Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #10: Video Marketing: How to Get Started

Michael Utley: Hey, welcome to Episode 10 of the Dodgeball Marketing podcast, for Dodgeball Marketing or DodgeballSEO.com.

Chris Raines: Can I just spin this while you do all the talking?

Michael Utley: Yeah, absolutely. Today's episode, Episode 10, Video Marketing: Ideas for Getting Started in using video marketing. And a quick note, we had a tornado here a few months ago and so we've got a lot of background noise. We're in an office on Main Street in Nashville, Tennessee. We're about 10 feet off the road and we have sirens come through and we're in a city and stuff happens.

Chris Raines: And the tornado damage at the point.

Michael Utley: And the tornado did a bunch of damage. We've got guys up there working right now to get us up and running here in the building. And so you may hear some noise and we'll just try to work through it.

Chris Raines: It's a good morning.

Michael Utley: Sorry about the noise.

Chris Raines: Talk about marketing.

Michael Utley: We'll just talk about the stuff, but let's get into the substance. Here's the deal. 95% of video marketers this year plan to maintain or increase their budgets for video marketing. That tells you overall that video marketing is a winner, and it is.

Chris Raines: And it's eating the internet.

Michael Utley: Yeah, we use it all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Tons of the energy of online content has moved, I would say over the last 10 years, really since broadband, which would be more like 20 years, but really in a big way, over the last 10 years toward video. If a lot of money was moving from radio, TV, billboards, to the internet, there's been kind of another wave of content being moved toward video for different uses. For pre-roll ads, for social media ads. We're going to get into that. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the ways that you can break into the world of video for your marketing. Chris, you've got a background in video production.

Chris Raines: Yeah, for 10 years those videos.

Michael Utley: Yeah. You did video production for GoEpps as Bullhorn Media for years and you've kind of migrated your business into paid search advertising. And now you've kind of gotten into a world where you're using a lot of creative to drive people into sales funnels. You're kind of handling more of it, more of the user experience than you used to, but you've actually got a lot of experience as a video production expert. Let me ask you a few questions. We want to talk about some different formats of videos that people can start to do and we want to talk a little bit about production, how to do some of this on low to no budget. And so let's start off with this, FAQ videos. What are these, how are they good?

Chris Raines: Yeah. An FAQ video, I would say is a piece of short-form content that's on your website, probably, that's maybe two to four minutes that answers a very specific question that's relevant to your business. And these are valuable for the simple reason is that your customers have questions that they ask, no matter what business you're in, your customers have questions about things related to your service or in the family of your service. And so the more you can get out and proactively answer those questions, whether you're an attorney, an accountant or a roofer or whatever, you're going to start to build trust. This is kind of that trust building aspect.

Michael Utley: Or a healthcare provider?

Chris Raines: Or a healthcare provider, what are the different types of moles and how do I know if a mole is cancerous or not?

Michael Utley: Why do I have acne?

Chris Raines: Right. Causes of acne. Healthcare is just, there are millions of things you can do FAQ videos on, but the real value is number one, when you do it in the video format, you're building that likability to your audience. It's you on camera. You are the expert, your company. It comes across different. This is why, like you talked about, video is becoming such a huge format. It's because it's really hard to build that trust, likeability and emotional connection with a text blog post. It's just hard to do. Just like we're doing right now. This could be a blog post.

Michael Utley: It's a lot of data coming through. It's a lot of personality. It's a lot of human touch. It's a lot of information.

Chris Raines: And you can attach that authority. Let's say you're a doctor or somebody doing an FAQ on a health topic. That authority then becomes attached to you, as opposed to just being, if maybe it's in a blog post, even if it's written by that same doctor, the authority wouldn't be as attached to that person as it would be if they're right in front of the camera and they're the sort of star of the show. And the other benefit of FAQ videos is you can do them in mass and at a great volume. You could schedule a day with a videographer or heck you could even, we have a really cheap DSLR camera, you could do it with your iPhone, whatever you want to do. And you could outline everything out and have 10 of them banged out in a half of a day.

Michael Utley: We've done trips where we shot 52 videos in one trip to South Florida, where we had sunshine and green grass to video using an outdoor commercial equipment product and then released those videos one a week for a year.

Chris Raines: Actually, if somebody is just getting started, I would highly recommend this format. And it's really easy. All you got to do in terms of finding topics for FAQs, go to your email inbox and find customer emails, maybe segment, maybe search for a question mark or something like that. And just take questions that you get asked often, if every time somebody, a customer asks you a question, just jot it down and put it in a spreadsheet. That's a video. It's simple as that.

Michael Utley: Another way to find good FAQs is to check Google and see what the auto fill is. How do I replace my roof? Or how much does a replacement roof cost? You can see the auto fill is going to tell you the most popular variations of those questions. Also, the customers also asked which Google will add or take away based on what they're testing on the user experience of their search results pages.

Chris Raines: I'm thinking of each of those is a little hook in the water and another opportunity to build trust, which is going to help you make the sale.

Michael Utley: Yeah. FAQs cover a lot of ground. All right, next up. Let's talk about behind the scenes clips and sort of things that you can do that are a little bit showing people how the business is done.

Chris Raines: Yeah, so I would call these maybe a business slice of life. And these are less kind of buttoned up and produced as say an FAQ. FAQ video, you'd want it to have a stationary camera and present planned content. Behind the scenes, slice of life is something like, let's say you're a home remodeling company, what you're going to do there for content is you're going to take people through from A to Z through a project. Hey, we've got this bathroom remodel here and this can be on your phone using Instagram stories or through just regular posts or maybe through a YouTube series, if you want to stitch it together a little bit more, but you're going to take people through and take them actually onsite to a project, let them see them before, the transition and the after. Let them see that transformation.

Chris Raines: And it's another way of showing people what you could do that's a little bit more dynamic and more educational than maybe a simple after picture, which is what a remodeling company would show like, check out this kitchen. Well, wouldn't it be cool if you could walk them through day by day and they could follow it through to see them rip up the old linoleum and pull out the refrigerator, put the new one in and do the tile and all that. It's a really immersive way to really, and you can pepper stuff in that shows your expertise. You could say, I don't know what it would be for a home remodeling company.

Michael Utley: Oh yeah. Ripping up linoleum. Yeah.

Chris Raines: We had to put a beam in here because this was a support wall so we had to rounder that off.

Michael Utley: We had to add a new column in the basement because we're taking out a wall on the first floor.

Chris Raines: Yeah. We couldn't go all the way up with the tile here. Whatever it would be for you. But it's an opportunity for you to take people through your process and really show people how much of an expert you are in a way that's not really possible with just maybe writing about it or showing somebody a before and after in that example.

Michael Utley: And somebody might think, well, we don't want to do that. We don't want to give away kind of how we do it, because that's just going to sponsor all the DIY people out there to do it on their own.

Chris Raines: No it's not.

Michael Utley: And the answer is.

Chris Raines: They were going to be DIY anyway.

Michael Utley: They were going to figure out, somebody is going to give them that information. There is no hidden information anymore in any art or skill, because somebody wants to put it on YouTube and anybody who's watching this, who's seeing it, who's kind of on the bubble is going to say, "Yeah, there's no way I'm doing that. I'm not going to be the one breathing the asbestos. Talk about a professional, I'm not wearing that hazmat suit."

Chris Raines: Remodeling is a good example. If you take people in and maybe you have a problem, maybe you run into some water damage and you got to figure out how to get around it and make do some really complicated decision making and weighing things. If you're a rookie and home repair, you're not going to, that's going to scare you off or I need a pro to do this. Yeah. I think, yeah, you're right. It's the wrong idea to say, "Oh, I'm going to give all my secret sauce away." You should give all of your secrets away.

Michael Utley: Right. Right. The internet is really a race to be the authority in a space by giving secrets away. Yeah. And just demonstrating. And a lot of things happen on the way to giving those secrets away, demonstrating expertise, customer service, demonstrating professionalism, demonstrating quality. Those are all things that happen as you're doing that. And then for on the healthcare side and for other industries, it's a lot of helping people know enough information to assess, to get help or maybe, oh yeah, with a little bit of mild acne, if it's temporary, you can treat it with this. That's fine to just put in a video and not have them come in. But if it's somebody really needs to come in and get seen, you're able to kind of help people get familiar with stuff and maybe have a little bit of language so they know how to talk about what they're experiencing.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Good, let's do this. Tell us about another video format, Chris, that you and I have talked about before and that we've probably produced some of.

Chris Raines: Oh we definitely have.

Michael Utley: If we thought about it a little bit, customer testimonials. How are these helpful?

Chris Raines: Now this is customer testimonials are probably if I could rank these out, depending on what the business is, I might even put customer testimonials number one. But FAQ, customer testimonials, one and two. Customer testimonials are great simply because the principles of persuasion that they deploy and it's social proof. We talk about it here a lot. We talked about it on the last episode. People want to know that people that are similar to them have experienced the result that they want or accomplish the goal that they themselves want. If you're a remodeling company, just using remodeling companies example, you could do a short interview with your couple that you did the kitchen remodel for and talk to them about what the process was like, what their fears were going in and how happy they were with the result. And then someone that's watching that is going to see, oh, this is a couple that is around my same age and looks like they have the house similar to mine and they trusted these people. And this is obviously a real person.

Chris Raines: Another thing to talk about, just we're talking about video as a format itself, is that video testimonial is so much more powerful than a text-based testimonial for a pretty obvious reason in that it's impossible to fake. Not impossible, but you could always pay an actor.

Michael Utley: Authenticity is going to come through the bandwidth of that information with video content.

Chris Raines: Exactly. And not a lot of people do this, but anyone could just write up a text post, a text testimonial and attach a fake name to it and put it out there. But it's quite a different thing to get somebody on camera to tell the story about how they experienced your service and how it helped them accomplish their goal. And the second thing I want to say about video testimonials is, while it's great to have those professionally produced with a videographer that's onsite, that's going to have a microphone that gets really crisp sound, it's going to have lighting and all that stuff. That's all really great and I would say, if you can afford to do that, absolutely do it. Especially if you've got something high end to offer, maybe legal consultation or accounting or something where you got to be a little more buttoned up.

Michael Utley: Even more high-end elective services in healthcare.

Chris Raines: Yes. And I would certainly recommend that if you can afford it, but even if you can't afford professionally produced video, something like a selfie testimonial through the phone or through a Zoom call can work wonders. I'll tell you a story about one of my own clients that I run digital ads for is a weight loss clinic. And we have one or two professionally produced videos. And those were produced a few years ago and they're still in the rotation. They're still on the website, but we need fresh fodder for social media and for ads and so forth. And so what we did is we literally just offered customers a store credit, a $50 coupon or something, to film. We gave them instructions. We told them to film on their laptop or on their phone, what their experience was. We gave them a list of questions and they did it.

Chris Raines: And we took, we literally take those and I think we put a background on it that's brand colors and kind of dress it up a little bit, but it's literally just an iPhone video. And those videos convert. People watch them on social, people click through and people schedule appointments based on them. You don't need a professionally-produced video. The easiest way to get started honestly, if you're a real estate agent, if you're a doc, whatever, take your phone out and say, "Hey, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?" Get their permission, everything legal, but literally stick your phone in their face. And you'd be amazed at how effective a really low production value piece of content can be, because it really is about the content. It's not about the trappings around it. If you can afford the trappings, do it. But if you can't, don't stop doing video.

Michael Utley: And the production quality on an iPhone compared to smartphones of say 10 years ago is insane. It's just insane.

Chris Raines: There's no one for which it's impossible to do this. It's possible for everyone.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Let's wrap up with this. What about something like a longer-form piece, like a video podcast like this one?

Chris Raines: Wouldn't recommend that. No, of course. And these are great. This is what we're doing right now. Anytime you've got a topic to talk about at length, it can be similar, an inflated version of the FAQ video. But it's maybe more longer format. Maybe you have a guest on, we have a co-host. Sometimes you have a guest on here on the Dodgeball Podcast, but video allows you to kind of double down and have multiple different asset types for a given topic. Right now we're on video. This will go on YouTube, it'll get embedded. It'll probably at some point.

Michael Utley: It'll get published out to a bunch of places.

Chris Raines: It'll probably get clipped up and put on LinkedIn and other places, but it's also going to be audio content. It's also going to be written content through the transcription. A video podcast, similar to this, allows you to sort of ascend the tiers of content and have the top level content, which is video and all the ones underneath it. And again, it behaves in the same way as the FAQ type in that it allows you to build. This is what we're doing this right here. We want people to see this and think, oh man, those guys are experts.

Michael Utley: Yeah. They seem energized and excited about online marketing.

Chris Raines: And it builds likeability in the same way that the other video types do. And it's just another way to build yourself up as the one that's offering value, the one that's helping, the one that's being an expert. And then when the time comes to actually start a conversation about purchasing services, you're going to be top of mind. Yeah, video is great. It's what we do. We obviously believe in it because we're doing it on a weekly basis.

Michael Utley: And get leads from it.

Chris Raines: Yeah, absolutely. A podcast, a video podcast, if you can do it and just the last caveat, similar to what we said on the other things, this is a fairly cheap camera. This could very well be an Android device or an iPhone device that we're looking at right here.

Michael Utley: Probably I would guess a $1,000 camera. I can't remember

Chris Raines: $1,000 camera, so phone's going to be what? Six or $700?

Michael Utley: Six to seven.

Chris Raines: But you've already bought it.

Michael Utley: Yeah, you probably already have a phone.

Chris Raines: This could very well be that it. Probably would look similar quality. There's really no technical hurdle to get by, to clear in order to start video podcast. You just need something to talk about and a little, maybe a little tripod. And we might do a whole episode someday on video production for starters.

Michael Utley: Yeah, that would be cool. Well good. Well, thank you everybody for joining us for episode 10, video marketing ideas for getting started in using video, tornado sound edition.

Chris Raines: Did we get any? Oh, there's one right now. That's probably because I was talking.

Michael Utley: There was a lot in there, but thanks, everybody. And appreciate all the comments and subscribes. Hit the button and yeah, check in with us if you have questions, want to talk, and thanks for listening to the podcast. Thanks.

Chris Raines: Later, later.