How To Create Homegrown Videos To Fuel Your Content Marketing Strategy

You Need Video, But You Have To Shoot It Yourself — Here’s How To Do It

Everyone knows you need video content for marketing, sales and customer service. Most people admit they are visual learners. In fact, 60% of people score themselves as visual learners. That means they would prefer to watch than read.

You need video content to be front and center in your video content strategy. However, shooting, producing and publishing video content from home has been nearly impossible — until now.

You might not know it yet, but there are three use cases for video in your business. 

1) Video for marketing can include videos:

• From your CEO sharing company strategy
• From your product people explaining new features
• From client services talking about how they helped clients in specific industries
• For social media
• For paid ads
• For your website
• For email campaigns
• From customers talking about their experiences with your products and services
• Showing how you’re responding to a crisis

2) Video for sales can include videos:

• From sales reps to specific prospects
• With answers to prospects’ questions
• Showcasing product features
• Highlighting specific applications for your products or specific solutions for your services
• Showing feature demos
• Featuring references from actual customers
• That enhance your sales process

3) Video for customer service can includes videos:

• Answering frequently asked questions from customers
• Showing or illustrating how to use your products
• From customer service leadership
• Highlighting company culture
• Introducing customer service reps to customers
• Explaining how customers can leave reviews
• Helping cross-sell and up-sell additional products or services

The use of video is wide and deep in companies today, and it should be a big part of your revenue generation strategy. Your team should be prepared to create these videos in-house and at home with a new suite of tools, applications and capabilities.

Here’s how to start an in-home video production effort.

Planning

One of the hardest aspects of video is knowing what topics to cover. We’ve been asked these kinds of questions before.

What do I write about? What do I blog about? What educational content should I publish? The answer to your video question is the same as the answers to these questions.

What are your prospects asking you about? What questions come up time and time again? The answers are the topics for your videos.

Just like you plan out editorial calendars for your whitepapers, e-books and blogs, now you need to plan out an editorial calendar around video.

One of the easiest ways to get started with video is using basic questions and answers.

Start with the question and then have your subject answer the question. Since prospects usually have many questions, you should have many ideas for your videos.

When we work with clients to map out questions that their prospects ask across the buyer journey, we typically uncover over 100 questions. Start with the most common, the most frequently asked or the ones that have the most interesting answers.

Now you have ideas for months’ worth of at-home videos for your business.

Production

This might also cause you to pause. Where do I shoot these videos? How do I light them? How do I get the best sound? Can I use my iPhone? What other apps do I need on the phone? Can someone join me on the shoot? What should my setting look like?

These are all legitimate questions and issues that should go into getting prepared for the video shoot.

Many of the answers are covered in the new video playbook we created for our clients and prospects. But if you’re looking for short answers, here they are.

Lighting is all about trial and error. Once you get it right, you can use it over and over again. Make sure there is good natural light, and if the natural light is too low or it’s too dark, start looking at adding lighting.

Simple household lights or spotlights might be enough; sometimes the lights in the room illuminate the shot just fine. Make sure the lighting isn’t casting any shadows over your face, and be sure your camera is getting enough light to record a high-quality image. Then you should be good to go.

Picking your location is easy too. Make sure your background is not distracting, you have no interruptions when you shoot and you pick a quiet spot. You might want to consider what is in the background. For example, you may not want pictures of your children.

By making your background interesting, you can create a warmer set for your videos. You can also consider adding a virtual background, which is easy to do.

Finally, the most important element of production is sound. You have to be heard. If the sound is bad, the video is going to be difficult to watch. You can use your computer’s mic or the mic on your smartphone, but the best bet might be to invest in a lavalier (lav) mic that clips on your shirt and attaches to your phone. This ensures the best sound, and you will be able to talk naturally to get that solid sound you’re looking for.

Now that you’re ready to shoot, it’s lights, camera, action!

Post-Production

You got through the hard part. You shot the video. Your talent was great. The setup worked better than you expected. The footage is in the can, as they say.

But you’re only halfway there. If you want a high-quality video, you need some post-production work before your video is ready for prime time.

You want to add some branding. Your logo should be present at the beginning and the end of the video. This helps remind viewers that your company brought them this high-quality video content.

You should consider some graphics. When a person is talking, it’s important to include their name, title and company. Again, this reminds the viewers who’s speaking and why their comments are relevant.

You might want to pull out a few keywords or important phrases and add them to the video while the speaker is referencing those points. This reinforces your most important points and makes the video just a little more interesting.

We recommend a few seconds of upbeat music to kick off the video, pull people in and get their attention. We also like to wrap up the video with the same musical exit.

Closed captions are critical. A survey of U.S. consumers found that 92% view videos with the sound off on mobile and 83% watch with sound off, according to a new report from Verizon Media and ad buyer Publicis Media.

It’s easy to add closed captioning to your videos in post-production. YouTube offers a feature that allows you to turn it on when you post videos to the platform. But if you’re using video on your site or in your marketing as native files, you’ll need captions added in post-production.

Finally, you want your videos to trigger additional action. That means you’ll need an offer and link at the end of every video. What do you want your prospects or customers to do after they watch the video? Head back to your website? Download a related offer? Schedule a call with you? Whatever you want, build it into the video during post-production.

Now you’re almost ready to go, but before you start posting, take time to plan your promotional strategy.

Promotion

Your videos are ready to go. What you do with them will make or break your ability to generate results for your business.

The first stop is your website. You should have had a plan around your website going into the video creation process. You should already know where you want the videos on your website, but videos on the website are a slam-dunk home run.

They make the visitor experience better, they keep visitors on your site pages (which improves your Google rankings) and they give people something to click on when they land on those pages. All of these improvements help your site page rank, conversion rate and visitor experiences.

Next stop, social media. Set up a YouTube channel for your company and post all of your videos there. Google owns YouTube, and YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. Putting content on YouTube drives views, visitors and rankings.

Now take those videos and put them on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Yes, even if you’re a B2B company, get them on Facebook. Since your videos are contextually linked, those social posts should drive more people back to your website to watch the video and learn more about your company, products or services.

Last but not least, consider using the video in your email marketing campaigns too. Video is a great example of how marketing works in 2020. It’s not a single campaign anymore but rather a collection of campaigns and assets all working together. Website, content marketing, video, social media, email marketing, search engine optimization and site optimization are all getting covered once you create your video assets.

Tracking

You might have thought we were done. The videos are created, they’re posted and they’re on your website, but we’re not even close to being done. Marketing never sleeps (or I should say good marketing never sleeps).

Now you have to get data on the performance of your videos. You didn’t create videos just to create videos. You created them to drive leads, sales opportunities and new customers.

Your best bet is to set up dashboards that keep track of your video content.

The data we typically look at is total views and the quality of those views. Are people watching your videos all the way through? HubSpot actually provides very good viewer-level data on videos that are hosted inside HubSpot.

To see the performance of your video you have to visit the blog, website page or landing page that features the video. There you can see how many people viewed it, how long they viewed the video for and when they stopped viewing the video.

If you’re looking for additional data on the performance of your videos, you can start tracking shares, comments and social media data related to views and shares on all the social sites.

This provides insight that can help you adjust your content and production plans going forward. Lean into those content ideas that generate more clicks, views and shares while you can start to lean away from the videos that are less productive.

If you set up links in your emails, you can also track views of the connected landing pages and the leads generated from those pages.

Keep tabs on your videos weekly and make adjustments to your video strategies based on that data. Before you know it, you’ll have a library of highly viewed and highly converting video assets that drive leads, sales opportunities and new customers for your business.