Video Transcript

So let’s talk about this, video content. It’s pretty safe to say that in this day and age, video content should be a part of your overarching ecosystem of content as best practice. But it’s still surprising the number of businesses that haven’t considered video content in their overarching ecosystem for a number of reasons. Some say that it’s too difficult if they don’t have a large enough team to pull off video content. Some don’t know where to get started or what should be on video.

So here we’re going to talk about just that. How you can actually manage it with a small team. Some ways to get started and think about your video content as a whole. So if you want to think about video content, let’s talk about it in two buckets.

There is video content that’s really sales collateral, so think about the questions that your customers — that your prospects — are going to be asking, that you could go ahead and answer proactively, so they come to you better qualified.

There’s the sales collateral side of the equation. The other piece is thought leadership, brand building. So how can you take a stake in the ground, have a unique perspective in your space that allows, again, your prospects to see you as a thought leader?

Now, these things can pay dividends from your business pipeline, but also your talent pipeline as well, allowing prospective talent to see who you are, what you believe in, and the types of problems that you’d like to tackle.

Now, let’s say you’re a B2B services organization and you have a high touch with your customers. It’s really great to get those people that are going to be interacting with those customers on camera so you can start to build trust and build those relationships before they come in the door, creating a warmer hand-off from sales to the delivery of your work.

Now let’s flip the script and say that you’re in a more product-focused environment. How could you have the engineers that are designing the product, the SMEs within your house,
that really hold the expertise and are helping develop what you’re putting into the marketplace and again, having your prospects and your customers experience these individuals, feel your expertise, continue to build trust with your organization before they come in the door.

You could do things about what do people ask about the sales process or what it’s like to work with you? Get your sales team, a sales team member, or maybe somebody who will be the account manager on an account in the service environment. Get them on camera talking about what that experience is like or again, going back to a more product-focused environment. Get those engineers talking about the benefits, the things that they really hold as their own expertise, that’s really unique to your business, to continue building that trust and educating your customers.

Think about who your target audience is and really develop messaging that helps them self-select in and the incorrect audience self-select out. You can really develop thoughtful messaging, thoughtful storytelling, and thoughtful content around who you really want to speak to that allows you to sort of sift through the clutter and make sure you’re speaking to the most qualified prospects for your business.

Now, some of these details also play into how you can execute video content with a small team. For instance, take Element Three. We have a small marketing team, like we talked about those other experts previously in the video, you can lean on the expertise that those people hold.

One of the frameworks that we use is when I talk to somebody to do some video content, some educational content, I really want those people to be such an expert on whatever subject they’re speaking about that they really don’t need all that much preparation to execute that video, right? So when you’re talking about engineering, you as a marketer don’t need to know everything about engineering. Go to the person who holds that expertise and don’t worry as much about the production quality and that kind of thing on the content side of things. You can get to that point and eventually invest more in production quality, but what really matters is high level content and thought leadership.

One final point I’ll touch on is where does this fit into your content ecosystem? Let’s say you’re an organization who has a blog, or maybe does a newsletter. At the end of the day, one of the reasons that you should be doing video content is because you need to think about different people’s consumption patterns.

Some people prefer to consume written content. Some people prefer video. Some people prefer audio.

And it’s really important that you have content that can be consumed in all those different consumption patterns and make sure that you’re really appealing to all your different target audiences. Another piece of it is some content is just warranting different types of production. So maybe it’s a piece that really warrants long-form written content because there’s a lot of nuance, there’s a lot of things that you want to refer to and link to. Well then, written content is probably a good idea.

Let’s say it’s a punchy thought opinion piece or a thought leadership piece, rather, that really only takes up a couple of minutes on video when you’re not referring to a lot of external sources. Great. Do video for that.

It’s really about making sure that the content you’re producing fits the medium and that you’re speaking to everybody in the way that they like to consume content. So hopefully that helps you get started.

If you’ve been hesitant about starting video content, that it’s really not that difficult to really think about the questions that you’re already being asked by customers. Use the expertise that’s already in-house to help a small team operationalize that content and then go from there.