In this episode Chelsea, Richard and James talk about the rise of video and how you can capitalise on it in your marketing communications.

Videography
Podcast Videography
Transcript
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about videography, to enhance your marketing communications.
I’m here with James and rich today, and we’re talking about videography. And it’s something that is gaining a lot of traction at the moment.
Yes, it’s definitely getting more more and more popular. We’re getting requests almost daily now for videos where it would have normally been a photo, both video and animation, to just liven up a newsfeed. Really, I think we all know we get the video gets much more interaction than ever, platforms and broadband speeds and all the other factors have helped the situation so that things load easily quickly. And think live streams, for example, another video source that that is going absolutely crazy at the minute if you’ve got the confidence to do it, I always suggest as a business, do it, go live on your social feeds, and you’ll get some fantastic results from it. It’s always nice to see a video when you’re scrolling down the newsfeed. And there’s lots and lots of product photography adverts, most mostly adverts, in fact, even more so than ever to get a nice video amongst it that sometimes isn’t an advert. And it’s just from somebody pitching themselves or a page or even just a profile, I think it always breaks up the news feed which is handy. We create some short videos for people. We help clients advise them how to make videos themselves, even if it’s simply picking up an iPhone, switching that camera and going live or recording a video of what they’re doing that day, they’re seeing some fantastic results from it.
I think it goes into the whole rise in authenticity and people actually wanting to see the processes behind things. So we were having a chat the other day about Facebook. And funnily enough, it’s the videos that are over three minutes long that gain the best traction. And those videos are usually the ones that show you like the process of making something. We’ve all seen those like kind of resin lamps that show up on your feed, and there’s not really any point to them, they just show up. And it’s kind of like the process of making something like that, or, yeah, the food ones as well. And for some reason, people are actually like staying engaged for pretty much the entire length of the videos.
I’m interested, I like to see how things are made anything. Sometimes it’s a little bit sad to almost even watch the programme how it’s made, just to see how things are actually made. It’s quite interested in YouTube channels are going crazy for it. So I think that’s what it’s all about really
quite interesting, really, if you sort of try and take that theory of the how it’s made. And say you’re a company that makes sort of very bespoke products. If you actually turned the the manufacturer factoring process into a video and share that on social media, would you then get more engagement with that, because you’re demonstrating the full end to end process rather than just sharing a finished product or a product photo? I suspect it will probably be one of the highest engage videos at that particular company put out there to be honest.
Yeah, definitely. And I think as well like kind of going back off that as well and taking away from products and like making it more about people and stuff as well. I think with the rise of like kind of being on video now all the time with like remote working and kind of like changing the working environment, people are getting a lot more used to basically seeing themselves on screen. And one thing that I have kind of realised is the drop in creative video has kind of gone down because obviously people can’t go out and make it. But there’s been a rise in people kind of like doing vlogging style posts on the line just to break up the feed as well.
Yeah, I’ve seen that and bringing people in remotely. Whereas normally you’d get together you’d set the scene, you set the studio, you go to a location that makes the whole thing look fantastic. Now you just see three heads on a zoom call, or in a podcast studio, or in some way shape, or form shooting a video that normally would be quite blunt about like some of the YouTube videos, for example, are in the same studio every time. They’re pulling people into it remotely. And it’s given it a little bit something a little bit more depth really something more interested in creating a conversation rather than talking at the camera. They’re talking to each other than the cameras just purely conversational. Really just recording the conversation.
Yeah, I think a lot of this content as well. I think people can get slightly obsessive about it being sort of hugely well produced. And so yeah, it looks like you’re saying historically, people would set up a studio and they get it all perfect. The lighting was all there. But obviously the practicalities of where people are at the moment is mental that can’t happen. So people are more forgiving of let’s say more amateur looking content, as long as the content still good and valuable, that it’s still got some, some worthwhile to it. I think yeah. If you go to YouTube, particularly, you know, depending on what your hobby interest is, you’ll find people that create essentially their own little YouTube shows, or podcasts, get turned into videos, and all that gets amazing amounts of engagement when you’re in a particular hobby or at topic that people are interested in. I think it’s more challenging in a sort of general b2b or b2c e commerce environment where you sort of really haven’t gotten necessarily a niche, and you’re just shifting products, because there’s less to talk about. And the videos will typically end up becoming just products things. But when if you’re in a business that’s got a particularly good following for a particular reason, or you’re in an industry that has got people that are really enthusiastic about something, then creating video content is really quite easy to do. And also, you can become sort of minus celebrities in your own field by doing it. And then this will then increase your personal brand, increase your business’s brand and lead you to getting more, click throughs to wherever you’re trying to send people through to as well.
A good example of that, and one of our clients also bright direct, they’re absolutely fantastic on social media, all social medias, they’ve got an avid following global following really, and, and they really do engage with the customer, they go live more often than ever now, and create some absolutely fantastic video content and get some good engagement, absolutely incredible engagement from that. And on the back of that they’ve created created a kind of a community that that that runs by itself, it doesn’t require lots of engagement from them, obviously, they do keep an eye on it and try to hold where possible where time permits, but the community themselves, create videos and create content themselves to help each other out and advise each other, which I think is key for a business to do that.
I think the other thing as well is that the technology to make the videos is essentially in everyone’s pocket right now anyway, you know that the evolution of how video, phone cameras have sort of gone over the last particularly sort of three or four years, you know, they all pretty much record in 4k video now. You know, everyone can get access to a relatively cheap tripod and sort of light setup. And so it’s more accessible now than ever before, without having to invest huge amounts of money in equipment to do it. You can you see that just from tick tock, you know, people create tick tock content on their phone all the time, they can edit it on the app. And essentially, it’s the same thing as making content any other way. It’s just the app makes it easy to do the editing. I think you know, with people getting more used to how video editing works, even at a very basic level, we’re going to see more and more people be willing to put themselves in front of the camera and talk about what it is that they do. And yeah, they may not necessarily go to a partner company to produce a video for them. They will do when they need a much bigger, more elaborate setup or like a very well shot corporate video or something that is very, very specific. But I think this sort of the quick social media style videos, we can we see a lot of this being done by people without really any past experience or skills just using the technology that gone I can
now can give you a clear example of that. So very recently, I use two apps where my son who is six years old, these apps run off AI, we shot footage on a drone, and we shot footage on a GoPro for the day, had a fantastic day didn’t really think about what we were shooting, we just shot the fun that we were having on holiday. And then at the end of that day use two apps apps had never used before. And you simply add the add all the footage. So it took some time, I used an iPad Pro through all the photo Gen and my six year old son edited it two or three clicks later and he produced an absolutely fantastic video and the app itself had looked at the video content doesn’t slow mo by itself sped things up added added audio on top of it to set the scene and all we had to do is type of title in day one on holiday, this is what we’ve done. And then it did the video for us and allowed us to fine tune it towards the end before exporting it. It was literally a 10 minute episode. And it looked like a professionally shot video. Just using a powerful obviously a powerful iPad did help. But my six year old son did it all.
I think we’ve that a lot of these apps are coming a lot more intuitive now. And so for example, tick tock I’m glad you mentioned it because it’s one of my favourite hobbies. And when you’re kind of like going on there and you’re editing videos and stuff, it’s it almost like kind of if you’re putting a load of videos together so for example, you’ve done some things and a lot of different takes it almost like kind of mashes it all up together and it puts in where it thinks that they should be blended. So the the way that you can actually add it on there. It does really fine tune it and I think tick tock as well you can notice with like how it just completely increased in popularity. At around the time that the first lockdown did come on, people were using it, for example, to entertain themselves to engage and now because of how many people have actually signed up into using it. Tik Tok itself has has it seemed like learning suite as well. They’ve actually got a team of people that are reaching out and engaging with brands and showing them how to do it and what to do on there.
I’ve seen that as well. I mean, tick tock, I’ve actually got a bit isn’t a programme running at the moment where they are trying to encourage more businesses to get onto the platform. And so they’re sort of trying to move away from what are suppose their core audience of teenagers, and not saying that your teenager, slightly older than that was, yeah, I might even get my, my 12 year old daughter use it quite extensively. But they are looking at moving into the sort of more, I suppose getting more of a more varied sort of selection of people on their
time to monetize. That’s what you say in it. And
yeah, basically, they’ve looked at it, you know, that they’re clearly making, you know, they’ve got a lot of users, that they’re looking at how Facebook and Instagram, Twitter have gone. And they’re seeing how they can engage people that are willing to pay to be on there, basically. And I think they ought to do that they need to broaden their appeal beyond the teenager market, necessarily, so that the advertisers have got more reason and more scope to be on there. So yeah, as a business, it’s not a bad platform to try and get into really, I mean, it’s not necessarily a young business now. And there’ll be something that comes along in a year and a half, which is the new tick tock. But for the time being, yeah, it’s something that especially if your industry, no one’s done it before, it might be worth getting in on early and trying to find a way to create content on there. Obviously, it’s all video content. And it’s all content that you could probably produce. It’s quite unique. And it just gives you something a bit different to go out there with rather than just the same old things that you’ve been doing historically, it just might take a little bit of creativity and thought about how you’d use that particular app to create content relevant to your business.
Do you think that we’ve got to start dancing Nolan James is crazy Tik Tok videos as so marketing online over to you, Chelsea?
Just on the just on with tick tock and that kind of engagement levels and is now the time to jump on it? I’d say yes, because I’ve been looking at a lot of stats recently. And I think there was one brand, it was big brand, I think it was Jim shark or someone and it taken them three years to get to 1 million followers on Instagram. But then on tick tock, they’d literally done 1 million followers in the space of a couple of months. And just because of how, how unsaturated it is at the moment, so everyone is now on Instagram and Facebook and whereas the kind of engagement levels that you’re getting on Tik Tok, because there’s less competition out there that can do it. Well, you can almost kind of boost your following on there really quickly and some micro influencers as well. They’ve just started on and they started on Tik Tok at the start of lockdown, and now they’ve reached a million followers on their 3 million followers. And it’s just insane how quickly people are growing a following on this platform because they jumped on at a really early time they’ve started playing around and being creative, the content that they’re getting out there. And Tik Tok, it’s your It’s famous for dancing and stuff, but also like, I think it’s just more creative and a bit more humanistic than some of the things that we’d see on Instagram, like with the heavily filtered photos and the really staged setups that you see.
From my point of view, I don’t use tick tock, I’m aware of it. I’ve been on tick tock. I just I just feel there’s quite a few social platforms that I enjoy using more. How how do these influences let’s call and all these people who it’s their full time job to be on tick tock, now they’ve got a million followers to keep happy. How do they make money out of it? Is it a thing at this moment in time? Can they make money out of it?
Yeah, definitely. They are making money out of it. And tick tock actually has a team of people and like the business team that James was saying, but they also have like an influencer outreach team as well, where they teach people how to create content that puts Tik Tok in the best light. So shoes is a really creative platform, teaches them how to use it teaches them how to grow a following. The algorithm on there is really powerful as well. So it tries to match the user up with content that they will find a lot more easily than, for example, Instagram where a lot of it comes from the hashtags and stuff that you use tic TOCs just a lot more intuitive. And I think as well like what I’ve seen as a lot of the people are also growing a following on Tik Tok, but then they are migrating to classic like Instagram and things to try and monetize on there. Or they’re starting to do more long form content and on YouTube and trying to monetize that but the key thing is, they grew that following on Tik Tok, they didn’t grow up on those other platforms because they couldn’t
write Okay, it looks like me and James got to get your dancing shoes on open up tick tock account and entertain people which thing James?
Oh, yeah, you can. Yeah, no, you’re right. I think you know, people tend to use more than one social media and when you’ve got a following on one, it does tend to start to migrate to the other because people will automatically use more than one. Things like you say with it being so early stage at the moment the eyeballs on on Tik Tok are easier to To get in front of them, they are on the other platforms. So it’s certainly something that’s worth customers looking into. From our point of view. Yeah, well, I’m sure you can offer them quite a lot of advice there Chelsea on that. So yeah, if anyone’s actually got any questions about trying to sort of engage video in their business, then drop us an email at Hello at so marketing.com