Blog - BlitzMetrics

5 Levels of Content Strategy Video

As a designer, I like to dive into the content that I am designing for. I love learning and I am curious pretty much about any subject. While marketing isn’t my top subject, I believe in simplicity and visual learning. To create a video like this, simply place the image you would like on half of your screen. Open up a video application on your computer and open it up on the other half of your screen. Then do a screen recording. If you want the image to fill the whole screen, simply switch back and forth as needed from images/walkthroughs to your face. For more on content marketing, see our Content Marketing Course.

by Ethan Rumbaugh, Graphic Designer for BlitzMetrics. Video Length: 6:18.

Video IS Your Funnel

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Today, I want to reframe how you think about your marketing. I think this will be the key to the future of all of us. There are a couple of key messages: video is your funnel; it’s not that your funnel is made up of videos. The algorithm can push content based on how they interact, what they say, and your ability to collect information along the way in different videos. Another point is how relevancy is absolutely key, and how that can be calculated, and how that ties back to every single other channel, whether it’s email, search engines, or social media.

So what exactly is Quality Score?

Let’s step back almost 20 years when we ran ads on Google; you had a Quality Score. Google would show you at the keyword level, and it was on a scale of one to ten. With better relevance, say an eight versus a four, you would pay half as much for that traffic, assuming they had the same bid.

If someone else had half your relevancy score, they’d have to bid twice as much to get that same traffic. So your relevance score times your bid was your ad rank for a lot of you guys. It still is the case for you folks who know about PPC, buying ads on search engines. It was the same thing for us when I was at Yahoo! We calculated something called the “Quality Index”. The Quality Index was something we showed at the ad level, and a lot of people asked why that’s different. It’s different because Quality Index, or Relevance Score, or Quality Score is the intersection between content and targeting. So it wasn’t at the ad level, and it wasn’t at the targeting level. It was at the intersection.

And for search, the better your Quality Index, which is Yahoo!, or the better your Quality Score, which is Google, the less you would pay and the better your ads would perform, of course.

If you’re paying one fifth the price because your Quality Score’s a ten, like on your branded terms, versus a two – maybe you’re buying some else’s term; maybe you’re buying the broad match term or a very general head term – you just wouldn’t be doing as well.

How does Quality Score work today?

Now, imagine what it is that goes into the calculation of today’s Quality Score on Google and why that’s so important to us as marketers when you understand what the search engine’s thinking. The number one factor in Quality Score, you guys know, is your CTR because the high CTR is a good proxy for relevance. People are clicking on it, then it somehow must tie to them. So if you get, like, a 10% CTR, which usually means you’re in the first or second position of search, then people are like, “Oh, this might be neat”, but it’s also looking at landing page factors; it’s looking at the keywords you’re using; it’s looking at other user experience factors, right? Because the search engine’s trying to think, “how do I know that something’s relevant – not just clickbait enough to get someone to click on it – but they end up having a good experience, and how do you measure good experiences along the way? Do they buy?”

So, if you look at Facebook and their Relevance Score… Facebook, of course, by the time you’re reading this, they’ve probably gotten rid of the Relevance Score and replaced it with three different factors. It’s the same thing. If you ask yourself, “what does ‘relevance’ mean,” it’s “does it apply to me or to whomever that user is?” And you could make the best content in the world, but if it’s not relevant to that particular user, it doesn’t matter. Or you could have the right target but the wrong content, and that’s gonna be low relevance. So you need great content against a particular user who needs to see that content.

Benefit by building a sequence for your marketing funnel.

Here’s something that throws most marketers because they don’t know how to build sequences. They’re trying to sell cold traffic to people who they’ve never met– people who haven’t consumed content along the way in sequence. And you can have something fantastic, but it belongs three or four messages deep in a sequence.

It isn’t that the content is bad; it’s that it’s not something you would say to someone as a first step, which would also be like a pickup line. Someone who doesn’t understand sequences is gonna walk into a bar, meet a woman they’ve never talked to before, and try their best pickup line to try to get them in bed.

But if you and I, where we’re being smarter about this, understand that high relevance along the way, multiple steps, means getting to know them the right way: getting their name, going on a first date, going on multiple dates, first kiss all the way to propose, get married, have kids, all those things… There’s something relevant to say at every step along the way. If you believe that modern marketing, for anybody, whether it’s high-end B2B or even selling simple products and services, requires building multiple touches, then how many of your touches are gonna be a first touch, and how many of your touches are gonna be second or more?

I would argue that 80% or more of your touches are gonna be two or more. It’s not going to be a cold touch, which is your first touch. Therefore, to have high relevance, most of your targeting is going to be driven by what they last did with you, therefore retargeting. So, if you think about retargeting as what they last did with you… IF they came to my website and filled out a form, THEN I’m gonna send them this email. IF they just became a fan on Facebook or filled out a lead form, THEN this. IF they are an existing customer, THEN this is what I’m gonna say. Or IF, based on data that LinkedIn has, that their job title is this, and they’ve never been to my website and have never been a customer, THEN here’s what I say is the first touch. IF, inside a video, I ask them, “are you trying to grow your agency and you’re just getting started or do you have an existing agency and are just trying to grow it, which of these paths describes you?”

Imagine that’s the beginning of an agency training video and instead of saying, “here’s all the different situations of who you might be” and trying to cover that in a one-hour video, we cut that down to an intro that says, “Hey! Welcome to my Agency Management Course, but first, before we get started, which of these is you,” and they answer that, for example, saying, “I’m just getting my agency started” and then you say, “Great! I remember when I first got started. Here are two or three things that I remember.”

Or let’s say that they say, “I’m a public figure, I have a book out, I’ve done public speaking, I’m doing well; I just want to take it to the next level,” you’d say, “That’s so good that you have these pieces. Here’s what we’re gonna do next.” Or it could be, if they answer that they’re building a personal brand, but they don’t have a speaker reel, for example, then you can address that directly and say, “You’ve spoken before, but you need a speaker reel. Here are the items that you’re gonna need,” and you can start to coach them. It’s just like a regular conversation you have with anybody else where there’s interactivity based on what they last said.

Imagine how much more powerful it is when you have engagement at that level because, when they’re engaging, you know that there’s a clear correlation between engagement and conversion. So, if you have high relevance along the way, you’re gonna get a lower cost of traffic along the way, and your net cost of conversion across all those touches, even though you have more touches, is going to be less.

Brad Lea, CEO of LightSpeed VT

Video remarketing really can be amazing.

When you are building video remarketing, you might pay two cents, two cents, two cents to go three touches deep for someone who has watched a video 15+ seconds, or on Facebook, a thru-play. I believe a first touch should be a Facebook video. So they watch one of these videos all the way through or 10+ seconds, then I try to get them to the website, to get their email address. Then I want to send them to an article on another site. Then I want to get them to YouTube, etc. There are many possible ways to remarket to them.

I consider email to be remarketing. I consider any kind of sequence journeys to be remarketing. You could have a LightSpeed video that has many different journeys along the way in that one video, so it’s like Bandersnatch.

Bandersnatch is a choose-your-own-adventure movie where you’re choosing for the character. “Oh, do I jump out the window or do I fight?”, “Do I eat the Fruit Loops or Frosted Flakes?” And thus all of us have a different experience going through Bandersnatch. You can’t say, “Well, the movie is fifty minutes long.” It could be an hour and a half long; it could be ten minutes long ‘cause you died when you choose the wrong thing. That’s how all video needs to be. That’s why the funnel is your video; that’s why your video is your funnel. Imagine, now, that inside one video, it could have any range, and inside a single video, you could have any range of possible journeys. Then no longer is it true that you can say, “Well, this particular video is 5 minutes, and this video is an hour long.”

It’s whatever length that video is for the journey of the user, right? But how are you going to create these kinds of sequence videos? You can’t put that on YouTube. With YouTube, you have playlists with video 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or I guess you could use Wistia and use a Turnstile where, along the way, you’re collecting information. But imagine if you can build your entire funnel into just a single video with all the different gated logics and the IFs/THENs.

Then you could take that video and embed it on your website. You can embed it anywhere else you can do a video embed code, and you don’t need to use all these ClickFunnels anymore. You don’t need to use all these crazy landing page builders. It’s simply, I’ve got a video; I’m continuing to make it more and more complex with more logic, and I’m building engagement along the way. What used to be maybe a six or eight-week conversion process with lots and lots of touches is something you can compress down into one video that has multiple sequences built-in. I hope that it changes the way you think about things.

LightSpeed happens to be the best place to make these kinds of interactive videos, not just for training, but for any kind of funnels as well. That’s why I’m so excited about LightSpeed. Contact us if you want us to spin up a system so we can help you and make a little commission, too.

Why VAs and Checklists are KEY to Scaling Small Businesses

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

The biggest opportunity in digital is local– local businesses are easy to service and are easy to get. These dollars come from retail stores, hair salons, attorneys, etc.

We believe that, in a few years, digital marketing will be replaced with LOCAL MARKETING.

But this shift is not here yet.

Why do businesses need digital marketing?

The demand side is ignorant.

Most businesses don’t know anything about digital marketing.

For local business owners, it is a complete GAMBLE TO INVEST IN DIGITAL MARKETING.

Right now, we know that 80% understand the importance of digital marketing, but only 10% are doing it. Why? It’s because they don’t trust the system. They don’t know how to measure the return on investment (ROI) coming from these digital platforms.

Why aren’t business owners buying into digital marketing?

There is no clear standard nor a clear path to success for them.

If you go to university, you earn a degree that builds trust.

Just like a medical doctor who has a legitimate degree and operates on patients, we trust that they are going to save lives. Same goes for pilots who we don’t know, but we trust that they’re not going to crash the plane.

So with the demand, people will only be willing to spend money if they trust that there is some sort of certification, badge, or diploma.

Who is the clear leader in digital marketing? Who has the authority to say that this is the standard?

To have authority in this digital marketing space, you have to be a THIRD PARTY.

Some of the most prominent players right now are:

Currently, no other agency has a stronger publishing presence nor a personal relationship with those people than BlitzMetrics. No one’s even close, and anyone who is close is already our friend, and they support the mission we have.

Other players, such as influencers, are usually a one-person show. They don’t have a team. They don’t have a process. They don’t have adequate resources, the power or inclination, nor the desire to put up forces and teach, create jobs, and build systems. Not one of these influencers is an engineer who builds systems.

So we have almost a monopoly on the demand side.

Who is on the supply side?

Agencies
Specialists
Freelancers
Virtual Assistants

Among all these, we believe that VAs are the top driver and are more sustainable, as they will treat this as a career.

The supply will be coming from the VAs who have been trained up via what they’ve learned directly on execution in Google and Facebook, and receive a respected certification that carries value among other business owners in their category.

How will the demand and supply connect?

We believe that it will be more sustainable if the trained VAs do the job on processes that they’ve embraced, as they get better over the years in training and experience, practice what they’ve learned, and understand that it works as part of the system – have access to the demand side.

All those different business groups trust whoever the prominent figureheads are; who run those groups, who run the conferences, who are in charge of those email newsletters, and who are in charge of all that traffic.

We have access to every single one of them. We speak at the conferences, and we’re a faculty. We’ve been the prominent figureheads in several business categories.

And that creates the MARKETPLACE, where the VAs and the business owners meet– where the demand and supply are connected.

Why are our VAs, system, and processes the KEY to scaling small businesses?

The bottleneck in satisfying the demand is actually the supply side on the VAs and the specialists. The thing that is preventing the VAs and specialists from growing is the lack of sufficient training. So if you trace this entire bottleneck back, it will go back to the systems and processes.

We believe it is effortless to develop these systems and processes as long as we follow a checklist, using expertise, being a part of a team, and where we rely on other people who have different skills, so we can also deliver results.

Those results can then be measurable in terms of ROI, and the profit that we will be making can then be invested in building better systems and processes, as well as paying our people.

And the demand will trust the supply because we have already built a process, where VAs and specialists are trained up and obtain certifications on specific skills that they can nurture. Then they can learn, do, and teach (#LDT) these skills and unlock more and more tasks– tasks that will eventually allow them to build their own team, or even their own business, where they manage multiple projects that deliver the same quality results to those on the demand side.

How To Use Facebook Audience Insights To Discover New Targets

By Paul S Leave a Comment

In our last blog post about how to use Facebook Audience Insights, we blew the lid off how to understand the treasure trove of data available.

Today, we are building upon that to show you HOW to actually use the tool 🙂

How To Set Audiences in Facebook Audience Insights

In the navigation, go to Audience Insights

Select ‘Everyone On Facebook’
Set the audience Age, Gender, and Location

Set any interest targeting

3 Audience Insight Pro Tips

#1 – Under the Advanced audience settings, you have access to eight other types of audience filters. Use this to get into people’s lives. Leverage information such as their relationship status, parental status, or even political leaning for deeper targeting.

You can pick out and analyze very precise targets

#2 – Get insights into your own Pages by adding in the Page connection filter. Please note you won’t be able to get data if the page doesn’t have enough Likes. Use this to find natural affinities between your business and other brands.

#3 – If you find an audience you want to run some ads at, use the Save button to create an official Audience asset.

Now, you not only know how to read the data, but also how to create your own audiences that can be used in your ad campaigns. Remember, this isn’t limited to the targeting either. Take what you have learned and use it in the content of your ads as well!

How To Use Facebook Audience Insights To Understand Targeting

By Paul S Leave a Comment

If data is the future, Facebook is sitting on a whole mountain of it. Smart business owners can actually mine for insights all they want, for free. The only cost is your time and brain power.

There is a tool called Audience Insights, and not many people know HOW to use it.

My goal for this article is to share how you can leverage this robust data sifting tool to find new and exciting targeting opportunities. One can also use this tool to validate customer avatars as well, if they are so inclined.

In over-simple terms, Audience Insights gives you a looking glass into the corpus of user data available. Not all the user data, but certainly enough to do the job.

On the left of the tool are your audience settings (which we will dig into in another blog post). On the right of the tool, are all the tasty data available in different slices. Should you find an audience slice you really like, you can create a formal Audience to run ads at the top of the tool.

Facebook Audience Insights gives you access into four distinct views of the Facebook users you’ve chosen in the audience settings. Later we will dive much deeper into how these views work. The four views you can see are:

Demographic information such as age, gender, relationship status, education level, and job title.
Page Like information such as top categories and relevant pages.
Location information available by city, country, and language.
Activity information such as how often the selected audience comments or likes a page; also see device usage in this view.

For some of these views, you can also see how your chosen audience compares to the average Facebook user.

As an example, when you look at people who like Coca-Cola in America, they are 27% less likely to be married than the average Facebook user. A simple insight such as this can help you refine your ad targeting. A competitor soda might exclude married people from their ad targeting to try and take some of Coke’s market share.

I believe that most people get confused about Audience Insights because they aren’t sure WHY they are using the tool. The various ways you can tune and select audiences leads to nearly limitless possibility, which can add to the confusion.

To demystify things, let’s look at how to read each view once you have selected an audience (which we show how to do later in the article).

#1 of 4 – How to Understand Demographic View of Audience Insights

The Demographic view shows your audience, the blue bar, and how it stacks up against the average Facebook user. You can hover over the bars for more information. You can even click the bar to add those audience filters to your existing selection.

For those who like Coca-Cola, they are generally younger and not married.

Scrolling further down shows the Job Title and industry information. The bars work the same except they are horizontal. The compare column shows how much more likely your selected audience is to be in that industry. Running ads that are segmented by industry is a great test to see who is really responding to your content.

Food and restaurants employment are 52% more likely than the average Facebook user for people who like Coca-Cola.

# 2 of 4 – How to Understand Page Likes View of Audience Insights

The Page Likes view shows two main chunks of data. First, you can see the top page categories liked by your selected audience. The tool will show 10 categories by default, and you can show more than 30 if you click ‘See All’. Second, you can see related pages and their audience affinities.

Coca-Cola fans really love Hershey’s and Steak ‘n Shake. Targeting these brands might be good for top of funnel awareness if one were a soda competitor.

The relevant pages and affinity section can be sorted by relevance, audience size, and affinity. This can expose other potential targets for advertising.

People who like Coca-Cola are 1,097x more likely to also like Gold Peak Tea- another member of the Coca-Cola brand.

Sometimes, you can find unexpected targeting opportunities. For example, a soda competitor would probably have good luck targeting a specific brand given the data above. That might not be super obvious before one looks at the data.

#3 of 4 – How to Understand Location View of Audience Insights

The Location view allows you to view your selected audience by top cities, countries and languages. This one is pretty self explanatory.

Fun tip: use this to sleuth out popular local places because you can click on the bars. Again, another rich source of potential targeting opportunities.

Indiana, Tennessee, and Texas are the biggest states for Coca-Cola.

I clicked on the Indianapolis bar and went to the Page Likes. These are all popular local places that are enjoyed by people who like Coca-Cola. One might consider geo-targeting these locations for highly targeted ads.

#4 of 4 – How to Understand Activity View of Audience Insights

The Activity view allows you to view your selected audience’s behavior on Facebook as well as some device information. While you can’t click on any of the bars in this view, the behavior data is still highly valuable.

Compared to the average Facebook user, Coca-Cola fans are much more inclined to Like a page, like a post, leave a comment, share a post, or click on an ad.

The only thing notable about American Coca-Cola fans, are that they are 19% more likely to use an iPhone/iPod than the average Facebook user.

There is a setting to change to the Primary Device usage in the upper right of the pane. This means that you are looking at the most used device by a user, rather than the combination of devices (i.e. phone, computer, tablet).

However, if we are only looking at the primary device, a Coca-Cola fan is more likely to be an Android user.

Now that you understand how to read the data, hopefully you can see how this information would be valuable to your business.

Again, there is a LOT of information here. Don’t get overwhelmed. Pick an idea and go with it.

Want to split test Apple vs. Android users? Try it out. Want to only go for single people because the data says so? Give it a shot.

The best part about running social ads is that you can take many shots on goal. By gleaning insight from this tool, you should be able to take more educated and profitable shots at goal.

In a future article, we will show you the best part of this tool…setting audiences!

For now, play around and see what you can discover 🙂

How to create, edit, share, and boost a WHY video

By Kurtis Daems Leave a Comment

Do you have a WHY behind what you do? People are more likely to buy from someone who has a story or mission that they identify with. We believe that the best way to share your stories or mission in an engaging way is through the use of a WHY video. A WHY video defines your reason, or your passion, and it is important to utilize the power of video content and social media to effectively share this with your desired audience.

Video is the most powerful ingredient of your personal brand, starting with your story and amplified by the stories of your ambassadors. It starts with you. Whether you’ve been regularly creating content for 10 years or have never written an article in your life, you’ll be able to easily create a WHY video by following this step-by-step process.

Before filming your WHY video, it is important to consider what your strategy is. There are three main components that make up your strategy: your goals, content, and targeting. When you go to produce or distribute a piece of content, think about what your end goal is. What type of content do you need to produce to achieve this, and what demographics or audiences should see this content? This is the idea behind Goals, Content, and Targeting, or #GCT. By considering these components for your own strategy, you will be able to produce and distribute much more effective video content.

Once you have an idea of what content you’d like to create, it’s go time! There are 4 main components to filming your video. The first is to begin with a hook, or something to quickly capture your audience’s attention as they scroll through their feed. This could be done by movement or something you say. Once you have their attention, you must retain it by bringing them along a journey that will ignite pain or pleasure for them. Here you could tell a story, show a success or failure, or clarify a benefit. At this point, the audience is ready to be presented with a solution or resolution to the story, and you can show that what you offer is that solution. Now the audience is ready to be given a call to action. What should they do as a result of hearing your message? Although these 4 components are more general to any one-minute video you make, they can be applied to producing a WHY video and should be considered when making your own.

In making any video, the key is not to overcomplicate it. No need for fancy equipment– have a friend film you on a cell phone camera, or if you’re by yourself, you can take a selfie video. We have found that vertical or square videos with captioning often perform best due to the fact that they fill most of the screen on mobile devices, which is where the majority of social media users will be. This style of video also comes across as more feed-like and personal, and something people will be much more inclined to stick around and watch as opposed to a professionally-made advertisement.

The biggest issue we see people run into in making their videos is camera shyness and overthinking what they’re going to say. These can both be overcome with repetition and practice, but our biggest piece of advice is to allow yourself to speak from the heart. We believe that sharing your authentic self is much more natural and powerful, because people trust people. As our CEO Dennis Yu says, “Being real is more important than being perfect.”

If necessary, you can edit your video with a headline, captioning, lower-thirds, etc. These help to optimize your videos for views even when people don’t have their sound on.

Once you have the final version of your WHY video, you’re ready to share it. You can upload your video to multiple places, including your Facebook public figure page, LinkedIn page, Twitter, etc. We call this process of sharing a piece of content to multiple platforms “cross-posting”, and by doing this, it will help you to reach more people. Write compelling copy, add automatic subtitles if you don’t already have captioning, and click “Share”.

After publishing your post, the final step we recommend is to boost your post on your Facebook public figure page using the Dollar a Day strategy. (If you have not already created a Facebook public figure page for your business or personal brand, we highly recommend doing so). Boosting is when you put some spend behind a post to help it reach more people who you’d like to see your content. By spending as little as one dollar per day, you’ll be able to gain enough information after several days to help you determine if the post will be a likely winner, based on how it compares to the Standards of Excellence. This low-spend strategy also allows you to test multiple posts and audiences at the same time without breaking the bank, so you can then determine which is receiving the best engagement and should continue to have spend put behind it.

Congratulations! You’ve just successfully created, edited, shared, and boosted your WHY video. This same step-by-step process can be applied to creating any one-minute video, and we highly recommend following this process of determining your goals, content, and targeting and amplifying your video using the Dollar a Day strategy in order to effectively produce, publish, and distribute content going forward.

(P.S.– To see examples of WHY videos, be sure to check out the many videos we have on the “Why” section of our website)

Basic mistakes of a video editor

By josh.hamby Leave a Comment

Video editing can be overwhelming at times, especially when you have a lot of videos to edit in a day. This leads to “subconscious” errors along the way.

Most errors are basic ones that can be fixed immediately if you just watch your video every time you finish it.

If you’re just getting started in video editing, here’s the list of the basic mistakes that you can avoid:

Before Editing:

Usage of low authority videos for speaker reels.

A speaker reel (mission reel, sizzle reel, testimonial reel, keynote speaker reel) is a short piece, usually 2-3 minutes long, of edited video or film footage showcasing a person’s previous work.

We use high authority videos for this. This is to display the credibility of the speaker, or the event. Using low authority videos such as b-rolls will make it feel less credible. Please see here how to consider a high authority video.

So before editing, editors must compile the high authority videos that s/he can use for the showreel.

During Editing:

Having a weak introduction to the video:

This is where we usually lose the viewers. The first 4-5 seconds are the most important seconds of a video, be it a showreel, or a one minute video. Most beginners in editing don’t pay attention to this. They use a weak introduction in a one minute video such as starting it with a question or a ‘bumper’. Please see here what a bumper is. In our case, we use a ‘hook’ as a strong intro. Here’s a video explaining what hook is.

For the showreels, not leading with the highest authority shots makes a weak intro.

Missing lower thirds

A lower third is a graphic overlay placed in the title-safe lower area of the screen. This contains the basic information of the speaker such as his/her name, title and the company that s/he represents. Without this, viewers will be clueless on who is present in the video.

Editing videos that are not mobile friendly:

Nowadays, most viral videos are found on Facebook/Instagram. It is important to optimize videos based on Facebook’s standard by using their video dimensions.

Recently, there are two sizes that are currently used in Facebook —

Square size (1:1)

Vertical size(9:16)

Using either of the two gives an upper hand by occupying more of the feed, as well as the clarity on a mobile device as opposed to posting your videos in default size(16:9).

Not working in a “sound-off” environment:

Being the most used social media website/app in the world, you can see lots of people browsing on Facebook everywhere, restaurants, train stations, beach resorts, anywhere as long as you have a data signal.

But since most people use it in public places, they aren’t fond of watching videos with the volume on. Thus, creating videos that will work in a “sound-off” environment is an advantage. Besides, you don’t want the viewers ignoring your video just because they can’t understand what it is all about when it’s muted?

Usage of stock images/videos as b-rolls.

One factor of a good video is personalization. Personalized videos make it easier to market your products or your event and make it more engaging to watch. Showing a part of you and what you do in your videos will build trust from your viewers. Using stock images and videos as b-rolls will create the opposite.

Reminder: When the use of stock footage is necessary make sure that you have the proper licensing, as well as with music assets in every video.

Weak audio – echoey, robotic

Raw videos with background noise automatically need to be edited on Adobe Audition or any software/app that can enhance an audio. If the quality of the audio is echoey or robotic and hard for you to understand, then the audience will not be able to understand either.

The background music is louder than the speaker’s voice.

In relation to the audio, it’s a major no-no to have higher volume background music than the speaker’s voice.

After Editing:

Failed to check the caption on the first iteration:

This is a mistake that can easily be fixed if the editor would just check the video after exporting. It will help save time for the “Proofer” if the editor can fix wrong grammar, capitalization, and usage of punctuation marks. This saves time for the editor by not having to send the video back and forth just because of these basic errors.

Not using the proper naming convention:

We normally use a proper naming convention, so we won’t confuse which one is the updated version. So just using a general naming scheme, such as video1.mp4 or How to create a lower thirds.mp4, for the video will cause problems eventually. Each video should have a Date and Version at the end for example Dennis_Conference_Seattle_662019_V1.mp4

Sending a link that is not open to public or broken.

When sending videos to clients, make sure that you share the proper link with them. Set the link to be view-able by “All with the link” or add them to the specific drive folders permissions so that they are able to view it.

By following these processes you can save tons of time on your edits.

What do you do when a client won’t respond to email and won’t use your project management system?

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Some of them prefer to use Facebook messenger and text, which leads to side conversations.

And that’s fine if the agency is just you. But when you have a team involved that has to coordinate, this quickly becomes a mess.

We use basecamp so we have an audit trail– to prevent “he said, she said”.

Our rule, that all clients and team members know, is “if it’s not in basecamp, it didn’t happen”.

We still have calls, emails, and such. But everyone knows that if we agree to do something or have details about a project, we post it in basecamp.

The ugly reality of running an agency is that there is turnover on the agency side and unrealized expectations and miscommunication on the client side.

So you must have systems in place to keep things going if the client fails to reply or a team member fails to deliver.

Video Trends and Insights for 2019

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

What are the biggest trends in video for 2019?

Vertical video— in 15 second and 60 second formats, designed for sound off in Facebook and Instagram stories.
Video for DTC (direct-to-consumer) companies that sell via highly produced entertaining and funny stories– like the Harmon Brothers and Chamber Media produce.
Video replacing email for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and other sales professionals– short video replies are more powerful than text-based replies via tools like Bomb-Bomb.
Video analytics starting to mature– going beyond cost-per-view and average watch time towards depth in sequence and increased propensity to purchase. Facebook has the most robust video analytics on paid and free traffic, while YouTube is concerned with privacy.

How should marketers work with videos to amplify digital marketing performance?

Marketers need to integrate video capture as part of their operations– not just to collect fresh testimonials at the point of delivery with customers, but to gather product feedback to improve their offerings.

They must make video a central, internal function– so instead of video being the realm of a freelancer who comes in to shoot and edit once in a while, video becomes a skill that everyone on the marketing team understands and practices. Everyone has a role in collecting video, being on video, doing light edits via free video apps on their phone, and boosting video.

Think of video like email was to mailed letters. Forty years ago, there wasn’t email, so all communication with businesses and customers was via physical letters that we mailed through the post office. Video is now the new medium, so everyone must learn how to use it if they want to be part of modern communication with customers that are under forty years old.

Why am I seeing a “continuation” thread in Basecamp?

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Gmail has a 100-comment limit per thread. So when we’re getting close to that number of comments, we start a continuation thread which references back to the original thread.

If you’re a client, this is a good thing, since it means we’ve gone through a lot of communication and iteration cycles to tune your campaigns.

Rather than wait to 100 comments in a thread, we’ll start a new one at around 80, since we don’t want to hit that limit, which would kill our ability to track and follow-up. Our team members use the Boomerang by Gmail app to track follow-ups, so sometimes you’ll see us start a continuation thread at only 50 comments, since there might be a few dozen internal follow-ups that you don’t see.

We allow any team member to start a continuation thread if they see the thread count start to get high– it’s not like fine sheets, where you want a really high thread count!

If you want a peek at how large-scale project management is done, you might be amused to know we have some threads that have 7 continuations on them, meaning that we have 700 iterations on that one thing. This is the case for our Team Roster, which we update every couple days, as well as some of our core courses– Dollar a Day, Social Amplification Engine, and so forth.