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0:49 – YouTube
2:13 – Video marketing using mobile devices
2:45 – Video marketing and social media
3:46 – Where do you start?
4:48 – 6 types of videos you can put on landing pages
4:55 – Face-to-camera type of videos
5:21 – Slideshow or PowerPoint presentation videos
6:14 – Demonstration Videos
7:05 – Interview videos
7:42 – Q&A and FAQ videos
8:12 – Explanimation videos
9:02 – Pricing of videos
10:05 – Equipment needed when making videos
11:11 – Audio of Videos
12:28 – Video lighting
12:56 – Create good quality videos
13:50 – Inbound video marketing
14:05 – Inbound video marketing: YouTube
14:35 – Inbound video marketing: Video ads
15:25 – Inbound video marketing: Q&A
16:38 – News videos
18:05 – Testimonials
19:19 – Tip of the week
Hello everybody!
Welcome to the hvacbusinessgrowth.com podcast. I’m your host, Nick Bielawski. It’s great to have you listening today.
The topic for today’s podcast is video marketing. We actually spoke in a recent news video about video marketing and how it’s taking the world by storm. Obviously, video marketing isn’t new but it’s one thing that I truly believe you just can’t ignore in your business.
So let’s go over the couple of the stats.
We’re going to focus today on YouTube in particular. YouTube is, at this stage, the third most trafficked website in the world and it’s owned by Google as well. So if you want to get in Google’s good books, then it’s probably a good idea to post and play around in YouTube as much as you can.
YouTube itself gets 800 million unique visitors per month. So that’s quite a lot of traffic as you can imagine and that’s how it fits the figure of the third biggest site in the world. There are 72 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Every single minute, 72 hours of videos are uploaded. So that’s absolutely massive. There’s a lot of content going on there. It’s a big traffic channel.
YouTube is also being used in 43 countries and is published or created in 60 different languages. So, if you’re not from the US or the UK or Australia or one of the western countries or mainstream countries, and you’re not quite sure whether video marketing is for you, then that might answer your question. You might fall into one of those 43 countries where video marketing or YouTube, in particular is popular.
And keeping in the trend of mobile devices and mobile phones, 20% of the views in YouTube come from mobile devices. So we’re talking about iPads, iPhones, android devices and the likes. That figure is growing every single month. And again, the message comes through the videos like it always does. But if you’re not doing some sort of mobile marketing, then you really need to start and have a look at it as soon as you can.
Video marketing is highly linked to social media as well. On Facebook, in particular, 500 views of YouTube videos are watched everyday. There’s a lot of sharing done in Facebook alone. You might see it in your threads how many people are posting videos on their Facebook timeline. Just out of your friends that you see everyday, it’s probably quite a few people. And on Twitter, 700 videos a minute are shared.
Videos are super popular right now and these integrates with social media so well. So if you can create videos, it’s probably pretty fair to say that people are going to share the videos that you create on the internet and that’s really important.
So if you can create a video and then it’s going to get shared around and distributed into all sorts of different media channels that you probably can’t even track. Some of these stuffs get spread so far and wide.
Hopefully now you’re understanding how big video marketing is and in particular, YouTube. So the question is, where do you start?
I think, everybody in this day and age, people who are running a heating and cooling business, you need to have a video on your landing pages.
So when I’m talking about landing pages, I’m talking about the main pages on your website that people are actually visiting. So if you have a page about hydronic heating or split system air conditioning or ducted air conditioning or whatever it is, I think you should have a video on all of your main landing pages.
It’s been proven that conversion actually improve when you have a video on your page and people actually stick around on the pages or the site a lot more because videos are so watchable.
Just remember, people are very visual with how they learn and how they interact. So if you’ve got a video on your website, if people are interested, they’re going to watch some of the videos and actually stick around.
So the big question is, what types of videos can you have on your landing pages on your site?
So, what’s really popular is actually having face-to-camera type of videos. So that’s just basically where you set the camera up and you just stand in front of it and deliver some content.
So, if you’ve been lucky enough to see any of the news videos that I’ve been producing, they’re face-to-camera videos. I just have the script set up and I just stand in front of the camera and deliver the content.
Also, a pretty popular and easy to do for people who don’t like standing in front of the camera is setting up a slideshow or a PowerPoint presentation. So those familiar with Microsoft Office products, that’s for the PC users who are listening, PowerPoint is fantastic because you can actually create the PowerPoint and then, just using a screen capture software like Camtasia (costs around $300) or Jing (free for 5 minute videos) you can actually video yourself talking into a microphone or just talking into the in-built microphone in your computer and going through the PowerPoint or the slide presentation.
So that’s really a simple way of doing videos. And obviously, within your PowerPoint, you can integrate images and little videos and that sort of thing as well.
Demonstrations can be very handy as well. It depends on what sort of products you are offering within your business. But demonstrations can be good as well if you have a special tip about how to clean a vent on a certain system or how to make sure that a certain air conditioner is working. You can do a video demonstration for a couple of minutes but that is really handy for somebody who is looking for some help on a particular unit. Then, they can determine for themselves what they actually need before they call for a service.
And the great thing about doing demonstrations is, because you are basically giving away information for free, people actually feel a little bit of gratitude towards you. And if they have a problem, they’re more than likely to come to you.
Some other types of video that works quite well are actually doing interviews. So, there are a variety of ways that you can do it. You can actually just do one-on-one interviews with somebody in front of a camera or you can actually interview them just over Skype or anything like that. Just take the audio recording and then roll some images in over the top of that. It’s very easy to do. It’s something that you can do again if you’re a PC user, which most people are. That’s something that you can easily do in a Movie Maker—that’s a free software within Microsoft Windows.
A Q&A or a Freqently Asked Questions type of video is something that I think works exceptionally fantastic. It was actually the tip of the week in last week’s episode where you would pick maybe 20 of the top questions that are related to your business or your industry and you’d get on there and do 1 video answering every single question that there is and then just market and release those videos on a set schedule. That works quite well.
Explanimations are quite a new thing and they look fantastic when they’re produced but they’re time-consuming and difficult to put together and hence they can be quite costly. So, if you don’t know what explanimations are, they are basically cartoons with a voice over over the top. The cartoons are actually moving and there’s a voice over-the-top of the cartoons explaining what’s going on. Like I said, these look really good when they’re done but they’re super expensive to produce.
They’re the main types of videos that you can use in your marketing but more specifically in your landing pages. So, I’ll probably start with, maybe, the face to camera type of thing or maybe even the slideshow, PowerPoint type of presentation. That can work quite well.
Pricing the videos—like I said before with the explanimations, pricing can be very expensive and can often go into tens of thousands of dollars because sometimes you need somebody that’s got 3D animation skills and those people just aren’t walking around the street. That’s quite a specialized skill set—having 3D animation experience.
Some companies like ANIMOTO actually create videos for you with some images that you give them and they put some music over the top of it. That’s actually a free thing; it’s very inexpensive.
Also, the face-to-camera type of videos or the interviews are really just the cost of the equipment and your time. The production cost isn’t really all that expensive. So that’s why I think it’s a really good place to start. I think this is the perfect segueway into talking about equipment.
So, obviously if you’re going to do your own videos, you need your own video camera. Believe it or not you can actually shoot some really good videos with just the iPhone or any mobile phone. The picture quality in those cameras and the sound are actually coming out really well. There are actually cheap courses online about how to do a video with your iPhone and I think one is called iPhone Video Hero. I actually haven’t gone through the course myself but I hear it’s quite good.
The news videos that I do, they’re actually just shot with a Kodak camera. It’s actually just a small camera that you can put a microphone into. It’s nothing extravagant at all.
If you want to go a little bit more professional, the Canon 60D camera is very good camera to use as well. It’s probably got a few more settings as far as lights and lenses go versus the cheaper Kodak model. So, these are some options for you.
So I think with video, sound is probably the most important thing. People can actually tolerate slightly less than ideal image quality or video quality but sound is a bit of a deal breaker I think. If you’re not too sure about what you’re going to invest in and you’re sitting on the fence, sound would probably be one of the things that you want to spend more money on.
In terms of getting good quality sounds, things like getting lapel microphones or wireless microphones is something that you should look into. For example, I’m using a blue snowball microphone for doing this podcast. And when I’m doing my videos, I use a wide lapel mic; it’s not wireless, it’s wired. It’s actually why in some of those videos you’ll only see me talking from the waist up. It’s because there are wires between my legs. But I think the sound that it delivers, particularly outside where there are lots of natural noises happening, is of good quality. It’s actually windy where I’m from as well. So the sound quality coming from that microphone is pretty good.
Light is another consideration. Natural light is the best place to start I feel. I’ve got lighting tips and those sorts of things. They’re quite difficult to set up and get right. You can actually spend quite a fair bit of money trying to get a good lighting set up. It takes up a lot of room so if you don’t have a lot of room in your office, it could be quite difficult to get a good lighting set up. So, just head outside or just use natural light; that could work quite well.
So I think that big tip though is to make sure that you’re actually creating good quality productions. We used to be able to slap together a video off your phone or a cheap camera without any microphone. It doesn’t really cut in anymore. So if you can’t use the best camera that’s available, spend some money on getting some good quality microphones or use a service that actually has this equipment; that’s another thing that you could do.
Spend some time in putting a good quality production together—putting title frames in your videos, fading ins and fade outs and just the special effects are some of the things that help add to the production value and the perceived value of what you’re actually doing to the customer. So I think that’s all I’ve got as far as the equipment side of things goes.
So, now I want to move on to inbound video marketing. One of the stuffs we’ve spoken about then was about the pages on your website and how you can improve conversions by doing things like face to video or face to camera.
In inbound video marketing, the focus is on YouTube as that’s the primary channel. Obviously, you should get yourself a YouTube channel for your business. Ideally, whatever your business name is, it might be New York Heating and Cooling, try and get a YouTube channel called New York Heating and Cooling. That helps with the branding side of things. Don’t worry about keywords or anything like that on your YouTube channel. We’re just going for the branding-type of approach.
So in terms of getting traffic to your website or getting traffic to your offer, video ads seem to be working quite well in YouTube. You might notice that if you’re watching YouTube videos at the moment, you’ll see some ads from the start of your video which you can actually skip but they’re actually interesting to watch in terms of what sorts of things people are advertising.
So, particularly if you’re in the residential market, nearly everybody is going to be or could possibly be customer of yours. Most people in most cities have some sort of heating and cooling system in their homes so they might either be looking for a new system or they need the service of their existing one. So, it might be worth investigating—doing some sort of video ads inside of YouTube—it might be worth checking out.
Other inbound video marketing techniques that you can use are the Q&A type of things that we spoke about before. So you can obviously put those on your website and you can put them on YouTube as well, linking back to the website.
So if somebody has a particular question about Jujitsu cooling system or whatever the brand is, they might go into YouTube or they might search Google for an answer. Usually, if there is a good quality video about a question like that, Google will serve it up probably somewhere in the first page. It might not be number 1 but as we know, when we’re searching on Google and when we see a video, it really draws our attention to the page and it gets a really good click-through rate.
The Q&A’s are fantastic. You can answer a lot of questions on there and you might only get a trickle of traffic coming through; you might not get much traffic but obviously if people have a problem they want an answer, that traffic that you can get is literally priceless. Those are target leads coming to your website. You’ll at least know they’re interested.
The news videos approach is basically when you act as a reporter in your market. So if there are any breaking news or new product releases, create a daily, weekly or monthly news video that lets the customers know or the market know what’s actually happening inside your industry. That’s a fantastic authority builder and I think it’s quite simple to do.
Interviews are great as well. If there is a respected person within your industry or a respected brand, you can actually hijack their credibility, so to speak. If you could potentially score an interview with the president or the chief executive of a major air conditioning or heating company, you can leverage off their profile.
You might only be the person asking the basic questions about a particular service or heating system, but because you’re doing the interview, you actually leverage off the authority of that person and it actually portrays you in a much better light. So the interview technique is fantastic and it’s not difficult at all to sit down with somebody and have a 20 or 30-minute conversation. And in terms of content on the internet, it works quite well.
Testimonials are one thing I think you should be doing. Text testimonials are very common at the moment but video testimonials I think are the way to go. They’re more difficult to get but if you could get your happy customers to give testimonials and do them on a video then you can put them on YouTube and you can put them on your site. You can literally put them anywhere and they don’t look as forced. They are quite credible I think because somebody has actually given the time to get up on a camera and deliver a nice positive message. So I think a little bit more credibility goes a long way.
It’s more believable I think when people deliver video testimonials. They can be great in getting inbound traffic to your site so it really helps. If people see a testimonial about your business away from your website, they’re almost pretty sold before they get there. It actually improves or enhances the information that’s on your website because people are already warming up to your products, services and your ideas.
So now it’s time for the HVAC Business Growth tip of the week.
This week’s tip of the week is to put a video into the homepage of your site if you haven’t already done it.
The great thing about putting a video into your site is it’s obviously a multimedia type of content. People are really engaged with videos. Once they see it, they just can’t help it but click on the video. So you need to create a video, put it on your homepage.
Face to camera video I think is fantastic. Start with anywhere between 30 seconds to 2 minutes and just get up there and tell people what you’re about and what you offer. The unique selling proposition we’ve spoken about before and direct marketing—get up there and just telegraph your offer in front of the camera and you’ll be amazed at how many people are actually watching your video and following your call-to-action.
So why should you do that? Why should you follow the tip of the week? Well, you want to be ahead of the completion, don’t you? Think about your competition. How many of them have a video on their homepage?
If you can do this, you’re going to get a fantastic jump over your completion and you’re going to be a leader in the market.
So that’s all we have time for today on the HVAC Business Growth. I’m your host, Nick Bielawski. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.