williams: Well, I’m probably not one of the 45%.
Paula Williams: But you view at least one video on the Internet per month. I know you do cuz I show them to you. [LAUGH] Okay, an average user spends 16 minutes and 49 seconds watching online video ads every month.
John Williams: 49 seconds, give me a break.
Paula Williams: 16 minutes and 49 seconds.
John Williams: 49 seconds.
Paula Williams: 16 minutes and 49 seconds.
John Williams: Yeah, well, I mean, so why don’t they say 16 or 17 minutes, I mean, give me a break.
Paula Williams: They’re giving very specific.
John Williams: Yeah, right.
Paula Williams: Statistics.
John Williams: Anyway.
Paula Williams: Okay, 80% of users remember the videos they watch online.
John Williams: 80%? Well, you might remember the topic and generally what it is. If it’s specific to you, probably you’ll remember more of it.
Paula Williams: True, 46% of users take action after viewing a video online.
Paula Williams: About half.
John Williams: About half, yeah, maybe.
Paula Williams: Exactly, your website visitors are 64% more likely to buy a product after watching a video.
John Williams: That’s probably fairly true.
Paula Williams: Yeah.
John Williams: In fact, it may be even higher than that.
Paula Williams: Yeah, it really depends on the market.
And again, these are general statistics and your results may vary. [LAUGH] As they say in the-
John Williams: Exactly.
Paula Williams: Disclaimers. When video is included in an email, there’s a two to three times increase in click-through rates. I will tell you that is absolutely true. Having seen it in our Infusionsoft statistics for ourselves and for clients.
When video is included in an email, there’s a 51% increase in subscriber-to-lead conversion rates.
John Williams: Wow.
Paula Williams: I think that is probably also true, compared to video versus no video.
John Williams: And all those stats come from?
Paula Williams: James Perrin at Koozai.
John Williams: What’s that, his website or whatever?
Paula Williams: Yeah, koozai.com, actually they’re a marketing firm that specializes in video. And, of course, we use everybody’s data, because if it’s good data, we don’t care where it comes from. [LAUGH]
John Williams: [LAUGH] True.
Paula Williams: But I think a lot of that, and a lot of things that you read on the Internet are true or not true, but these do pretty much square with a lot of our experience.
So I think most of these are pretty close to true.
John Williams: Well, they’ll be in the ballpark, good enough to give you the idea.
Paula Williams: Exactly. And another really important statistic that we know is true, cuz we’ve seen it in multiple sources, is that YouTube is the second largest search engine or second most used search engine depending on the day.
It kinda trades places, YouTube, Amazon.
John Williams: Trades place with Google.
Paula Williams: Yeah, exactly. So a lot of those things trade places here and there, but depending on the day, it is a very large search engine, so you really do wanna have your materials indexed in YouTube for your keywords.
So it’s also a great opportunity if your competitors have Google all locked up, it’s very likely that they don’t have YouTube locked up so-
John Williams: True.
Paula Williams: That’s an opportunity if you want one. So, that’s great, and you might think okay, well, that’s fantastic. I wanna do some video and I wanna get on YouTube and all those things.
But what the heck am I gonna do? How do I produce a video? What should I use as subject matter for a video? And so on.
John Williams: Yes, well, the sound is probably the most difficult. And it’s not just the sound and capturing it, but integrating it with the camera.
There are quite a few cameras, and even the iPhone isn’t all that great. Because if you have the phone or the camera set at a distance where you’re interviewing people and trying to record it, you’re not close enough to the microphone. It doesn’t have a secondary auxiliary input that you can use for a microphone and use lapel mics or anything.
So that’s probably the most interesting part of making this work. You should get a camera that has external input for audio and then you can work all kinds of things inexpensively.
Paula Williams: Right, so a lot of people say well, I’ve got a really good camera on my iPhone.
Well, that’s true, but you don’t have really good sound on your iPhone. [LAUGH]
John Williams: Exactly.
Paula Williams: We can just about guarantee it, which is not to say that you shouldn’t shoot video from your iPhone. You can always put music behind it, or something like that.
John Williams: And they may get to the point where you can have an auxiliary input for audio but then how do you aim it?
Paula Williams: Mm-hm.
John Williams: That you’re gonna be the only one or two people shooting the same thing and how do you adjust. It’s good for you taking pictures of other things, but to try get audio input from them and you at a reasonable balance, it’s difficult at best.
Paula Williams: Right, so what we do for audio, you can see I’m using the, what we call our Frank Sinatra microphone.
[LAUGH] And that’s because I talk the most, and also because John already has this beautiful, deep, resonant manly voice.John Williams: Right, right.
Paula Williams: [LAUGH] So he’s using a lapel mic, and we have them both running into the camera input.
John Williams: As an example, the lapel mic that I’m using costs about $32.
Inexpensive, and you get a camera, the bottom end of commercial, which is what we use, because the consumer stuff just doesn’t work well enough, from my estimation. [LAUGH]
Paula Williams: He’s not picky or anything.
John Williams: And then you have to a few things, you gotta get some converter plugs to go into it, but that’s okay because it more than makes up for what you do.
Paula Williams: Right, so tell them about this microphone, the Frank Sinatra model.
John Williams: [LAUGH] Well, that particular microphone was made in the 40s. It was given to me, when I was 13 or 14 years old, to use because I was in amateur radio. And I used it for a while and it ended up in boxes.
As a matter of fact, when she wanted to out and buy a new microphone, I said well, wait a minute, I think I have one. So I went to the garage, pulled it out of a box, had to disassemble it and rebuild some of the foam pieces in it, but that’s what we use and it’s really, really nice.
This is broadcast quality microphone.
Paula Williams: Exactly, right, so a lot of times, some of the things that you have already can be used to produce a lot of great video and audio. So, let’s talk about good lighting.
John Williams: Well, the lighting we’re using here, [LAUGH] is the result of a, you have to have the lighting and it takes a while to place lights wherever, to get the shadows out the face and so forth.
I happen to have in the garage.
Paula Williams: Mm-hm.
John Williams: Some construction lights.
Paula Williams: Mm-hm.
John Williams: That have the little cages over so they don’t get broken. And I take the cages off and we use those construction lights. And they’re on pivots on a bar and you can move them around until you get the light like you want it.
So that the shadows are off the face and that no highlights anywhere you don’t want. It just takes some working with it.
Paula Williams: Exactly, and he’s actually bouncing them off the ceiling, so it does take some creativity to make that work in ways that are not super harsh and drive people completely crazy after the first ten minutes of a video.
So when we have a client come, we take care of all of this for them and have the set up ready to go. All they have to do is come in here, do their thing. We do as many takes as we need to until they’re comfortable and we’re comfortable.
And carry on from there.
John Williams: Exactly.
Paula Williams: So, obviously this is a podcast, so we’re doing this in one take. We’re not doing it super polished or anything like that, but-
John Williams: Well, they think it’s one take.
Paula Williams: [LAUGH]
John Williams: [LAUGH]
Paula Williams: Exactly, so-
John Williams: Which is the whole point of video.
And matter of fact, in this particular one we’re doing, so far at least two takes but you’ll never know that.
Paula Williams: Exactly.
John Williams: In fact, you can go back to review it and look and see if you can find out where we broke it.
Paula Williams: Mm-hm, I’m sure they probably can.
John Williams: No.
Paula Williams: [LAUGH]
John Williams: Not when we get done.
Paula Williams: So that’s the third thing, is good editing. You want to go back through the video and cut out anything that you don’t want to use. So, there’s always going to be things where people hiccup or sneeze or other strange things happen.
John Williams: Or.
Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Or they say too much, which is the thing that I am working on, I presently struggle with, as Tony Horton says in the videos. [LAUGH] The third thing is, or the fourth thing is that we wanna have a really great call to action, if this is a sales letter or a marketing piece.
And what we’ve put together in our, well, with the things that we’ve learned from the other products that we’ve offered and combining that with video is what we call a video sales letter product. And what that is is it’s a video, on top of a form, that people can use to either request more information or purchase your product.
So they see the video, you give a really good demonstration or explanation of your product or service. They are right there, where they can fill out the form to purchase your product. And that’s proven to be, in the last few months in a lot of the groups that we work with, one of the most effective sales techniques there is.
If you ever watch late night TV, you’ll see the infomercials because they know how important it is to get you to call right then and they’ll put a little timer on the screen and everything. Saying you get this discount if you call in the next ten minutes. You can duplicate a lot of the techniques that work without being quite so cheesy?
John Williams: Or nauseous. [LAUGH]
Paula Williams: Or nauseous. [LAUGH]
John Williams: Nauseating, yeah.
Paula Williams: Nauseating, with what we call a video sales letter, on the web. And basically what that is, like we’ve said, is it can be a short or long, it can be two minutes to ten minutes video. However long it takes to sell whatever it is that we’re selling effectively, together with a call to action, the form that they fill out, and take it from there.
And sometimes we can do what we call a two stage video sales letter, the first stage is to sell an information product. To get more information about this product, click here, and all we need is an email address and a name. It’s a fairly low-risk call to action, as we’ve talked about in previous podcasts and other materials.
And then the second stage is once they’ve downloaded those materials, the second video goes into more detail about your product or service and actually sells the product, where they actually put in their credit card information and make the purchase. So that first video can be very short. The second video will be longer and in a lot more detail.
A lot of people ask us, how long should a video be?
John Williams: About that long.
Paula Williams: About that long, about as long as it takes. There is a lot of statistics that say that people will only watch a video online for 15 seconds, or they have the attention span of a goldfish or whatever.
We think that’s BS. People have as much attention as you earn. If you get them interested in your product and if it takes 20 minutes to explain your product and you’re able to keep them interested that much time, then they really are a qualified prospect.
John Williams: Right, and as long as you know your demographics and you’re talking to them.
Paula Williams: Yeah.
John Williams: Then they’re going to be interested and last longer on watching.
Paula Williams: Right, and so sometimes we wanna break that up into shorter segments, maybe go from live action talking heads to slides, back to talking heads, to a product demo, and so on. And we wanna use things like music and things to move things along and structure the video so that people maintain their interest.
But as long as you are telling a great story and giving them information that they want, they’ll stick around.
John Williams: Yes.
Paula Williams: Absolutely. Okay, well, thank you for joining us. And we hope that you’ve enjoyed this and we hope that you will take some action as far as figuring out where video can fit in your marketing system.
And if you want to do some kind of video in your sales training system, we found that to be very effective as well. So those are two ways you can use video. And we hope you do one or both of them, either with our help or without it, right?
John Williams: Of course.
Paula Williams: Of course. So have a great week, and we’ll see you next time.
John Williams: Yes we will.
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