Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #31: How to Make Good Content Marketing Videos

Michael Utley: Hey, welcome to episode 31 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. I'm Michael, and this is Chris.

Chris Raines: How're you doing, man?

Michael Utley: Good, good. Happy Friday. We got a train going in the background. Hope everybody can hear that.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: We're going to talk about how to make a great content marketing video. We really enjoy content as a way of drawing people into a website, and video is no different. Video doesn't have to just be used for a main video on your homepage. It can also be part of a larger content strategy. So, what kind of things fit into this? We can kind of take turns on this, but-

Chris Raines: Yeah, how to make a good content marketing video. That's what we're going to do.

Michael Utley: Yeah, a good content marketing video. Yeah. One is hot topics, things that are in the news. It's good if you're a consultant or you're doing anything, like a lot of our clients are kind of B2B. If you're doing anything that's sort of sophisticated and has to do with relevant timely things. This week we were talking about cybersecurity, and there was a patient data hack of, I think, 30,000 records. And so, in talking with a cybersecurity company, they're going to make content about things that are in the news like this, and video is a great format for that. So, things that are topical, because YouTube, as we often mention on the show, is the second largest search engine. So, these sort of topics can rotate into the news and they can come and go pretty quickly. But—

Chris Raines: And when they rotate into the news the search volume spikes.

Michael Utley: Yeah, it does. It does.

Chris Raines: Yeah, people are curious about it.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And YouTube is one of the places where people are going to learn about things. Another format is Q&A type material. If you have an audience or a customer base that is using your website to use your products or services or learn about you, frequently asked questions, those are great little videos.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And they don't have to be long. They could be a minute or two and be really good material. And of course, once this gets loaded to YouTube, and if you're putting these videos on your website and using them as landing pages, and transcripting them on those landing pages, this is all going to be really rich SEO material.

Another one is product demos. A lot of times sales teams think, hey, we really want them talking to us. We really want to get in there. But really, things have shifted. People want to self-educate more. They go through the choices of thinking about who they want to work with. And as they're doing that, the more they can decide on their own, they will. And so, people have a high tolerance for consuming video and other material, infographics, white papers, PDFs if it helps them make decisions more quickly by scanning or absorbing material by video, and not having to set up meetings and get on the phone with somebody.

So, these sorts of product demos are things that also make good videos. And Chris, why don't you talk a little bit about avoiding jargon and lingo, and just how to think about crafting video.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So, number two is create videos for your audience. And what we mean by that, is communicate your content in the way that your audience wants to receive it in the way that they talk about the content. In Michael's example, if you are in something that's highly technical, or if it's a B2B or something like that, the tendency can be to use a lot of insider terms, and use a lot of terms that maybe your audience doesn't use at all.

The second thing we talk about here, is just think about your audience when you're making your video. When you're talking about something, when you're using terminology, is that the same thing that your audience is going to use when talking about it to other people, or to themselves? If not, consider changing the terminology. Even if it's something that would sound a little bit pedestrian to you, it's going to communicate more clearly. It's almost like clarity is better than accuracy, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: You want to be clear and communicate clearly, even if it's not the exact right terminology or exact right thing you would say. So, make it palatable to your audience.

Michael Utley: Yeah. A lot of the conversations we have around ... There's the train again. Hope everybody's enjoying the authenticity.

Chris Raines: There's actually two train tracks right above this, right beyond this wall.

Michael Utley: Yeah, right next to us. Yeah, a lot of this comes down to technical information and practitioners who are passionate about their craft, wanting to make sure that people in their industry know that they understand their business.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: But, what this misses is, a lot of times your customers have much less sophisticated ways of saying things, and we even run into—

Chris Raines: How many times have you been called the webmaster?

Michael Utley: Yeah, yeah. The webmaster. Yeah, yeah. The webmaster. Or, we'll often have people schedule meetings with us and say they need help with their social media. And it turns out they're really talking about SEO (search engine optimization) or paid search advertising.

Chris Raines: It's all kind of the same.

Michael Utley: Yeah, people who need services. My goodness, if you're doing something, if you're offering either a product or a service that's either B2B or B2C, you need to honor the need that your customers have when they come to you. That's why they need you. That's why you're in business. Not to be hard to understand or cryptic with them, but to center your language around their pain points.

One of the ones that we think of, and we've mentioned before, is the difference. This is an even tricky kind of thing. We do a lot of sophisticated commercial industrial trade services marketing. And there've been a lot of changes in the products over the years for surface coatings, in particular, epoxy. Polyurea is another form of this sort of surface coating that's getting very popular. And so, we're getting a lot of great traction with it, with a program around polyurea. But, we've got a little problem. A lot of the audience is still searching for epoxy. So, if our client says, oh, we're not using epoxy, that's true. But, what if the audience is still using epoxy? They mean epoxy. It looks and feels like epoxy. It's polyurea. They don't know how to spell polyurea. They feel like they can spell epoxy.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And so, yeah.

Chris Raines: I used to run a PPC program for an orthopedic practice, and we would have keywords, like knee doctor.

Michael Utley: Knee doctor.

Chris Raines: What's a knee doctor? It's an orthopedist.

Michael Utley: Yep. Yep.

Chris Raines: But, people search for it in context of their own problems. So, I have a knee problem, I need a knee doctor. Well, every orthopedist can work on knees, right?

Michael Utley: Yes.

Chris Raines: So, you're meeting them where they are.

Michael Utley: If one of my four sons was finishing medical school right now and deciding on a URL for the website, I would suggest kneedoctornashville.com.

Chris Raines: That's right.

Michael Utley: If nobody's got kneedoctornashville.com, I would suggest that. Okay. Next topic, answer customer questions with video. We talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but we want to dive in deep on this. There are a couple of different sources that you can use to great effect to answer your customers’ questions using video.

One is, the things that you know are the typical conversations that you have in your sales process. If you have a sales team, a good way to start out with a video content strategy is to informally interview them and record those interviews. And, just ask the question, hey, why do people work with this? What are the problems they run into? What questions do they have? What are the points of friction for them on choosing our products or services? And basically, dissect that content and break it down, and suss out or identify all the little points of friction that are customer inquiries.

All of those questions make up things that can be developed into a standalone Q&A format. And some of these may be very short. It may be something like, do you all offer live support? Well, that's not a bad video. It may be a short video, but it's not a bad video in an FAQ section to tell somebody, hey, here's what you can expect with support. Here's where you go on the website to get it. Here's what it looks like. Here's who's going to be helping you. I think that's a minute or two right there.

Chris Raines: And it doesn't even have to be about your product. It could just be general questions around the subject matter that you're involved in.

Michael Utley: That's right. It could be information about your industry as a whole. It could be about your company. It could be about your basic products or services. It could be about special features and ad-ons. It could be about concerns or even a little myth-busting, things they've heard about your products or services that they need resolved.

So, that's source number one is your sales team. They're a real wealth of information, and those guys don't get asked a lot. Go ask them. Go interview them. Do a Google survey. Get them to get them to talk. I've found that in working with a sales team, it's good to just get them verbalizing, and to actually not get them to try to write, because they tend to lock up. But, they tend to flow when it's a verbal request.

Okay. Source number two for this idea of questions customers have, is go to Google, do any kind of search, and then scroll down the page and see if you get a People Also Ask result. This PAA content, people also ask, is very dynamic. It was a response to, we saw this rise in popularity in prevalence on the search results page in Google, with the rise of devices like the Echo Dot Alexa, these voice activated searches, because these were longer tailed questions. People were asking things like, hey, Google, what's the temperature in Antarctica right now? Whereas before, it might've been three keywords, Antarctica, temps, chart.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: These longer form questions give you a very organic sense of how real people are articulating their need.

Chris Raines: That's right. And as voice devices like Alexa and others become more prominent and more used, you're going to see way more. That's why the question format is so valuable because people talk to those devices differently than they type into a search box.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: They're going to ask a question to Alexa, whereas with a search box, they might just type in the topic and see what comes up.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: They're going to interact in more of a personal way by asking a question.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Questions are really powerful choke point for thinking about how we interact with information. In the movie AI, Kubrick was making a movie and he died and Spielberg finished it. But the movie AI, the internet in the movie was basically a hologram of Einstein, and you could ask it questions. Sort of almost a mythical version of the idea of the internet. But, I liked that that is kind of a visual reference of the future to think the Internet's just a QA interface.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: I play a game with my kids in the car. We play, what would an ancient Roman think? As we notice things in the landscape, we'll say, if you dropped an ancient Roman here in the car with us, what would they think? And, we got kind of excited and we said, “Oh, the internet. What about the internet?” And they said, “Oh, a book.” So, that's good. We go to books for information.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: There's a whole world of creativity and ideas ready for you, available that Google has already presented if you just choose to take the time to develop the content and answer those questions.

Chris Raines: Yeah, that's great. Let's move on to number four here. I'll call this one, don't be afraid to give away your knowledge.

Michael Utley: That's good.

Chris Raines: When people are making content, there's a lot of times a rub at some point where they say, especially if you're in a consultative type of business, they'll say, well, we can't give too much of this way. We have to hold back a lot of what our knowledge is in our content. Because if we give too much of it away, they won't need us and they'll go do it themselves. That's not true.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's right.

Chris Raines: 98% of the time it's not true.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And, honestly, I will say for the people that do soak up your knowledge and try to do that themselves, they were never going to be your customers anyway. They were always going to look to solve their problem on their own.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's right.

Chris Raines: And the upside is so big on giving away as much of your knowledge as possible. And the biggest upside is the authority that, that attracts to you as the business. And so, the more you can articulate your knowledge and to give away your knowledge, give away your expertise, the more you're seen as the expert, and most of the time they're not going to try to do what you do on their own. They're going to come to you as the expert, and you've already pre-sold them on that.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: The know, like, and trust. Like, well, they can trust you.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: If they know that you know what you're talking about. So, don't be afraid. Err towards giving things away.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: Don't err towards, oh, we can't really talk about this because that's our secret sauce. No, it's not.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Give it away.

Michael Utley: Yeah, we think of innovation as part of an editorial schedule, and we have waves of how we utilize and develop innovation in our business. We have a hunch about something. We interrogate that, and we develop a template or a strategic document. And, the first wave of publishing that is to our customers, our paying customers. It's part of the set of assets that are used to help our customers. And then, after six months or a year, we're starting to see other people get that hunch and publish, we'll go ahead and turn that into either a blog post. Or, in the case of what we're doing right now on Dodgeball SEO, a series of 102 blog posts, we're turning our 102-point SEO checklist into 102 separate blog posts. And, in probably six months, eight months, we're going to combine that into an ebook that will be available for free.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I was going to say you should do that, too.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's going to be combined into an ebook. We think of it as a fountain, but yeah, give it away, give it away.

Chris Raines: Yep. Give it away. Give it away now.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: As the Chili Peppers would say.

Michael Utley: That's right. That's exactly what I always think of. Last point for today on how to make good content marketing videos. Address customer pain points using video. And our idea here, is you focus video on common challenges to help your clients or customers tackle something that keeps coming up for them that your services helped them fix.

Okay, so this sounds like friction points or things they ask. That really has more to do with this sales process. What we're talking about here is, what is their pain? Why are they searching for help in the first place? There's a cliched way of talking about the solution of, my customer doesn't need a drill. They need a hole in the wall.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: You need to understand what the hole in the wall is that your customer is trying to address, because often there are low-tech solutions or alternatives they can consider that you can meet with your products or services. We've had any number of clients talk to us about whether or not they should move to a very expensive marketing automation platform. And we've said, well, what do you want to publish about? And they really didn't have a content strategy built out yet.

So, we've often said, hey, hang on a second. Why don't we use this Google sheet and develop an editorial schedule first? And by developing an editorial schedule, we're developing a low-tech way just to start thinking about what they're going to actually populate this marketing automation software with once they have it up and running. They're in this conversation to essentially be sold something very expensive that doesn't quite address their pain. Their pain is, they're trying to figure out how to talk to an audience, but they're missing this whole other side of things.

So, yeah, figuring out what your customer's real pain is, and then speaking to that, is going to make your video content possibly be a little bit of a myth-busting type of thing, or shake them up and get them out of somebody else's sales conversation into something that's really going to meet their needs. And often it's a good way to differentiate yourself if you can help them deescalate or simplify how they see their problems, because often their problems are wrapped up in the complexity of what they don't understand, and the language someone else is using that they're trying to grasp onto. And so, pain gets very complicated very quickly.

If you can develop content that very simply connects with and addresses that pain on both a human side and a services or a technical side, that's a very effective way to use video to insert yourself in a conversation that may be getting away from someone.

Chris Raines: That's great.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: That's all we have those five ways to make good content marketing videos. And hopefully, you're using video in your content marketing already. It's easier and easier every day to even low-cost ways to produce video. So, it should be part of your marketing mix, and hopefully, this helps you implement that.

Michael Utley: Thanks.

Chris Raines: Thanks for watching.