A “Facebook marketing expert” accepted our outreach offer to create a video for her business at no cost, just to show her what our new video-making platform can do.
I sent her back a 16-second video that pitched her Facebook marketing course. It included professional graphics, the typography was perfectly in sync with her brand and website, and she didn’t have to copy-edit and request changes.
Oh, and it took about 8 minutes from start to finish.
Intrigued?
Guess what – you have a ton of on-brand, ready-to-use content for videos too! If you’ve got a web site, or a Facebook page, or printed material, you already have assets for video.
Here are some expert shortcut tips to get you to “video content” in under 10 minutes.
First, you need to be clear on subject matter – if you don’t have a well-defined message to get across in a video (or videos), start there. Since this was the top-listed course on said expert’s web page, I assumed that she was interested in having people sign up.
Tip #1: don’t “make a video.” Waste of time. “Make a video about _____.”
And yet – and yet, this is where most people go into vaporlock when it comes to video. “I want a video about this new course. Must…get…camera…footage….voiceover…budget…”
No, you don’t.
Hiring a studio and crew, with cameras and lights, at hundreds of dollars an hour, is one way to get video – the expensive, slow, difficult-to-update way. Save your calendar and budget!
She already had a great-looking web page about the course that covered all the W’s – who, what, where, when, why and how much. The “content” required to pitch the course was already there – too much content, in fact. The page itself wasn’t well-suited to posting or emailing – too long, not very visual, and no motion.
In video form, though…people like video; they’ll click on that little triangle 3-4 times more often than they’ll read a long paragraph.
So putting that content into a video ‘container’ was the solution.
Tip #2: select clear, short visuals & copy for video use.
Since it was her web site, I assumed that it was on-brand; transferring her logo to the video background & matching her font was simple.
Opening scene – how do we grab people’s attention? Oh, look, there’s a big, splashy intro graphic about the course, right on the site. Right-click, download, add to video.
The actual course page was one of those long-form sales pages…the kind that scrolls forever, with the price (finally!) in Tierra del Fuego. Too much text – but there was a great, short paragraph about the reach of Facebook, plus a tight little chartlet about Facebook (79% of all social referrals!).
So I copied that text, and popped it in a Franklin Gothic text block on the video next to the chart image.
Tip #3: a few basic design tools – a color-sampler like Sip, and a good screen grabber like Skitch, help!
Middle segment of video, done!
The closing screen content was the simplest of all shortcuts – a screenshot. Her web site already had a big fat checklist of the reasons someone should take the course.
Here’s the key – if it were a tiny, svelte Norwegian checklist, a screenshot wouldn’t have worked. You stretch a screen shot, you get an ugly graphic. You shrink a screen shot, it still looks fantastic. So these folks following the design trend of Truly Enormous Single Visuals for websites make the video job easier, too.
So closing segment = checklist + huge URL to her course landing page.
Seriously, that was it. Under 8 minutes to a finished marketing video.
I’ll recap. You need a video?
- Grab copy and graphics off your web site.
- Pick a template that suits the brand, with a soundtrack that helps move people.
- Drop A into B, download video, and start marketing.
Oh, sorry.
Wait – stop, not done yet.
If you just download a video file, you’re looking at a bunch of technical grunt work to make it do something for your marketing. Creating is one job; using video is another.
That’s OK. We built the sharing-and-using tools into Vid.One to get rid of grunt work.
- Upload video to Facebook? Check. (Business pages, too!)
- Post on Twitter, LinkedIn – yup.
- Transfer video to Vimeo, Wistia or Vidyard – that’s a yes.
- Add directly to MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or AWeber? Yah, sure, you betcha.
Tip #4: A video file alone doesn’t equal marketing action.
So next time you’re thinking “we should have more video in our marketing mix”, take a look at all the content you have for that next project. If you’ve got a web page – even in draft – it adds up to a lot more than you’d think, usually.
Grab all those files, and head on over to Vid.One, and give it a shot – you don’t like it, you don’t pay. You do like it, it’s about 5 bucks (seriously.) We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised just how easy it is.
Here’s the funny part. I got a snippy email back from her saying “this is an older class that I’m not really marketing…the video really isn’t on-brand for me at all, sorry.”
Um…OK…it’s your website, your logo, your font, and your content about your online marketing course. Maybe there’s an alternative-facts type definition of “expert” that I missed, or maybe it’s just one of those ‘do what I say, not what I do’ situations.
I decided not to sign up for the course after all, though.
Guest article written by: Matthew Dunn is the founder and Chief Explainer at Say It Visually, creators of Vid.One, Fast Forward Stories and other visual-communication services. He’s been a startup CEO, corporate Senior VP & CIO, Microsoft veteran, professor, and teacher. He is also an award-winning writer, designer, director, inventor. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media and an MFA in Directing.