Video is the most powerful trend in content marketing. But you don't want to be on camera. Don't let that stop you or your competitors will crush you. What are your options here?

Video is the most powerful trend in content marketing. You've noticed that as soon as you log into LinkedIn, or open the app, the first thing you see is a video, so you know you have to do more video content marketing, and you have to start right now. But what's the most common complaint we get? "Yes, I want to do video content marketing, but I suck in front of the camera." That's a very fair point, but it shouldn't hold you back from video content marketing, or your competitors will crush you. What are your options here?

You can use slides that build on your talking points throughout the video, or you can script your video and have an actor deliver it for you. In this video, we'll go through these options in a little more detail, but first, I wanted to talk a little about when you should be the person in front of the camera and when you shouldn't.

What is best for small companies and what for larger companies.

If you're a solopreneur or a small business, it may be a good idea for you to be the person featured in your video content marketing because your prospects will see you and get to know, like, and trust you, so when they call in, they're not talking to a stranger, but someone they see as an expert, a trusted advisor who can solve their problems. That can be very powerful and helps to shorten your sales cycle. But if you're a larger business, you may not want your video content marketing to be tied to anyone in your company, specifically even the CEO. You may not want to build a business around one person, but rather, the entire company, in which case it's best to either use slides or an actor as representative for your business.

1. Slides

Now, let's talk about option number one, using slides in your videos used for content marketing. This is not as good as using an actor because, let's face it, slides aren't nearly as engaging, but it's still a decent solution, and it's much better than nothing. Well-designed slides can go a long way to properly engage your audience to break it up a bit and make sure it doesn't feel like they're sitting through yet another boring corporate presentation. Use as few words as possible on your slide, and add lots of fun photos with bold messaging.

Now, how can you put all of this together? To design your presentation, you can simply use one of the templates your software comes with, or if you want to invest in your look a little bit, you can go on Fiverr and find a cost-effective gig to get a more professional custom template for your presentations that you'll use over and over again. This will also help you reinforce your branding.

To break up your presentation, storyblocks.com is one of the best solutions because with an annual subscription that's around a couple of hundreds of dollars, you can get access to all the stock photos you need, and with videoblocks.com or getyarn.io, you can level up, add some stock footage, or even funny clips to make your video even more engaging. Finally, to record your video and sync your audio with your presentation, you can use a tool like Camtasia or ScreenFlow, or even QuickTime is a good free alternative, but it doesn't give you all the editing functionality you might need.

With these tools, you can screencast your presentation, which means that you can capture your screen showing your presentation and click through it while you're talking. In the end, you'll get a video that shows your presentation and is synced to your voiceover. If you need editing, you can do it with Camtasia or ScreenFlow, or even outsource it to someone on Fiverr or Upwork.

2. Hiring an actor as a representative

Now, let's talk about the second option, hiring an actor as a representative for your brand videos. This is actually a great option. The only challenge is that you have to script your videos word for word, but that's something that we actually recommend anyway because when you write your script, you often go back a few times and always improve it, make it tighter, add more insights, make it more valuable for your audience, and that's the most important thing. Scripting is really something you should focus on. If that's a hurdle, we can definitely help.

We have and can recommend very streamlined processes to make it much easier for you. For example, you can have someone from your team interview you on a topic, record and transcribe the interview, and then edit it to tighten it up and enhance it. With a one-hour interview, you can end up with enough material to produce more than 10 videos.

There you go. If you're not doing video content marketing now, you will soon be at a clear disadvantage, and if you do want to do video content marketing, but what's holding you back is that you don't want to be on camera, problem solved.