How to Leverage Video Marketing in 3 Simple Steps

Video is a powerful medium that can help you engage with leads in a more natural and personal way. In the past, you had to invest in a ton of gear if you wanted to do video well. But thanks to the power of today’s smartphones, anyone can create a great looking video.

Video Transcript:

Ryan:                Hey, if this is your first time watching or maybe you’ve been watching a while, and have to yet hit subscribe, please do so now. We would love to have you join our community. This is my friend, Gabriel. He is the owner, operator, CEO, head honcho, whatever his official title is, at Nextiny in Sarasota. They’re a HubSpot partner. As you guys have probably seen on this show a couple times, you know that we’re a HubSpot agency. What we really focus on in this show is helping people grow their business organically using digital marketing.

Ryan:                One thing that I love about your company is the way that you guys have embraced video over the last couple of years and put it into practice. One of the things that you’ve done is committed to being really consistent. I want you to share a little bit about how you got started in video, where you were a couple years ago, because now if you go to a HubSpot event or you go to Inbound, you’re going to see this guy’s mug as the guy who does video in the inbound marketing community because they’ve done a really good job embracing it and executing.

Ryan:                But, as he’ll share with you, it didn’t just happen in one day because you got a master’s degree in videography. Can you share a little bit about the importance of that and how you get started?

Gabriel:            Thank you for having me, first of all. This is awesome. I feel like the first thing was we always wanted to do video. That was always on the list. This is something we want to do in the future. This is something that needs to happen. I remember going to Inbound, the HubSpot conference, I think it’s 2016. Brian Halligan came out and said, “Next year, don’t hire a blogger, hire a videographer. 50% of your content has to be video.” I was, like, okay, this is the time we have to do this.

Gabriel:            So, we were already Wistia partners which is an incredible video platform that helps you optimize your videos and posting, all that stuff. I called Dee Dee at that time. She was managing the partner program. I was, like, Dee Dee, let’s do this. What do I need to do? First of all, I would say partner with great people. The more partnerships you can create, the more people you have around you that know what they are doing and they can help you and you can help them, the better.

Gabriel:            This partnership for us the same way helps, the partnership was incredible and it’s incredible. Wistia for us, and the video side of things has to be incredible because in the beginning, we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t have cameras, we didn’t have videographers, we didn’t have anything. We just had an iPhone and started shooting. We started learning how to do lighting, how to do sound, how to have multiple cameras, and by trial and error, got better and better over time.

Gabriel:            So the partnership was very important. And the partnership was, a lot of it, based on education. Find partnerships that educate your team, that educate your marketing team, I feel that’s crucial. Now, with video, everybody thinks video is hard, and that’s the biggest problem. The problem with video is people think that you need specialists, that you need big, expensive equipment, and it takes time, that it’s expensive. That’s the stigma of video. Video has an incredible stigma around it.

Gabriel:            Video’s awesome, video’s easy, video’s cheap. You can pretty much shoot video with your iPhone. It’ll look amazing. It doesn’t matter if the video doesn’t look like a Hollywood production as long as the content of the video is great. So I feel that’s the first thing you need to do. Of course, partnerships are great and education is great.

Gabriel:            Just do it. Go and do it. Start doing it. Do it consistently. Fail a lot, like they’re talking about all the time nowadays. Create series that don’t work and then make them better. Shoot a video every week and show what you do in your team or why things work or don’t work for you or your customers. Showcase yourself and keep going at it.

Gabriel:            I feel like that’s the problem. People quit too fast. We were talking about this today. People quit too fast in videos, they quit too fast on many things.

Ryan:                Blogging, whatever.

Gabriel:            Blogging, whatever it is. You have to keep going. So first of all, it’s great partnerships. Second, the stigma of video. Just forget it. Go do it. Empower your team. You have a team, you have a marketing team. Just find someone that’s creative. Someone that has an Instagram page that is a photographer or someone that loves this already. If they like media, they do media, that’s great. But find that person and then empower that person. Give them the right tools, the right connections, empowering them with education, time, resources; and let them be.

Gabriel:            I feel like that was what happened with us and our agency, our agency just took something that didn’t exist two years ago and made it into this huge video product for ourselves and our customers. Everybody tells me, yeah, it’s easy to say that you’re going to start and then all of a sudden you’re going to sell video for agencies? I say just go do free videos for your customers. If you are trying to sell video, just go and do it for free for everybody. Just take your iPhone, buy a $50 tripod, and the lighting set for another $50, and go shoot some free videos, edit it a little bit, and start showing how that impacts their brand, and how it impacts their resource.

Gabriel:            We were talking about today YouTube is a great place for branding. Do that. Wistia is a great platform for regeneration and tracking and understanding if your leads are watching video when they’re connected. Do that. Once you start getting your first case studies, and you’re starting to understand that, and be able to prove the impact of video, you will see that people will ask you for it.

Gabriel:            Again, that’s as an agency. If you’re doing this for your business, just go at it. Try to prove it for your boss maybe. Keep doing it because it will work. We have case studies that we can share where we have proven that leads that watch video turn into customers three times as much as leads that don’t watch videos.

Ryan:                We’ll link out to that in the blog.

Gabriel:            That’s awesome. In the end, it’s finding the right partnerships, finding the right tools, starting, and keep doing it. Don’t stop because this works. And you will learn. If that person that wasn’t creative, starts loving video, just give them more resources. Buy them more cameras. Then in the end, if that person turns into the videographer or the video manager of the team, either for your company or agency, that’s great.

Gabriel:            Once this continues to grow, invest in it. Hire a videographer. Bring someone that knows more about sound or lighting and get more proficient at it. We are now, like you mentioned, being invited to talk about all these things, to events, we’re confident about it and it all happened because we were promoting ourselves, because we were doing it. That’s kind of like what you said today. You are who you show you are. Nobody will call you and say you’re an expert, please help me, if you’re not doing it consistently.

Gabriel:            So I feel consistency has to be one of the main things.

Ryan:                I think that’s something we talk about a lot. In the videos that I create, whether it’s a technical thing on SEO or we’re talking about marketing strategies, it’s the consistency of building up one by one by one. For me, it took me over a year of blogging three times a week before I started to really see a significant increase in traffic.

Ryan:                You mentioned two years ago, you didn’t do video. Now, it’s started to build that compounding interest, now you’re being seen as this expert in video. We live in a culture of right now. I need to have this right now. I want to order this. It should be here. But the reality is good things take time. And things that are lasting and that are going to create something that’s worth being a part of, they take some time to create. Rome wasn’t built in a day. That’s a saying but it’s true.

Ryan:                I think the powerful thing with video, like, take these points, put them up on wherever you need to see them, and then just go do it. Put your first step forward. Just keep making videos. Keep putting yourself out there because when you attach your face, your humanness to your brand, and you allow yourself to have a conversation with somebody, it changes them. It’s not stale anymore.

Gabriel:            Definitely.

Ryan:                Thanks so much, man, for sharing. Thanks so much. I’m at his sweet, really cool office here. Get to spend the whole day learning from his team. I’m going to make sure we have a link to that case study in the blog notes as well as below the YouTube channel. If you have any questions for me on video or something for Gabriel, you want to ask him, I will also pass it along. Please comment below, and until next time, Happy Marketing.

Check out Nextiny’s Video case study mentioned in the video here.