Nothing says New Year like new tactics, and if there is one tactic that is worth examining in the coming year to add value to your communities through your content, it is integrating video. Over the last few months of 2015, we began a discussion of what it takes to integrate video into your content marketing - even if in baby steps. Let’s take a look at what we’ve learned so far, where we’re going in 2016, and five ways you can add video to your content marketing along with us!
1. Start with Testimonials
In our very first discussion about adding video to your content marketing, we spoke with Jen Knoedl about the value of the quick, simple, authentic testimonial. Jen literally wrote a book about this, and she has a great instinct for making people feel at ease in front of a camera. Those authentic moments, she says, can go a long way toward building trust and adding value to your community. Viewers recognize when what they are seeing is too staged or forced, but they appreciate seeing themselves in your content, especially when they see the solutions that are most relevant to them. Before you start gathering footage for your simple testimonials, don’t forget to ask yourself community-centric questions that help you stay focused on creating content that is valuable to your community and not just focused on what you want to tell them (or sell them.)
2. Do YouTube Intelligently
No matter what kind of videos you are adding to your content marketing, the simple fact of the matter is that you will need a place to host and stream them, and there is no more recognized place to do that than Google’s game changing video platform, YouTube. It may, however, not exactly be the best place for you to start, especially without an understanding of what communities of viewers on YouTube commonly expect. Fresh off of a day full of learning at ContentJam, we were lucky enough to sit down with one of the most recognized names in YouTube marketing strategy these days, Amy Schmittauer, the creator of the wildly popular Savvy, Sexy, Social video blog. Amy was kind enough to share her tips for things like content length (make sure you are consistent, and don’t be afraid to dive right in without too much “intro”), comments (don’t be afraid of the trolls or to get the conversation started yourself), and keywords (YouTube is a straight-up search engine these days, so make sure you hit those relevant keywords in your tags - she recommended the use of http://vidiq.com/ to help).
3. Use Video for Company Culture through Social Good
When it comes to asking what your content can do for your community (instead of focusing on what it can do for you) there is no faster way than to literally document the ways you are contributing to your broader community through social good. We sat down with video production professional Dave Hunter of Greenroom Video Productions and discovered that the most valuable videos in your content marketing efforts are often the ones that your viewers connect with the most emotionally. Creating videos that highlight those emotional notes can lift up the value of your video efforts in general. Emotionally relevant videos don’t necessarily mean higher production value, but adding things like compelling music can go a long way. We also discussed other ways adding video to your content marketing strategy doesn’t necessarily mean just talking about your product or service. One of the communities you are a part of includes individuals who would like to join your organization as staff, and video is a great way to let prospective employee advocates know what it is like to work at your organization from an employment branding point of view.
4. Go Mobile
There is no greater reason to begin adding video to your content marketing (besides adding value to your communities) than the drastic advances in availability of mobile devices to gather (and even stream live) video content. Nearly everybody has a mobile device capable of gathering some great footage to use in your videos, and each of our guests to this point sought to remind us of the value of that ubiquity of technology, along with a few caveats. Those devices are changing everything from the way we communicate to the way we spend our time. We had the chance to sit down with someone who is doing a great job of navigating that change: storyteller, video game creator, app creator, and video producer Josh Tsui. Josh knows better than anybody the convergence of these areas that are apparent in the trends of increased video consumption, and he gave us some excellent suggestions for using those mobile devices to wade into the process of adding value to your communities via your content as fortified by video.
5. Let the Machines do the Work
In our last #OMGVMS conversation of 2015, we had the chance to sit down with some innovators in the video editing software space, ShredVideo, to talk about the pain they experienced trying to find the time to take all the footage they were gathering and edit it into anything useable or sharable. We came upon ShredVideo’s automatic video editing tool in our blog post discussions of video editing tools, and they were kind enough to talk to us about what it takes to “make the machines” do some work for you and their effort to take some of the pain out of the video editing process. We also talked about the various opportunities an organization has for gathering images and video around their events, and some great ways to assemble them together in an authentic way to provide value to their communities.
BONUS: Start Creating and Recording Video Chat Conversations!
As we set upon this task of exploring and sharing ways to add video to your content marketing, we’ve also discovered that having conversations online and recording them like a panel or webinar can be a really simple way to start getting video into your content marketing and adding value to your communities. We know that this topic is of value to organizations we work with, so we went out of our way to both explore and share what we are learning with our communities. Hopefully you can find yourself doing the same! A few of the tools we’ve been able to use to do that are the up and coming BLAB network, SKYPE, and Google Hangouts. In future sessions, we’ll be unpacking some best practices we’ve learned for using these tools (and other more “webinar” focused tools as well), so be sure to join us. You can also suggest what you’d like us to cover.
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