The use of online video is valuable for companies of all sizes, but there are still many questions about its use. Some of these questions include “How do we use video in my company’s marketing strategy?”, “What makes a good video?” and “How can I keep my audience engaged throughout?”
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Wistia’s Director of Marketing Ezra Fishman. Wistia is a video hosting and analytics company out of Boston that helps businesses enhance their video marketing campaigns. Because of their knowledge in video and video production, Ezra was able to shine some light on the topics that trouble marketers about video.
Ezra: One key piece of it, is really knowing your audience. There is a feeling that if I make a video, I am going to get it in front of the entire world. So I am going to target the entire world with my message. What ends up happening, is that you get a pretty watered-down message. It is hard to write a script and have a message apply to everybody.
What we see with people who really do great content marketing is that they focus on a specific audience and try to teach something fairly specific. Our area of expertise happens to be in video production and video marketing, so we will make very specific content. Examples of this content are lighting, or how to make a video using an iPhone or how to use email to get your videos to your audience. We are targeting marketers specifically. We are targeting people familiar with video. That helps us make content that is specific for that group.
Another key component is that your video has to be educational. It’s tempting to make videos about your company and what you are doing. As a consumer of content, I am not really that interested. I want to be taught something useful. Those are the pieces of content that are most successful for us, as well as our customers. People that use video well understand what their audience needs to learn and caters their content specifically to those needs.
Ezra: You don’t know everything at the beginning, so you have to make educated guesses and look at the feedback you are getting. We will look at what people are asking on our blog. We will look at what people are asking on our Facebook and Twitter, and we’ll respond.
For example, we had a number of people asking what lights we were using in our studio. So we said ‘Hey, that question has come up a few times; let’s make a video resource specifically answering that question.’ Then we made that video, put it on our blog and looked at the kind of response it got. We looked at how many people watched that video, how engaging that video was, how many people added additional comments to that post and how many shared socially. We used that to evaluate what topics people are most interested in.
Whether it’s video production, tools and techniques or the video marketing side, we are constantly trying new areas and evaluating the areas that get the highest engagement.
Ezra: We think about it as a lot of 90-second engagements. We aren’t going to make one 90-second video and everybody is going to see it and know all about Wistia. That’s just not going to happen. What we think about is that we are going to have a lot of little engagements. We try to focus our message on one thing and repeat it a couple times. We are also going to add a little bit of humor and personality to it. We are not going to try too much at once.
If you try to make the Dollar Shave video, 99 percent of people are going to fail. We try to do something that will grab some attention and get one specific point across. That is what we do in an individual video, and the sum of those videos is where the real power comes.
Thank you to Ezra for taking the time to provide this valuable information. Be sure to stay tuned for the second half of this interview early next month. In the meantime, please share your company’s successes with using video in its content marketing below!
photo credit: laverrue
With a degree in Electronic Media, Dan Romanski has five years of video production, both professionally and independently. When he is not assisting with lead nurturing campaigns and projects at Kuno, he can be found exploring different parts of Cleveland with his camera. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
