Michael Epps Utley Video Transcript:
Everybody, Michael Epps Utley here at GoEpps. This is the third video in a short series called "Three Hard Truths About Video Marketing".
It's basically you're thinking about video wrong, and so truth number three, you're publishing it wrong. You're publishing it wrong. This gets back to number two, you're buying it wrong. But you're publishing it wrong means that when people plan video, it's typically some kind of Mount Everest moment that they think deserves this special treatment. They go out and produce one video and then they realize, "Man, we really need more video." But if you treat it as sort of a mountaintop subject matter, we can only do this one or we can only do these five, we're going to do one for each of our services or 20. We're only going to do one for each of our products. That's not really enough video. It's not even nearly enough.
Video should be a communications flow with your audience, so whatever your brand is, you have an audience out there. It's everyone who's ever heard of your brand. That's your audience. And some of those people are more or less interested in your brand. Video is like a conversation that you can have with everyone in your desired brand audience, but if you're thinking a video and planning video as this mountaintop experience, you're never going to get the volume or do enough in that channel to make an impact. So instead, when you go into a video project, you need to not go into it as a video project. You need to think of it as a marketing channel. It's a flow of communication between you and your audience. You're publishing video. They're engaging with it. They're communicating back to you either through comments, shares, likes, or minutes watched or time on page.
And so if you make this shift from thinking about video as a mountaintop experience, "We're going to do a video. We're really proud of it." Blah, blah, blah. And instead, start thinking of it as a channel and a channel for communication, then you can go into a production process with a plan that's going to get a lot more value out of your production days, a massive amount of production value out of your production days compared to just thinking of it as the video is the end result. This is very similar for how people think about websites and just thinking about the look and feel. When there's this whole world of other stuff going on behind the scenes that you find out after the website's live that you should have considered when planning a website. So what to consider when planning a video? Well, think about all the places that's going to be published and plan all of those before the shoot day is even scheduled.
Some of the places to think about are YouTube. What are your video channels? If you're publishing on YouTube, well, what are the subject matter that you're going to use that are going to be keyword relevant? So you can do SEO research to plan how your content's going to hit YouTube and how much value it's going to create there, before you start shooting and thinking about specific videos. This gets down into the details like how to think about specific topics and to make those essential categories and have call-outs for those so that you make sure that you're planning ahead and getting the right keywords into your transcripts that will be in your YouTube channel. Another thing for YouTube is to think about clipping. One of the ways that we do video is we'll have a video that's a longer format, maybe 15 minutes, but then plan ahead of time how we structure that content so it can be clipped out.
So we have little vignettes. They're not vignettes that we just happen to come across, and topics we happen to cover. They're topics that we've outlined, and so when it goes into YouTube, suddenly you've got clips that are being tagged and playlisted using subject matter that are specific to a very fine point inside the video. It might end up being a clip that might be a minute-long. And then social and email. The way you pump out a flow of video to all of your channels is very different than thinking after the fact about, "Oh, we've got this great video we made and put on our homepage. Should we share it on our social channels?" Yes, but that's not enough. You need to be thinking about your videos and your clips going out in a flow of content over a schedule to either your highly valued email subscribers that should all be opt in or people that you're working closely with and you have a reason to email and a reason to be in their inbox or your social media audiences.
These people, when they go to something and they're looking for a quick hit on something, if it's a one-minute clip, they can get that right there in the email or the social media post. They may have a click over from email if they're not in Gmail, but for the most part, you're conveying that value in a more compact way that's absorbable in the format and the length that's appropriate to the channel. But this requires better planning. So when you go into a video shoot, you're eating all this cost with production time, you really need to have those clips embedded in the content planning for the larger format videos. Also, reuses. There are clever things that we can do now with a large plan for video content. We can strip the audio, make it a podcast series. So there's crazy stuff that you can do now to reach out and infiltrate all the different connections and nodes that are on the internet for your content, if you do better planning.
And then here's the last one, and this is one that people miss, search indexes. Besides YouTube, it's good to have your video on your website. If you have pages that are keeping people engaged, they're going to hit that back button a little slower, and that blog is going to register as a little bit more valuable to searching indexes. Also, when you're creating video content, if it's really good material, it answers a specific question in a way that's been thoughtfully crafted, then all that transcript information can be loaded to your page's content. You can have a video about a service and have the transcript available to search engines. It could be lower on the page, or you could window shade it, if you want to get people on to look at some other things like a bulleted list of specifications or whatever.
Maybe the video content's a little bit different flavor, but then some of the info and transcript is not a direct reading of what you want people to see next, but you can either window shade or place that content lower on the page and make sure that search engines are seeing and getting and indexing all the good content that you're creating. There's a lot of innovation that's happened with transcripting, with YouTube, but doing this manual and letting people read through it, if they choose that instead, that's all good for page engagement.
All right, this has been the three-part series titled "Three Hard Truths About Video Marketing", but my title is "You're Not Thinking Right About Video". If you need help on this, you want to talk about a program, we do all this stuff, let us know. Go to goepps.com/video to get all the videos in the series, see what you missed, and to download a PDF on how we think about video and how we get cost per video way, way, way down. All right. I'm Michael. Let us know in the comments if you found this valuable and look forward to talking to you. We'll see you soon. Thanks.
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