At Meticulosity, we’ve been grappling with how to do video for a couple of years. It’s obviously been on our radar, but video can be scary to a marketing agency that does Content and Inbound Marketing very well, because it’s a totally different process.
Or so we thought.
Branching into video, we imagined we would require producers, production crews, editors, and the challenge of how to package branded video for our clients that both they and we would be proud to share.
Video Is the Future
We’ve been very slow and cautious with our approach to video, but we can tell that there is a deadline looming:
- A prominent Facebook executive predicted that their platform will be all video and no text by 2021. (Quartz)
- By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017. (Cisco)At HubSpot’s annual Inbound Conference in September 2019, it seemed like the word “video” was mentioned every 5 minutes. This really pushed us at Meticulosity to figure out how to do video for both our clients and ourselves and how to do it in a way that integrates seamlessly with Inbound Marketing.
APPROACHING Video AS INBOUND MARKETERS
We’ve turned the whole video process on its head with a new approach as Inbound Marketers.
There are several aspects to Inbound Marketing that make it so successful:
- Delivering the right information to the right person at the right time, every time.
- The cadence and the velocity of content and meeting your customer needs in a much faster way than ever before. It's about creating relevant blogs, social content and offers that are relevant today because that's where your digital customers are. They're living in the now, and not six month or a year ago.
- Creating real, engaging content. 5-10 years ago, many companies blogged to stuff keywords so that Google would find you and give you a page rank boost. But that doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t read well. And customers don’t like it.
Real people can tell when content is not real.
Real people bounce when the content is not engaging.
For example, there are millions of blog posts out there. Why are they reading yours? How is yours telling them something new or different? When you give your customers value for consuming your content, you attract customers that are engaged, delighted, and in turn, attract more customers. That is, in essence, the Inbound Marketing Flywheel.
Sure, we’d love to churn out videos that look like they were directed by James Cameron. But that's not affordable. Or realistic. And they take too much time with too many cooks in the kitchen to be created by an agile marketing team.
A new Way to do Video
So what is our approach to create engaging video at high speed, offering customers value for consumption? By taking all of the same methodologies from Inbound Marketing and applying them to an approach we call Inbound Video:
- Cadence and Velocity: By shooting video content on a HD or 4K. cell phone vs. an expensive production crew we can turn around high quality, branded content within a week or two. Not several weeks. Or Months.
- An easy-to-follow scripting process built entirely around an engaging content offer within the video, offering the viewer something they care about or something they can learn, with a clear call to action.
- Delivering the right videos to the right customers on the right channels at the right time.
We've created an onboarding and training process that teaches our customers how to build a video content offer, and to do it in just 10-15 minutes. Then, we show you how to use your cell phone to shoot video content in a way that looks good. Finally, we take that content and edit it, add in the proper branding and graphics, and give it back to you a format that you'll be proud to share and is easily integrated into your overall Inbound Marketing Campaign, at just 5-10% the cost of traditional video production.
