Blab #28: Utilising Video for Brand

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Labs podcast. I'm your host, Tilly Hayes, the SEO exec here at Marketing Labs. Video content has become a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy. However, creating an effective video content strategy can be quite daunting, especially for small brands. In this episode, we're joined by the ML team to explore the world of video marketing, and hopefully we will uncover some secrets to making it work for your business. Joining me on today's pod are Tom, Nick, and Matt. How's everyone doing?

Good, thanks til, yeah. Good, Phil, how are you? Thanks.

Yeah, good, thank you. What are the first steps that brands should think about when creating a video content strategy?

The two most important things are defining your objectives. What do you want to achieve and who is your audience and what's your messaging? It's three.

I would chuck one more in there though. I would say

Platform. Yeah,

That's true because if you're creating a video that is for, to be fair, once you've got a video, you can normally repurpose it for multiple platforms, but a lot of people come with one purpose for the video. They might say, oh, I want a video for the hero section on my website, or I want a video to showcase what our business does. But you can chop that up and use it elsewhere.

Yeah, you can quite easily. You can repurpose it, can't you? I guess the one thing is though, some platforms you might need slightly different messaging for.

In

An ideal world, you probably would produce per platform

If it's campaign based, you'll need different messaging for different videos,

But obviously that's quite time consuming. So you could always repurpose, and I think you'd get most of the way there.

I think when considering it all is try and plan so that you capture all your content in one go, then you've got the biggest opportunity to chop that up to whatever you think you need it for, whether that's social, website, display campaigns, get as much content as you can in one go and try and plan in advance. That's what I would say is probably the most important thing.

How would you go about optimising that type of content for different channels?

Well, obviously I think repurposing for socials, you need to be short and concise. Obviously reels and TikTok and that sort of format are playing a massive part now in social media. So I think in terms of optimising for social, you need to do exactly that. Display campaigns, I don't know whether they're slightly different, but there's also like VOD and YouTube advertising now via Google. So obviously it's more about what format you export that you end result in, how long it is and what the message is. So coming back to what I said before is that you've got to try and capture everything in advance of what the objectives are.

It is detailing that in the strategy, isn't it? I think that's the key thing. I need to achieve this and this and this is how I'm going to achieve each of those things. And then the makeup of that is kind of what you need to capture and then how it works across those channels and how you need to edit it and what you need to bear in mind for those. So depending on what your objectives are, as Matt said, that will define how you need to approach capturing that content and tailoring it to audiences.

We see that videos with no objectives that work well, though TikTok is a perfect example of that. Some people just create 'em and they go viral and then it works, don't it?

The thing is, we were talking about this the other day, we, there's not necessarily a perfect set of ingredients for a viral video.

No.

Anything could go viral and sometimes incredible videos don't go viral. In fact, very often. So yeah, sometimes they're just done on a whim and it works, which is weird. But what I would say though is I think there's very little correlation between things that go viral and good commercial performance. What's much more important than one video or one post going viral is consistency and

Messaging.

I think also as part of that stuff that typically goes viral on TikTok is entertainment, isn't it? It's not necessarily for businesses. I think when businesses try to go viral very often they fall flat on the face. It just doesn't work for whatever reason, unless it's very clever, a very clever spin on something or accidental sad or something like that.

Yeah, accidental stuff can, so the Stanley Cup in the fire, that's just coincidental. They had no involvement in that. It just happened and then they got the benefit of it

Getting capitalised. Obviously that's

Important, but

I think we just know from a statistic perspective that video just generally perform better. Most people's, the average person nowadays spends like an hour and a half a day looking at video, whether that's reels or TikTok or YouTube.

That's a crazy stat, isn't it?

Yeah, that was from

E-marketer. Wow. An hour and a half every day. The average person,

I guess you can look at your own stats as well, can't

You? Screen time.

You've got screen time.

So I'm already on TikTok, 35 minutes.

Oh, mine's actually really quite superb.

Really quite superb.

Yeah, I've got six minutes on each app.

That's impressive. Sure. How many apps you got?

I know I'd map yesterday, the map of apps I've got.

It's not that you've got the apps, it's your home screen. Mine's proper knee now. It's now you've mattered it.

Yeah, I've mattered it.

Yeah.

Six minutes on Instagram, six minutes on.

That'll increase by the end of the day though, no doubt.

Probably by about 30 minutes.

Yeah,

That's quite good. But an hour and a half seems like quite a lot. Maybe it's not. I don't know.

So I just done the lou this morning.

No, I watch it in bed when I get up first

Thing

I do. Yeah,

So you shouldn't do that for your brain, Tom.

Yeah, and then I walk the dogs, so it's just my first few minutes of just getting something that I need

A dopamine hit. If you borrowed Matt's VR thing, you could

Watch

'em whilst you're walking the dogs.

That's impressive.

Yeah,

That's another thing, video via vr.

That's true. Yeah.

How much is that going to play into the marketing world?

Probably a lot Eventually.

Yeah.

So it is a bit early now, isn't it? But eventually, I imagine it'll be pretty big.

I just want to throw a really interesting stat in there though. Out of nowhere is from HubSpot. Just by putting the word video in your email marketing line improves open rates by 19%.

Wow, nice. You piss people off. If there wasn't a video in your email, are we doing Tom's stats today? Not

Doing Tom's stats. We're just doing, I just thought was really this one. Have you got any? No. Okay. Be better next time.

Okay. I can make a start up.

So if a client comes to you with a proposal for a video, how would you go about determining their audience?

So the first thing I would get them to do is fill in a brief form of what to get the objectives and to form that strategy in terms of audience, try and get some analytics data if they've got that, which always helps because that gives you a really good idea of audiences or meta ads. Sometimes if they've got some stats from that platform, that can be quite helpful. If you're starting from scratch though, usually just start by asking them and just see what their ideal buyer would be and if they've got any ideas of who they're sort of targeting. If beyond that they haven't got a clue, then we'd probably more than likely have to do some research.

I suppose there is one more thing you can add to be fair, and that's again, understanding what their goals are. If you know what they want to achieve, you can then highlight how the video should look, how it should work, what the messaging should be, and what platforms it would work best on. So it all comes back to the goals again, doesn't it?

There are also tools as well to understand if they've got any competitors and if competitors are doing video and what audiences and demographics might be watching those. So you can kind of get cues from elsewhere as well if that's not already defined.

That's a good shout. I didn't think competitors to be fair, but that's a really good example. If they've got a really good Instagram feed with good video, you could say, oh, we could do something like this or try something different. Yeah.

Thinking about the wider picture, how could something like video fit into your wider marketing strategy, like SEO Google ads, things that

Email with your stat?

Oh yeah. Well yeah, that stat on email marketing, it can play a big part. It's great for things like explainers. I'm not too familiar with how YouTube ads work. I know how they work obviously, but it's formatting it correctly for the viewer and getting the right placements and things, isn't it really?

It depends what you've got to say, what your video purpose is coming, right. Back to the original question, what are you telling your customers? What do they need to know? What problems are you solving for them? So depending on what the answer to those is and what that means to your business, what define how your customers need to see that message. Some of that might be on your website, some of it might be part of advertising. Some of it might only exist on socials, but it is considering what role that plays as part of a wider strategy and how you need to deliver those messages to your audience, I suppose.

Explain the videos work quite well. Would they work quite well for SEO? Because you could put a video together with some frequently asked questions written after it and then it helps both ways?

Absolutely. I think from an SEO perspective, you've got two angles, haven't you? You've got the user experience side, anything that's good for UX is generally going to be useful for SEO, but then on top of that, you've got the transcription opportunity. If it's something where there's at least something that can be transcribed, both of those can be really useful for SEO.

Perfect example of that is if you've got a new app or a new product and you do a video about it with some reviews and things like that, someone talking about it, if you transcribe it, then you've got all those opportunities for keywords.

So what about accessibility, things like captions, live transcripts?

Well, a lot of people actually watch videos without sound. According to Facebook, 85% of people 'em without the sound. So captions are really important.

You start those

Often. Yeah,

I do accidentally sometimes and then realise, but

Yeah, you always have to click the sound, don't you? So yeah,

For things like podcasts, you could just sit there with your phone and you don't have to disrupt everyone in the office,

But

You sort of still get a gist of what they're saying. So I think subtitles and captions are really important. Not all the time, but most cases.

So you get on TikTok, you get them auto transcriptions and sometimes they're really terrible, aren't they? Yeah. You read it and it's like that's not what they're saying. Just random words now and they put the struggles with dialect and things I think.

Yeah, you see them a lot on Instagram now, caption videos, don't you?

Yeah,

That's the main place I've seen them. Would you say that when you're determining which platforms you're going to use, there's sometimes cases where you'll just automatically rule out specific ones depending on what the client does or

Yeah, I think that's very dependent on the client, the industry that they're in and their audience. So B2B might not be, let's say an company they might not be on, you might not want to get 'em on TikTok or Instagram. It might be Facebook and LinkedIn, whereas WARM is, for example, their ideal platform is Instagram and TikTok and

Fashion would be great for those.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it comes back to the industry and the audience really, but you can easily determine that from the start. I think we always have a pretty good idea, don't we, of what platforms and channels work well.

Yeah, it's not always conclusive, but the other thing you could do is analyse their analytics data.

If

You can see from their analytics data for example, that there's very few engaged sessions from Facebook, it's probably not a great platform for them. It doesn't mean it's not for sure. It could just be that they've not had budget there or they've not really put any effort into it. But you can also analyse when you analyse how those visitors actually perform, even if there's not many of them, you can get an idea for whether it's the right platform

And testing as well. Test them all if you want to at the start, and then you'll come to the platform that works the best for you eventually.

Yeah, just hone in on where your time should be spent.

I guess that's where we come in and just say from experience, we think that you're better off here starting off here first and then

How else would you leverage data when it comes to video production,

I suppose there's loads of ways really. I mean, what I think is the optimum setup would be a two B testing firstly. So if you've got two different creatives, two slightly different messaging, even the way the videos look and how they're edited, if you've got two slightly different versions, you can certainly analyse data to determine which ones resonate best with the audience, but you could also take that to the next level and analyse the impact of what that has on engagement within the platform. And the next level, again, understand what impact that has on whether people are actually maybe going to your website and converting or turning into customers.

Yeah, could you potentially have videos of different lengths as well to see which works best?

Yeah, that's a good point. I think, again, it depends on the goals, doesn't it? The objectives. So if you objective is something really quick, concise, snappy, you could do a video that's 15 seconds long and it could still perform quite well, but some topics are going to be deeper. So we have our shorts, don't we? And some of those are 30 seconds long and they get to the point and they're fine. Some of them need a slightly deeper backstory and might need 2, 3, 4 minutes. So I think it depends on the objectives

And the channel as well. Just to add to that, so across social and across YouTube, potentially people might, especially if they're ads, they might only see two or three seconds of that. So landing your key message within those first two or three seconds as well as your brand can be critical. So it really does depend on the purpose and what you're trying to achieve.

Getting to the point as well, very, very quickly with a hook. Could be a visual hook, could be an audio hook, but the hook is so important to just draw people in.

Would you say there's any specific places where you'd see longer form video?

YouTube is well known for that, isn't it? Podcast? Podcast as well? Yeah, I saw a YouTube video the other day. It was nearly three hours long.

Really?

Yeah, I didn't watch it. Obviously not got three hours to sit watching something. Yeah, three hours is too long for me, but I suppose it depends, doesn't it? Some people probably really like that.

What would we say is long form? I would say anything over five minutes is long form or maybe even less.

Yeah, probably. I see Longform more like brand type videos on websites or just anything on YouTube in general.

So they'd be, if you're going to do a brand video, then you probably do

It. That could be three minutes though, I guess,

Couldn't it? Yeah, three minutes I'd say is a good number. Then if you've got all the content, you can chop it down again, can't you?

Yeah, Facebook potentially. But then again, it's probably videos that you might be using on your site anyway.

When you get into things like ads, they're like 30 seconds, sometimes 20 seconds, 15 seconds.

Yeah, I was thinking more posts videos than,

Yeah, it depends.

Ads ones

Depends

What your video is, doesn't it? If it's a tutorial of some kind, it needs to be long. You need to put a lot of detail into it. You need to structure it properly.

Was it Clickup that had a really long video on how to do multiple videos? They had a series on how to set Clickup up in certain ways and they were really long. They were like 40, 50 minutes long, but they were really Detailed.

Detailed, yeah,

And extremely good. Actually. There was no wastage. They were long, but there was no wastage. It was just very much, right, do this, this is why then do this. This is why

How to videos, tutorials if it's like a platform and things like that can be quite useful.

Well, what would you say is the best way to get CTAs across without it being too salesy or long?

I would say be just make the video is natural. Let's say if it's a product, if it's a good product, then it should sell itself as long as you put across the core benefits. How's it going to help solve a problem basically without it saying, oh, buy this now. Do you know what I mean? How's it going to help the person who's watching the video? Whether that's, I dunno why I keep coming back to warm is all the time, but keeping you warm in winter and things like that. A different messaging, but I think you've got to get across the fact that it's going to help or it's going to give a benefit. So get your benefits across of that product without actually saying, oh, this is just the best products in the world. Buy it now because we're the

Best. If you don't land your message, the CTAs irrelevant, isn't it? People aren't interested.

So

Get your message right first and then it's likely that they'll perform the action that you want to based on that message.

Yeah, an authenticity here as well. People can spot whether you're authentic from a mile away, that you've just got to be yourself.

Would you say that also goes hand in hand with building trust as well?

Yeah, the thing is people can spot whether you're just trying to sell them something from so far away, you've got to be authentic and got to really try to resonate with them. And if you try too hard, it'll be obvious that you're not resonating with them. So you've just got to try and relax and be yourself, and like you say, you've got to understand what kind of challenges your audience face and how you can or your product, the purpose of your video, how it helps them with that. And I think if you achieve that, that goes a long way towards getting them to take that action next.

I think with the trust topic as well, it's probably a good idea to maybe include some customer testimonials as well.

Absolutely, yeah. We integrated customer testimonials into our case studies, didn't we? Video video ones and they work fantastically well. We always get good feedback on them. So yeah, absolutely. I think that adds a huge amount of trust. What's better in a case study than actually seeing somebody, a representative from the company you're talking about saying how amazing marketing Labs is physically seeing them do it adds so much more value.

If it's a brand video for someone like, I dunno, let's say Marketing Labs, the way I would get the message across from us is that we're trustworthy. I'd show the team enjoying what they do experience, so I'd probably get Matt or Nick or myself or anybody in the team talking about what they do and how we add value. It's a bit harder with an agency, obviously selling our services. There's no specific products, but I think the more you can just show that we're a relatable, down to earth friendly team that just enjoys what they do and gets results, that's the most important message there. I think

For actual products as well, there's a great opportunity to use user generated content, I think, but user generated content as well can add a lot of value because it's more genuine, it comes across as more genuine, and those people, you're more inclined to potentially trust them than actually just a brand selling themselves, which is not that it's not trustworthy, but their business is to sell to you, whereas actual people using those products can add a lot of value, can't they? So sometimes utilising that content can be really valuable as well.

Encourages loyalty as well throughout the brand, come back and do more. And it depends whether you just take the videos that they produce for free or not, but I'm assuming most businesses would've a model where that if they do a video for them, they'll reward them in some way

And that is probably the best way of being authentic. It will drive so many more conversions. People will trust other people more than they'll trust a brand saying what they want to say.

Yeah.

Slightly random question, I would say, what would you say to brands looking to produce video on a budget

UGC Prime example really?

Yeah,

You probably wouldn't have to fork out for a professional agency who's got all the kit that they've got to cover the cost for and things in their time and travel and things doing UGC providing that they've got a decent camera to record it on. You probably set some guidelines of what the brand wants. But yeah, I think that would be the most cost effective way of doing it. You can create animated video and using things like Canberra and things if you want to get some general messages across. But I think, yeah, going back to what Nick said, UGC could be a really good start if you're on a budget,

And I think if you then want to take control of that content yourself, the next easy solution is just you can get a decent microphone for 20 quid, 30 quid and use your phone. Your phone can produce some crisp video now anyway. So an e-commerce brand that does loads of live videos and does very well from video is oddly enough my next door neighbour. So he runs a business called A MJ Watches, and they do great with video. They do some really cool video and they are authentic and it works extremely well for them.

So I'm guessing he uses that in terms of showing people the stock that he's got in?

Yeah, so specials and something will be released, a limited edition watch, and when it gets delivered they'll do a couple of videos on it, showing it off and that kind of thing, saying we've got five of these and

Once

They

Tangent it's more, isn't it like a video? It's easier to demonstrate what it looks like, how it sits on your body. Obviously watches are quite self-explanatory, but clothes might be less so, or you could get different people different size shapes or whatever.

And also some things on pictures, it doesn't particularly show it off too well and watches probably are one of those, especially if some people like watches that are a bit bling, for example, you can't really see bling on a photo.

How big is it on your wrist or

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's very good for stuff like that and that gets great engagement.

So thinking of examples of good videos, are there any that spring to mind recently or in previous years that we particularly

Got the excitement at Christmas videos, haven't we?

Yeah,

Yeah. We did a blog post a few years ago about Christmas videos. It was very popular. Pick the best Christmas videos of, I think it was all time

Back then,

But obviously they all do their Christmas videos, aren't they? And they go down well, socially.

Yeah.

John Lewis have just launched theirs. I've

Not seen that one yet.

It's very good.

Have they got a this year or comedic? A

Bit of both, but it's quite good. It's got a nice tone. I like it. I think they're doing more the first one so far. It's Dawn French and I think she's doing seven or eight.

Nice. I always like Aldis.

Yeah,

They're love cartoon carrots.

Yeah, Kevin, they're quite good. Kevin? The Carrot.

Yeah, I like all these marketing in general. They're not scared, are they? No, they're good on socials. Yeah, very good. Extremely good.

Would you say that there are any video trends emerging recently?

I don't think there are. I think the only most common one that I can think of now is the likes of TikTok lives, TikTok becoming more prominent.

Do you know what is happening? Actually, you've just bought me onto something polish of videos. There is a time and a place for very polished videos, but actually I think some brands are starting to look a little bit more amateur and I wonder if there's an element of trust and authenticity in that to make it look like UGC. Not always. There's still a time and a place for very polished video, but sometimes yes, it's like they've just lowered the level really a little bit.

What about ai?

I think creative video via AI isn't the best personally no's. Not

AI is it, but it will be. It's getting better. But it clearly as well though, there's a huge amount of content now out there that is AI and it is being engaged with. It is weird as well because we've all seen them then post where it'll say five best holiday destinations and it's just a bloke talking from a script that's ai and they're really low quality, but they seem to do really well. Oddly,

I think they'll get better over time, but for me they're just not there.

11 labs is fantastic for that, by the way. That is close to being legit. Most stuff you pump into that, it comes out like a genuine person. Extremely good at 11 labs. I

Feel like it's a long way behind images still, isn't it?

Yeah, probably. But if you remember when images image AI first came out, it really struggled, especially with people and fingers.

Yeah. And that wasn't that long ago to fail, was

It? No. No. And it's generally improved quite a lot since then. I don't think it'll take long, will it?

That's all for today's episode on utilising video for brand building. Thanks to the ML team for sharing their insights and expertise with us. Video marketing is all about telling your brand story in a way that resonates with your audience. By crafting a solid strategy, you can harness the power of video to take your brand to the next level. Remember, keep your video content short, engaging and optimised for each social platform. Join us next time on marketing blobs for more digital marketing insights and expert advice. Until next time, bye bye. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye.