You’re sold on video. You know it’s the biggest trend for high-growth businesses. But where to start? How can you create high-impact video that will help you grow YOUR business? Here’s our step by step process to take out all the guesswork and anxiety.
Step 1: repurpose successful content
First, look at your blog posts and rank them by their traction. The ones that resonated the most with your audience in terms of traffic and/or comments should be at the top. These will be the first topics you’ll focus on.
What if you don’t have a vibrant blog or many topics on there yet? Use a tool like BuzzSumo and KWFinder to find the best content out there for your ideal keywords.
You don’t want to reinvent the wheel here with video. You want to rely on content that you know is going to strike a chord with your audience. You pretty much want guaranteed success.
If it’s your blog content, guess what? You’re pretty much done already. If not, you want to create your own content based on your research. Put your spin on it, add your insights, enhance with some more research and links, showcase your expertise.
Step 2: edit into webinar text
Now go through the blog content and make some edits so it flows better for spoken language. You’re effectively turning this text into a webinar.
A webinar is a great evergreen piece of content that you can use as a lead magnet on your home page or landing page.
Your visitors value video content greatly, especially if it has a hook embedded in it. Tip: how-to, top10, and myth-busting videos tend to work really well.
Step 3: record your video
You can do this on your own with your computer’s camera and software like TechSmith’s Camtasia. But you may be anxious about how you’ll look on camera, or the content delivery doesn’t come out very authentic. Check out our guide to creating high-quality authentic video content for some help, or give us a call to see if we can help with your project.
What we’ll do is that we’ll either invite you to one of our permanent studio offices, or if you’re not close to one we’ll do what’s called a double-ender. We’ll be on the phone guiding you and asking you questions in order to make you more comfortable and the video more conversational. Then we’ll take the raw footage and polish it up with color correction, editing, lower-thirds, audio cleanup, etc.
It used to be that very raw home-made videos worked really well on YouTube but now viewers’ expectations have gone through the roof because everyone has elevated their game.
What if you don’t want to be on camera? We can use one from our stable of actors to become your brand’s video ambassador. It’s the same exact process only they’ll reach your webinar script from in our studio using a teleprompter and a professional setup. We’ve picked highly personable and experienced actors that will deliver your content very authentically.
Step 4: reach your audience
Having a powerful lead magnet is great and all, but you’re probably asking “now what?”
And this is perhaps the most important part, where most people miss a trick. You want to make sure you promote your video as effectively as possible. That means: you have to get it in front of the right audience.
If you’re B2B and you know the exact persona with whom your video would resonate, you want to use LinkedIn. You can sponsor your content to pay per engagement, or you can send an InMail inviting someone to your webinar but there you pay for reach (pay per send instead of engagement). So you have to make your recipients feel special and your message authentic and personal instead of spammy.
If you’re B2C (or in many cases even if you’re B2B), you want to try Facebook and YouTube ads. We’re hearing from some experts that Instagram is becoming the hot place to build an audience cost-effectively too.
Step 5: capture emails
Your ad should direct traffic to a landing page with your video. This can be your blog content with the video and an email pop-up or welcome mat. Or you can “gate” your video, which means that the pop-up that asks for their email is embedded inside the video.
So after someone’s watched 1 or 2 minutes of your video so they know it has to offer lots of value, then you ask for their email address to continue. This tends to work much better and can be done easily by hosting your video on Vimeo with a business account or Wistia.
Step 6: nurture leads
Once you have your list of emails from people who watched your video, you know that they’re interested in what you’re offering. But they’re not sold yet. That’s where nurturing comes in. You want to demonstrate that you can be their trusted partner, that you’re the expert in your field.
That way, they won’t feel like they need to do their own extensive research and bid our their business to competitors.
Nurturing means that you put these emails into an email cadence. You typically send them a series of 5-8 emails using a software tool like Mailshake or Mailchimp. The content can be some of your best blogs, ideally turned into videos in order to continue with high engagement (various research pieces on the impact of video in email campaigns shows 50-300% more engagement). And the experts recommend using the Fibonacci sequence for the frequency of your emails, meaning that you send 1 the next day, 1 the following day, then wait for 2 days before another email goes out, then 3 days, and then 5 days etc.
So there you have a step by step process to create AND promote a high-impact piece of video content: blog -> webinar -> record -> promote -> capture -> nurture. And this is a process that you’ll probably want to repeat on a regular (e.g., monthly) basis in order to keep growing your audience and promoting new services or the same service with a different angle.