Why video is the new document

Summary: What I learned about producing video in 2018 at Video Marketing World

Let me open with a disclaimer: I borrowed this title from my buddy Rollo Wenlock, CEO at Wipster. You know what he told me? That video is the new document. You know what else? He’s totally right. This is just one of the things I learned at Video Marketing World 2018.

Video Marketing World is an annual event that launched in 2018. It only invites 500 people and that’s what’s really neat about it. Normally when I go to a tradeshow or conference there are thousands of people there and you’ll always find a small group of people that you know and just hang out with them. When it’s 500 attendees everybody’s included and this makes the speakers way more accessible because they aren’t being mobbed by thousands of people.

I went there hoping to learn three things:

• What does successful vlogging look like for a B2B company like ScreenCloud?
• What metrics should we be measuring when it comes to video marketing?
• How do we achieve overall channel growth?

In this post I’m going to share what I learned about those three questions and what else was up from an awesome few days!

Creating a successful vlogging strategy

One of the questions I asked Amy Landino was how do I build more confidence in front of the lens? She just looked straight at me and said Brad, it’s not a lens it’s a person.

When we get in front of the camera we forget that our audience is a person. This is even more important if we want to bring a vlogging strategy to life. Vlogging, by its very nature, is meant to be personable. Using a teleprompter or reading direct from a script just won’t make the cut for personal videos.

When you’re standing in a room full of production gear by yourself it’s difficult to remember that the end viewer is a person. So I’ll be looking to get deeper into our ScreenCloud personas in order to truly know the person I’m speaking out to, then speak directly to them.

Metrics to measure

There were a few super interesting things I learned about metrics at the event. First up: what gets you into the YouTube “Recommended” algorithm? Here, the speakers shared that the average clickthrough rate and audience retention is most important. Also, ensuring people stay interested throughout the majority of your video and interact with your content after they’ve clicked through on it. The more you can get into the Recommended channel the more chance you have of reaching a wider audience!

Secondly, the average clickthrough rate for a video on YouTube is around 2.2% Our ScreenCloud videos get an average of 5.5% which is a good start but what we really want to build is audience retention, so ensuring that once a user has clicked through they’re sticking around.

Brian G. Johnson also spoke about what makes for a compelling thumbnail and how he’s tested this over time. His thoughts were around reducing text and making it bigger, so as to be clearer on mobile — a great point!

There’s also an interesting caveat around social video. For a long time, channels such as Facebook and Instagram have been trying to monopolize the video platform. Features such as IGTV from Instagram and Facebook’s “Live” focus make it really appealing for those who are maybe not as comfortable with YouTube.

However, there’s definitely a learning around taking viewership numbers on social media with a grain of salt. For example on Facebook, if a user scrolls past a video and it was viewable for 100% of the time while they scrolled past, it’s considered a view!

In my opinion, the key with metrics is to focus on owned channels or channels which aren’t being as heavily monetized. This means video on your website and also video channels like YouTube. Although YouTube does use ads, business-to-business channels don’t often need to be monetized.

Subscribers on YouTube can also push the notification bell to see your new video and that’s a pretty pure way of being seen. Lastly, YouTube is the second largest search engine so when people search they’re likely to find your videos whereas social channels have more difficulty in the discoverability department.

Achieving overall channel growth

For a few months now we’ve been executing a strategy at ScreenCloud of YouTube videos that help our users to get better at the topics they’re interested in. What I learned at VMW was that we are on the right track! We’re running parallel to that right path and pouring more content into that video funnel is what’s going to help us go even further.

What video needs to be is the next form of document. Something that is going to engage us as humans. The way businesses create documents is fast and it’s designed to help people, or tell them something or get them to the next step. When we start thinking about video in this way, it’s going to get faster to create and it’s going to get better.

For us at ScreenCloud, it’s really time to look at the workflow and process we have in place (shout out to Rolo for this tip!). Rolo blogged consecutively for 98 days and saw huge amounts of channel growth. The learning about growth is that you need that time being consistent and out of that, you’ll get results.

Or, to put it another way as Roberto Blake mentioned:

“The only time that you see a return before you make an investment is in that term: return on investment.”

It’s so true!!

So to summarize:

• Video is such a personal channel, that we need to not fight against this. Let your customers see the raw footage while you learn and grow.
• To get good at vlogging you need to do a lot of it!
• Metrics such as retention, view time and length of interaction are a true measure of success. Views and “impressions”, not so much.
• Channel growth comes from doing video consistently and thinking about videos as documents as opposed to feature films that require huge production.

Do you agree with these points? I’d love to hear your video thoughts and what else went down at VMW18 that I might have missed! Hit me up on Twitter and please do give me a “Medium clap” if you enjoyed these learnings.