"Online video is driving astonishing innovation in thousands of different fields ranging from the ultra-niche to the sharing of truly world-changing ideas" – Chris Anderson, TED
Whilst many industries are already well represented with marketing content on Youtube, one niche stands out as still relatively empty. Beer and spirits companies have been slow to jump on the bandwagon of Internet video. Only four clips make up the viral hits in this category and they have been competing for views for months now. The area is ripe for another breakout hit from the right producer.
Budweiser dominated the first quarter this year, with its Brotherhood video bringing in well over two million views. However, the next nearest hit came in at under one million for NEFT. Heineken and Bud Light also ranked with two hits rising to more than 300,000 views, but everything else in this category came in below 20,000 during the first quarter.
There is obviously still space for emerging companies to overtake the big brand names. If vineyards and craft beer producers can create video that rivals their most major competitors, the resulting boost in popularity could help them enjoy big sales without major investments. Carefully crafted material will stand out against the big budget productions coming from companies like Budweiser. Don’t be afraid to try to compete when the playing field is so level.
You’ve probably worked out already that we think video presents many great ways for different businesses and industries to engage with customers. In this post we will focus on just a few tips that a legal practice might employ – And through in a bit of a freebie at the end
1, Promote Your Authority
There are hundreds of resources online for finding answers to legal questions. Understanding whether these sources are reliable or not is another matter. Video presents an ideal channel for a lawyer to engage their audience with answers to questions whilst doing so in way that carries more authority than an anonymous Q&A site.
Step 1 – Scour forums or sites like Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers or Quora to see what questions are being asked.
Step 2 – Film your lawyers answering 10 of these questions. (Malpractice concerns can easily be avoided whilst ensuring comprehensive answers are given.)
Step 3 (a) – Start adding these videos to your YouTube Channel. Link them together using annotations to ensure maximum engagement with your channel
or
Step 3 (b) – Create a video landing page on your own site. Use a player such as Wistia to upload your videos and optimize for SEO and rich snippets.
Over time you will build up a large bank of answers that will either drive engagement with a YouTube channel or generate traffic and enquiries through search engines.
2, Tent Pole Programming
Predicting when a client will need your services on a day to day basis is all but impossible BUT there are certain general dates that you can play to with your content output. For the same reasons scary movies get released just before a Halloween and the relationship experts turn up on chat shows just before Valentines Day, ‘Tent Pole’ programming can work for your legal practice.
The key here is to look for predictable diary events that you can leverage content creation against. (For example, the end of a financial year may create a surge of inbound calls from clients old and new. What are the chief concerns these people have?) Create a calendar of dates and events that you can play to and create videos in advance. Release just before these dates. Such content ensures that you are relevant just when your audience need you to be.
3, Meet your team
Legal firms are knowledge businesses. There is no product that can be shown off. Essentially lawyers are working with the same raw materials (i.e. the Law!) as every other business – so how can you differentiate your team?
Produce videos that showcase your team. Who are you? Put a face to a name. This will build confidence and engagement with your firm before a client even walks through the door.
Capture your team talking about the culture of your business. Explain how you help clients, your processes, your offices, your specialties. Allow clients to get to know your business. The mere fact that you are prepared to expose your team to the camera shows openness and builds confidence with your prospective clients.
4, Meet Your Clients
Even better than meeting the team is meeting some clients. What better way to find a trustworthy and competent legal firm than through recommendation?
Have you got three or four clients that will talk about the work you do? Make it fun for them – encourage them to participate. Promote their business too in exchange.
Nothing builds confidence more than a client that will stick his hand up and talk positively about your business.
5, Educate / Webinar
Run a live Q&A session online. Pick a topic such as tax and deliver a live webinar series featuring your lawyers and have an online community ask questions. Limit it to, say, 40 minutes and take pre-registrations.
Allow participants to ask questions via Twitter using a hashtag to gain extra exposure.
Once the webinar is complete take the recording and split it into several videos for each question.
Post these video clips to your YouTube channel or again to your own video landing page. After your webinar be sure to run an email campaign that includes links to your videos.
6, Add video to your Email
Start adding video to your email campaigns. It will not only increase your open rates dramatically but it will also increase the engagement with your services. Use a hosted video service such as Wistia so that you can track who is watching your videos and how they are engaging with them. Are they finding particular sections interesting? If so concentrate other videos on these areas.
If you have run a live event be sure to include video in your post-event mailout.
7, Feedback
Use video analytics to assess what to make. Are certain videos doing better than others. If so why? Is it a particularly difficult topic or one that is relevant at a particular time of year?
Take these trends and build on them. Can you expand on these topics?
Look at in-video metrics. Are certain parts of videos getting repeated? Again, Wistia in-video analytics is a great way to determine what people are watching. Can this a particular topic be broken off to a new piece of content?
8, Pay Per View – Guaranteed views for your videos
Perhaps one of the best ways to quickly and directly engage with prospective clients is using LinkedIn Video and Google Video Ads.
That is a whole new post but as a tester – Promote this article and receive a $100 LinkedIn Video Ad Coupon.
Developing a content marketing strategy that includes video will provide your company with few concrete benefits if your clips look like the work of an amateur. Professional polish is crucial if you don’t want to drive away viewers with crackling sound or bad colour management. If you’re not sure how your videos look to the public, watch them with a critical eye whilst looking for these six common problems.
Poor Framing
A tight zoom can show off the details of your product, but it could cut out all of the rest of the action.
Amateurs often shoot at a slightly crooked angle that can drive visitors crazy when trying to view your clip. Proper framing ensures a square and level shot and also requires you to avoid shifting or drifting away from the centre spot whilst recording.
Audio That Peaks and Clips
When your narrator laughs or pronounces certain words, does the recording get so loud that the sound cuts out? This is known as clipping and can happen even with professional recording equipment. Combining a trained voice actor with a skilled audio engineer will prevent these kinds of common problems. Low audio is nearly as widespread. No one can enjoy the information you want to spread when they can’t hear what you are saying.
Blue or Orange Tint
Incandescent lighting will give the entire clip an orange tint whilst florescent lights provide a blue colour. Neither is flattering to your performers and could make it hard to see your product. Many cameras used by amateurs attempt to automatically balance the white value for the recording, but this can backfire and make the tinting even worse.
Blurring and Shaking
Investing in a tripod that costs less than $20 can eliminate this issue, so don’t upload blurry content that shows your hands shaking. Even the most basic family videographers can learn to take smooth, steady recordings with an affordable tripod. There’s no point in having expensive recording equipment if you don’t have anything to brace it against accidental movement.
Does your plotline jump around from point to point? How smooth are the transitions between concepts? Proper scene transitions aren’t the only requirement for a professional video. The storyline and script should also follow some kind of logical path. Don’t jump between product features and customer testimonials unless you want to lose your audience.
How can you use product videos to engage an audience with two products that you market?
That was the challenge laid down by Life Technologies when they wanted to show how both their products SYBR and TaqMan were used.
Both products had fairly loyal followings for different reasons and both products have their advantages. So with the Wooshii team they head looking to make a product videos that would engage, entertain and of course promote these products.
Working with Wooshii the two products were personified as Rap artists and then pitched up in a Rap Battle in the Lab
The results were a load of fun – check out the finished article here
2012 was a big year for online video marketing, with millions of new viewers tuning in to their favourite content at least once a day. Many Internet users added video viewing as part of a daily routine for the first time this year. This made a noticeable impact in the viewing numbers for many viral video hits. While musicians and comedians saw their viral hits topping the charts on Youtube, many large corporations also garnered plenty of attention for their advertising campaigns. Here are the five companies that saw the greatest increase in total views during 2012.
1. Samsung
When 2011 came to an end, the electronics manufacturer had only 52 million total views on its published content. In a single year, this multinational corporation managed to reach a whopping 280 million views. Over 200 million views poured in during the year as the company released 26 carefully designed video campaigns.
2. Red Bull
The energy drink producer invested in a scientific challenge to draw over 192 million new views in 2012 alone. The “Stratos” campaign involved an experienced skydiver jumping from the stratosphere with minimal protection. Many viewers had never even heard of the brand before watching the historical live video stream.
3. Google
Google may still be best known as the world’s largest search engine, but they are quickly dominating the world of video marketing as well. Part of the company’s success in 2012 comes from their acquisition of Youtube. They released a grand total of 40 individual campaigns during the year, which garnered an increase of 136 million views. It’s most popular campaign also hinted at the world of tomorrow, much like the “Stratos” project from Red Bull, by featuring augmented reality glasses that are currently in development.
4. Nike
Nike’s success in producing popular video content has carried over from previous years. 18 campaigns netted the company 61 million new views. Over half of these views came from just the “Summer of Football” campaign. Each campaign also saw a rise in the average amount of viewers, indicating a complete increase in interest surrounding the brand and the content it is producing.
5. M&M’s
Mars Brands’ chocolate candy campaigns may have only come in fifth place, but they still beat out hundreds of other major companies by scoring nearly 50 million views this year. Nearly every view came from its popular Super Bowl campaign, “Just My Shell”.
Thumbnails, along with your video title, act as mini-marketing posters for your content on YouTube. You should always create custom poster-frames to be uploaded along with the video title. There are a few general guidelines to follow, but the right poster-frame depends on what your show is about.
Clear, In-Focus
Bright, High-Contrast
Close-Ups of Faces
Visually Compelling Imagery
Well-Framed, Good Composition
Foreground Stands Out From Background
Images That “Compel You To Click”
Accurately Represents the Content
Thumbnails are important for search, related video traffic, and channel page optimization. This visual snapshot of your video is one of the most important optimizations for attracting views on the platform. Tip: make sure to upload high-resolution thumbnails so your thumbnail appears crisp and clear throughout the site.
Most of all, as a rule of thumb, it should should grab people’s attention and at the same time represent what the video is about too.
But the Creators Playbook goes on about it, offering even more tips about video thumbnails — showing the importance they also see in them:
Keep Thumbnail Optimization In Mind When Shooting
Shoot your videos to make the content translate into a great thumbnail.
Proper lighting, framing the shot, and capturing compelling imagery when you shoot will provide you with better material to work with when creating a thumbnail.
Consider taking photographs during your shoots to capture images for thumbnails.
Create A Great Thumbnail
Using images from the video and supplemental images (where relevant/appropriate) to create a custom thumbnail that shows off the best aspects of the video.
Use photo-editing software to resize, modify, or combine images together in the frame.
Apply effects such as adjusting the contrast and brightness of the image to make it stand-out and make the colors brighter.
Preview your thumbnail design at the actual size it will appear on the site to know if the image will still be eye-catching at smaller scales.
Insight Tracking Tip
Track changes in viewership after you optimize your thumbnails. Use the Viewership graph and Discovery Information available in Insight to track any increase in viewership coming from search and/or related video where thumbnails are important for attracting clicks.
So being Youtube the most used platform for video, how do they handle video thumbnails? They give users the choice of three different thumbnails that are automatically taken from the video. Many times, those are enough and will give you at least one good thumbnail to choose from.
Other times though, or if you want ot have more control over it, you can make your own custom video thumbnail:
Quite a few steps, but should be worth it to have control over your thumbnails. Plus, a few video platforms offer an easier way to add custom thumbnails, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
To wrap it up, keep that in mind: the video thumbnail and its choice are very important decisions when uploading your video and displaying it on your site or social networls.
The following guest post was written by Michael Litt from Vidyard.com, about the differences betwen player and video, following examples from their own platform (crossposted on their blog).
A common question we get at Vidyard is the difference between a player and a video. What are they? And, how do they work? To clarify the terminologies, we’ve put together a quick reference to help you distinguish between the two so you may better understand video talk when navigating through our platform.
The Player:
Anyone who is interested in video hosting on our platform (or any for that matter) will start out by creating a player. Each player is a stand-alone container for storing and playing video content, think of your player as a shell or enclosure. Below is an example of a player as well as its anatomy showing the unique customizable features such as dimensions, skins, layouts, etc. to ensure consistent brand identity for your online video marketing efforts.
Each player has one embed code, the embed code allows you to insert the player into your website. Players contain videos that you intend to share with your audience.
When you create a new player, you will need to put at least one video in it, more on this later.
After creating your new player (by clicking “create new”, and selecting at least one video), you will be able to customize your player. All the customization you input will determine the design of the individual player, and how content is played within it.
The Videos:
Videos are the video content that you’ve created and hope to share online to your potential clients and community, they are stored inside the player, ready to be played. At any time, you can edit the video(s) within any player. To do this, from the player, click on the Title of the video you want to edit:
From here, select “modify” to begin editing your video:
Once you’ve done this, you’ll arrive at a screen where you can add more video content from your computer or pull a video in from YouTube. This page also allows you to see all previous uploaded video content within your player.
To summarize…
-Players are where your videos are stored. You can have more than one video in each player. You can have multiple players in your account.
-You can customize your player(s) to change the look and feel of how the content plays.
-Each player has its own embed code, which enables the player to be inserted into your site so that your videos will play.
- Videos are the video marketing content that you’ve created and intend to share through a player.
Our robust video hosting platform is a combination of both players and videos to ensure your video content is a smooth viewing experience.
Google Adwords for Video is a great opportunity to enter the ever growing online video world and take advantage of both Youtube (the second largest search engine on the web) and the Google Display Network which is the number one ad network reaching 89% of entire the online population.
This post looks at the key features and mechanisms of Adwords for Video.
Starting a Video Campaign
Video Production
This is the key point of difference between regular Adword text ads and Adwords for Video. Where with Adwords text, multi-variant and differing text could be tried, video cannot be altered.
Video also requires higher upfront investment from a given brand both in design and production.
It is therefore essential to ensure your videos are planned, designed and produced effectively and cost efficiently.
Wooshii can help you produce videos for your campaigns with dramatic savings
Start Your Campaign
1. Name your campaign and state your daily budget.Just like in the regular Adwords, you choose how much you’re willing to spend per day.
2. Determine Geography and Language – Language determines whether your ad will show for a specific language setting on YouTube (note that AdWords doesn’t translate your ads)
Ad Networks
3. Choose network - Select your actual video for the campaign, and choose what advertising Networks to run it on: YouTube Videos, YouTube Search, or Google Display Network. You can select just one, all three, or any combination you please.
Note: Ad formats available are affected by the networks you choose.
Ad Formats
Ad Formats come next. There are four types of ad formats on Google Adwords for Video:
In-search
In-slate
In-display
In-stream
In-search ads
This video ad format lets you promote a video alongside search results on YouTube using keywords to highlight your video for viewers who may be interested in your content. The appearance of the ad format will include a 640×90 Rectangle or 300×70 Small Rectangle depending on the ad’s position in search results. You’ll pay only when viewers choose to watch the ad.
In-slate
This video ad format lets you promote a video ad before longform videos (videos longer than 10 minutes) on YouTube or the Google Display Network. Before the longform video plays, viewers have the option to choose to watch one of three ads from different advertisers, or to watch regular commercial breaks throughout the video. You’ll pay only when viewers choose to watch the ad.
In-display
This video ad format lets you promote a video alongside website content across the Google Display Network. The appearance of the ad format will vary, depending on which ad sizes and display formats content publishers support.
For example, the video ad preview unit may vary and the video may play either within the ad unit or when a viewer clicks the unit to watch the video on its YouTube Watch page. You’ll be charged for clicks when viewers choose to watch or click your ad. If the same ad appears on a video site in the Google Display Network, the content publisher (website owner) can define which format may be displayed on their entire site, or on certain pages or areas of interest within their site.
In-stream
Finally, this video ad format allows you to promote a video ad before, in the middle of, or after short- or longform videos on YouTube or the Google Display Network. After 5 seconds, the viewer has an option to skip the ad and you are only charged when the viewer has completed 30 seconds of viewing or seen the entire ad, whichever is shorter. For example, a :15 second ad will be charged when the viewer has completed watching it and a :60 second ad will be charged at the :30 second mark. You will also be charged when a viewer clicks on the ad.
You also have advanced settings if you want to, like choose if you want to optimize for view or optimize for conversion, and that can all be done by selecting which one is best for your campaign.
Device Targeting
This is a useful targeting option on Google Adwords for Video as there are shifting patterns of device consumption of video.
Videos can be targeted to:
Desktop and laptop computers
iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers
Tablets with full browsers
… but also other advanced settings such as operating systems (all mobile or tablet operating systems or only selected ones), along with mobile carriers or just a selected few.
Group Targeting
This second part of creating your video ad on Google Adwords for Video is also very similar to the regular Google Adwords. Here you can define your targeting groups along with bidding (in Cost Per View, the maximum Cost Per View) and your keywords (for Youtube Search, Youtube Videos and Google Display Network).
And that’s it. Your first Google Adwords for Video campaign is done and ready to lauch!
If you aren’t convinced, let this video from Google itself do it for you!
As you see there is a lot to explore and a lot to tinker about, but the best really is to try it yourself now, right here.
If you need a video custom created for you first, with the budget you set yourself, then you can post it right here, on Wooshii.
The starting point for this recent brand survey by TubeMogul was to try and answer if video and particularly real-time bidding on video ads delivers “brand lift” or if it is all “direct response hot-air”, as they put it.
This is probably due to a flawed measurent that is taken after campaigns are launched (measuing direct-response – clicks for example), as opposed to something marketers should care more about like brand awareness and persuading a target audience.
So, using a methodology of exposing 4,487 random survey-takers to 0:15 and 0:30-second pre-roll ads (totaling 44.7 million impressions) of 5 video campaigns, and then targeting them again within-banner surveys within 30 days with no direct incentives to answer, all campaigns showed the following brand lift:
Intuitively, purchase consideration and intent metrics tend to increase by the number of times someone is exposed to an ad, while click-through rates often peak at the first viewing.
A statistical significant correlation accurately predicting average lift a marketer might expect when they run a video campaign was found (to 0.05). This of course is something that we’ve known time and time again, but showing it statistically with new studies only reinforces it.
Furthermore, the survey found that “each additional exposure of a video ad is likely to lift message association by an average of 3.46% over control, with diminishing returns kicking in at six, and “each additional exposure of a video ad is likely to lift purchase consideration by an average of 1.67% over control, with diminishing returns similarly kicking in at six.”
So to sum it up: the study shows that marketers are seeing an average lift of 4.3% in brand awareness and 11.6% in purchase intent, a quantifiable lift from video ads bought from leading exchanges and platforms.
If you missed yesterday’s Webinar on Video Crowdsourcing, with Wooshii’s own Fergus Dyer-Smith, then no worries – we’ve got the video for you!
Joining him are Peter LaMotte from GeniusRocket and Anna Sawyer from Trada, who will discuss – in 55 minutes – everything from video strategy, to content, cost and control over project and the distribution, and more.
