‘What videos do I need in my business?’ is a common discussion that we have with clients, as many of them are wary of the camera, but know that the statistics show that video can make a HUGE difference to most businesses.

In this episode, we’ll get into the ways to use video, how to get started and the ways you can use video without appearing on camera at all!

You might want to take a look at BaranovTV Episode 16 (not 14 as I mention initially!) as well, which is here: https://bit.ly/2vruR1L

You can get a copy of John Peddie’s infographic here: https://bit.ly/38LHWBu

(Transcript below.)

Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to de-mystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

I thought that was a bit of a fun way to start episode 100 of BaranovTV.

I can’t quite believe how quickly time has passed, but here we are, episode 100!

I thought it’d be a really good idea to use the idea of video as the subject for this episode. But before you all turn off, I came across an infographic on the internet, by a guy that we know, a guy called John Peddie, who actually runs a business called J Productions.

He’s produced this infographic, which I appreciate you can’t see terribly well but I’m going to talk you through it.

Actually what he’s done in the infographic is, he’s explained the benefits and different uses of video and the types of video you need in your business.

Which is funnily enough, the heading of the infographic!

He takes you through five different sections, but the overwhelming point of the infographic is that 84% of people say they’ve been influenced to buy either goods or services based on a video that they’ve watched produced by a brand.

So the five areas that John talks about, about the videos that you need in your business, are:

Lead generation

He mentions vlogs, social posts and promotion in that section.

Know, like and trust

In this section John talks about:

• About us, about me,
• Products and services,
• Testimonials,
• Case studies,
• Meet the team,
• Frequently asked questions,
• Email,
• Explainers,
• Company culture,
• Podcasts and videos

All of these encourage and generate that relationship between yourself and your existing and potential customers.

Obviously, I talked about video way, way back in Episode 16 of BaranovTV, which was ‘How and Why Do We Produce BaranovTV’. One of the things I talked about in there was about the importance for us of BaranovTV in building a relationship with you, our audience.

Lead conversion

In this section John talks about using videos for

• online courses
• landing pages
• offers
• a series of videos, and we’ve done a few of those over time
• sales presentations
• teasers
• events
• launches

Internal Use

This could actually be a really good way to start using video, to start working out how to do them, and then they’re not actually public-facing, so hopefully you’ll feel a little bit more confident a little bit more quickly!

John includes the following suggested uses:

• staff training
• quarterly updates
• company culture
• onboarding for your customers and clients
• process mapping
• recruitment, (to give your potential recruits a really good taste of what they’re letting themselves in for, what they’re actually enquiring into)
• press releases

Customer journey

This could include videos around:

• onboarding
• instructions
• updates
• thank yous
• within your newsletter, (so similar to what we send out BaranovTV on to our contact list every Friday)
• event videos
• behind the scenes
• customer support

I’ll make sure that this infographic is available as a download, and I’ll attach it to the emails when I send these out.

So if you don’t receive our weekly emails for BaranovTV, let me know if you’d like to and you can have, obviously have, a copy of John’s infographic, which I think is brilliant!

The thing, the really important thing to do, in my opinion, with regards to using video, is to use it and practice it before you make it public.

I talk to my camera; I don’t do this with an audience.

I might do a recording out and about on occasion and I do get some very strange looks but those are generally people that I will never, ever see again, so I really don’t mind!

But I get used to talking to the camera and to be honest I do have a sense of detachment from it. I don’t really think about the fact of who’s going to be watching it.

So you do get into a mindset through that practice.

You need to make the whole process as easy as possible for yourself.

I’m quite comfortable with doing the topping and tailing that I do through iMovie that I talked about back in episode 16. But if you’re not comfortable around that and you’re not comfortable with the tech, then make it easy for yourself and use somebody like John Peddie. There’s guys on LinkedIn, there’s lots of suppliers out there that can do the recording for you.

There are apps that you can use like Teleprompter, that I use for some of the more technical videos that we do, that actually give you a script on the screen right next to your camera, so it doesn’t interfere with you looking at the camera, but it just does make sure that you cover off all the points that you want to.

You can use an editor like John, you can find video editors on Fiverr, which is who did the beginning of this episode for me, which is obviously just a little bit of fun.

But it depends on what level of quality you want.

These are just filmed on my iPhone, but if you want something super glossy then you need a professional videographer to come in and do that for you. They’ll talk you through, they’ll help you script, they’ll talk about camera angles and different cameras and all of those sorts of things.

I would suggest you start small

Keep your videos brief and to the point on a subject that you know really well, because then you won’t be worrying so much about the script.

And the absolute must these days if you are going to make that video public, particularly on social media, is to make sure that you use captions.

And I would wholeheartedly recommend Rev.com, at a dollar a minute for captions. They’re super easy to upload to your video.

You can run the video and the captions file through something like HandBrake, which actually burns the captions onto your videos so it becomes one file, so you can then post that video anywhere that you want to and those captions will automatically show and you can’t actually turn them off. This means that the video is much more accessible.

You can do videos without doing a lot of face-to-face like this.

So there are packages out there such as Animoto, which you can use captions and pictures and text and you can set those to music, where you don’t actually need to be visual– don’t need to be visual yourself, you don’t need to be visible.

There are things like BombBomb, that you can use which are one-to-one videos, where you record a video on your phone and send it out to one individual and you can track that, that’s really good, we use that occasionally through the business.

Loom is another free app that enables you to do screen capture and you can choose whether you just want to capture the screen and do voice recording at the same time, or whether you want a camera on– whether you want a camera recording you as well as the screen. We do use that, and I’ve done that with some of BaranovTVs.

I do that using this little camera on the top of my screens, which works really well. So you can use Loom, and that’s really good for internal or for training videos.

Again, another less formal aspect is using Facebook Live. Facebook Live works really well and you can actually leverage those across lots of different channels as well, because you can download them.

So there’s lots of different ways of using video and getting to use video within your business. It’s really important and gaining momentum all the time.

So if it’s something that you’re not using yet, and you’re still looking to enhance how you’re communicating with your customers and clients, then video really is the way to go.

And you might just need to look at John’s infographic.

So I’ll leave you with that thought. Thank you very much to everybody who’s been following our videos over some time, as I say, episode 100 today.

We’ll be back for episode 101 next week. And I’ll see you then. Bye-bye!