Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #62: The Best Ways to Use Video in Your Marketing

Chris Raines: Hey there. Welcome to episode 60. I got to look here. 62, 62, 6 two of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. Michael, we're going to talk about video today. I love video.

Michael Utley: I do too. I love this topic.

Chris Raines: I love video. I felt...

Michael Utley: And our title is The Best Way to Use Videos in Your Marketing.

Chris Raines: Best way to use videos in your marketing, video's huge. The internet is basically one big collection of videos at this point. Everybody loves video. It's proliferating everywhere. So it's obviously a big thing when we're talking about marketing, how not, if we're going to use video in our marketing, but how we're going to use video in marketing. Because it's almost a predetermined. You have to use video, you have to do something. So we're going to do five things that we think are the most important things to think about and how to deploy video out on the internet for your marketing.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: Michael, you want to do one?

Michael Utley: Yeah, I'll do number one, provide a 360-degree overview on your homepage. Every company that has customers needs to be able to create some real estate to show people, here's what you can expect working with us. For whatever reason, we do a lot of lead generation, a lot of patient acquisition. We're generally in the business of driving results. We're not necessarily focused typically on branding projects. We're more marketing channel results folks in what we have done in our careers. And so the way we think of it is how does this help or hurt close rate? How does this move people through a story of getting to know that what we're offering meets their needs? So this would be true for someone looking at maybe, dermatology services or someone looking at selling their ophthalmology practice to a mergers and acquisitions company. To a venture capital company.

Michael Utley: Somebody thinking about cybersecurity for healthcare. Could be somebody thinking about hiring a new roofer for their house or their business. These are all things that we've worked with, where videos come to play. And on the homepage, you don't really have a lot of time with any online engagement. But if you want to take 60 seconds to make a video for your homepage. What I recommend is, hit the highlights and don't go deep in any one chapter of knowledge or information that you need to convey instead do a 360. So for me, here's what that means. Number one, here's who we are and the market that we service and exactly what we do, very simple. That's probably 10 to 20 seconds at the most. Next, these are the services. Here are the highlights of the different categories of service that someone might fit into.

Michael Utley: Number three, how we work, this is what you can expect when you work with us, make contact, we're going to do an intake. We're going to come back with a proposal. Then you're going to have a program. That's a 1, 2, 3. You can deliver that in 10, 15 seconds. And then number four, some kind of social proof, some kind of credibility. We're excited about working with you because we have enjoyed working with thousands of your friends and neighbors in city already named.

Michael Utley: So this kind of review of the company, isn't just a deep dive into, you've got to know all of our services. It's a cursory touch on all the different things that you would do in the life of a sales conversation. And so to me, for a homepage, that's the best use of video is to condense everything that you would do over say a one-month or a six-month sales relationship where maybe it's a complex sale. You're going to have social proof, references, you're going to have all these different types of information. So you got to condense that. And that's an easy 60 to 90-second video outline.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And a lot of times too, if you have a lot of things you need to cover, video can go a lot further and cover more ground than having multiple sections on the homepage for those things. So if you're a nonprofit that has five different areas of service or ministry or whatever, it's really hard to convey all of that in-depth but you can do that really succinctly in a video.

Michael Utley: Yeah. In video, there's something really cool about video. With video you've actually got two frequencies that you're transmitting on. So Elon Musk always says that, with a keyboard, we have all these keys, we got 30 keys on a keyboard, but with this guy, I've just got two thumbs. And so suddenly I'm going through a much smaller, I've gone from 10 fingers down to two. And so it really changes the bandwidth. But with video, you've really got two frequencies you're transmitting on. So you can have images and voiceover, both providing different data points in the story you're telling. So yeah, video's very rich. That's right.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So number two, here, digging into details on your service pages. So Michael talked about the homepage. We're going to talk the service pages. So you mentioned, the homepage is good for 360. We're going to mention the services, but we're not going to go deep. Well, service page videos are a chance to go deeper into that service. So now we're going to talk about what pains this service solves, who it's for. And it's a really good opportunity, I think on service pages, to roll in relevant customer testimonials. So you're going to layout, this is the overview of the service. This is what we're going to do. This is the pain we're going to solve. This is the outcome that we're going to get you to. And oh, by the way, here's three other people that we've done that same service for and advanced them to that outcome that they were looking for.

Chris Raines: And testimonials, in particular, are really, really powerful in helping people get past that moment of trust and saying, "Is this something that will work for me? Well, it worked for these three people. So I think it's going to work for me. I think I trust them." So those are a couple good things to keep in mind on service. You can go deep on one service in a way that it's not really appropriate on the homepage and you can roll in those testimonials that are attached to that service, that can really be influential and persuasive to your audience.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I wouldn't hesitate on a services page to have two to three minutes of content in a video.

Chris Raines: Oh yeah. And as many, and here's the thing, depending on what you're selling, people are hungry for that testimonial content. So even if it's a Zoom recording, even if it's not super, now, if you can do it professional, that's great, do it. But even if it's a Zoom call or something, I would not hesitate.

Chris Raines: I have a weight loss client center and we've got a proof page and we've got 10 testimonies and we're going to keep adding. We're going to make it overwhelming. We're going to, keep scrolling, keep scrolling. Holy good Lord. There's a hundred, I know this is going to work for me. Look at all these people. So that's how powerful it can be.

Michael Utley: So if your editing's tight, you can actually pack quite a bit of value in a services page video. Good. All right. Next up, use video in your marketing to increase the conversion rate on your ad landing pages. Generally, in contemporary internet marketing, in the modern era, when we're doing advertising, we're not driving people to a website. We're driving them to a landing page. It's a single page where we are focusing on just the thing that was the connection that we had with them in the ad. Whether it's social media ad or a search ad, we're tightening up, we may offer 10 different products and services as a company. But if that search keyword and ad had to do with one of those 10, guess what, that landing page is going to be big and full around that one specific service.

Chris Raines: If you're a janitorial company and you do floor care [crosstalk 00:08:01]. If somebody searches floor care, you don't want to send them the homepage you're going to send to that floor care page, aren't you?

Michael Utley: Yeah. It's always, always, always about taking the work off of the customer, off of the user. And so video HubSpot, the number that I always go back to, it's kind of a dated number, but it probably still holds up, is from HubSpot. Is that a video being added to a landing page will increase the conversion rate by 30%. Well, that's huge. That probably in any sizeable campaign, justifies the cost of producing that video. And video is always getting easier and easier to produce. So in video, on source, it could be the same video that you would use on the services page on the website, or it could be a combination of what we call, I think we just moved our camera a little bit. I think we're okay. It could be a combination of what we would use on a homepage to cover 360 degrees of the company.

Michael Utley: So when you're using a video on a landing page, you might have a handful of highlights about who you are. So they're contextualized and they know, okay, who is this company? I'm on this landing page, from this ad. You might have some social proof in that video content. And you might go into a little bit of how to get started in working with us so that you're projecting a little bit of what their future is going to be like in moving ahead with you with this service. And so these are ways that video content on a landing page, coming in from an ad will significantly improve the campaign.

Chris Raines: Perfect. Love it. All right. Number four, share a regular flow of content on your social channel. Obviously, Facebook and Instagram are heavy, heavy video. You've got stories now, there's another channel on both of those platforms. You've got Snapchat, which is still around with, it's heavily video-based. And the new kid on the block is TikTok who is all video-based. So video is becoming more and more the format that people consume content on social channels. So a good thing to think about is if you're doing, let's say that that video shoot to do a services page video, landing page video, or a homepage video, make sure you plan into that day clips that you can use for social, right? So you might have a video.

Chris Raines: So let's say, let's take the customer testimonial. So let's say you film, you have a shoot day and you film three customer testimonials. Let's say each video is, each raw interview clip is maybe 15, 20 minutes. You might be able to clip 7, 7, 8 little bitty clips out of those big clips, right? And so now, you maybe put some graphics around it, maybe put a title at the front and maybe do something creative with the video to make it, like Facebookify the video. Well, suddenly you've got, what is that? 21 clips. So you've got one project that you got your main customer testimonial video out of it. But now you've got 21 clips that you can share over and over again. And you can format them for TikTok if you wanted to. Although, customer testimonials are kind of weird from TikTok. But you can put them on, you can put the small clips on YouTube. So this becomes fodder. Don't think about we're going to do the one video, think about one video and then 20 clips with it.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Breaking things down, disaggregating larger pieces of material into something that can be absorbed more quickly. You know, it's like in magazine layouts, you have maybe a long-form article, but you take little call outs and you put them in larger print, pull a box around it, maybe add a picture. So it's a way to kind of create a little bit of a chunky style engagement with the material. That's good.

Michael Utley: All right. Next up. And we'll wrap up today's episode with this. Use video in your marketing by highlighting your best topics in email newsletters. If you have an opt-in email newsletter list, even if it's a really small list of just your customers because they're essentially opted into you as a customer. They need to be kept in touch with, to be nurtured, kept up to date, maybe new products and services. Maybe just know that you're still kicking still in business. And a good way to do that is with email.

Michael Utley: Something that we like to do, we actually do this with the Dodgeball SEO newsletter, is every issue of the email is a blog post and a recent podcast clip or episode. And so we are not only, and where this came from, for me was, that videos really expensive to produce. So you have to take an approach of getting a lot of uses out of every piece of content you produce. So not only are you going to put it on YouTube and have an optimized YouTube listing. You're also going to have a webpage for that video where you've got maybe a full transcript blown out below it to get the SEO value of that text. And that's really good.

Michael Utley: So that's two, YouTube and website. Chris, you talked about number three, social media. Taking clips and rotating those into your social media. Which can be not just one episode or one video, but broken up into separate clips. So that's a big, number three is really big. Well, this fourth one is good old-fashioned email. Just putting a still shot or something to promote the content and let people know it exists. But then getting that connection out to the world, letting people know, "Hey, we've got a new episode of this, check it out." And for us, with the podcast, that's one of the ways people discover new topics. And so we talk about something in the podcast, we say, "Hey, I was watching this video that you sent me and just want to know, is that something we should be doing? Is that a service we should be doing in addition to what we're already doing with you all?"

Michael Utley: And so for us, we've done this, seen it to be very effective. But emails just so inexpensive. If you don't waste the time of the recipient, if you're offering something that's truly valuable, then it is going to be well received. You just have to do all the best practices with email marketing to do that.

Chris Raines: I'll say it's more clickable inside the email box. If you can roll in the thumbnail with the play button, place to play button over top of it, it's just such a clickable element. And it's more exciting to engage with the video than it is a text article.

Michael Utley: Totally. Totally. So check in with us for ideas on that. And then yeah, this has been episode 62 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast. The Best Ways to Use Video in Your Marketing. I'm Michael. This is Chris. Follow us on Dodgeball SEO on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. As always, thank you for everyone sharing with us that you're getting these and sharing comments. We always appreciate hearing from you and follow and subscribe and that's it. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you on the next one.