How Brisbane Businesses Can Build Their Audience Through Video Production

How Brisbane Businesses Can Build Their Audience Through video production

Brisbane businesses using video production in their marketing strategy are successfully building their audiences; this is because online video is maturing and visitors to websites are expecting to see it – from a “nice to have” it’s becoming a “must have”.

You can increase the “buzz” around your own small business through a variety of ways from getting the cameras rolling yourself to outsourcing the whole job to a professional Brisbane video production company.

Either way, here are a few tips to help you increase your number of viewers and get them coming back to you again and again.

Less is More

In terms of the length of your videos, think short; 2 to 3 minutes is normally adequate or you will send your viewers either to sleep or elsewhere! Keeping it short and punchy is the golden rule.

Make Them Stand On their Own Two Feet

Make each of your videos a separate entity that needs no prior or post-video viewing to understand it. Include all contact details and calls to action in each video so nobody needs to click elsewhere to find you.

It’s about Education and Information

Know what your audience wants to talk about, then have the conversation; inform and educate your viewers and that way you will build your reputation as a source of knowledge in the subject; this will have people recommending you, passing your details on to others and coming back for more.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Sound

It’s video – not a podcast – but don’t underestimate the importance of sound to the overall video; that means getting a good microphone that allows your words ( and your message) to come across clearly, as well as adding any incidental music to the edit, post-shoot.

Light the Way

Don’t skimp on lighting as it will back-fire; until you see badly made video you don’t realise how important lighting is and it really can ruin the effect you are trying to achieve; you don’t need to be an international film director but you do need people to be concentrating on what you’re saying rather than the shadows under your eyes! Use a 3-point lighting set up for best results.

If you’re making your own videos then just these few tips will have you on the right path; many Brisbane video production companies will know all the above – but the best ones will be able to help not only in making the videos but with selling your business through them too; that means scriptwriting, marketing and distribution.

10 Ways To Employ Online Video Production In Your Brisbane Business

Online video production can improve your business in multiple ways and that’s part of the beauty of it; it’s a broad ranging solution that can have you firing on fronts that you only dreamed of before.

Below are 10 of the best ways your Brisbane business – whatever it is – can be utilising video:

1.     Answer Questions Efficiently

FAQ pages are all well and good but they can be long-winded and who really reads them? FAQ videos, indexed well, help your web visitors find answers to their burning questions, not just by telling – but by showing.

2.     Position yourself as the Expert

Web video allows you to demonstrate your expertise in your business area. How-to videos are great for this. Decide on the top 10 things your customers want to know how to do and then create a series of videos showing them. How good does that make you look? How many of your competitors are doing that?

3.     Prove that your Product or Service Works

Get your best customers to vouch for how good your product or service is; the word of a few others creates more proof and impact than your words could ever do, so start using this great resource – a great video is just a question away!

4.     Tell your Story to your Audience

Your story is how you connect – everyone has some interesting and engaging story about how they got where they are today. Making this resonate with your target audience will be the key to your video “working”. Find your story, script it well and deliver it to the camera by talking to your audience.

5.     Engage and Entertain

10 Ways To Employ Online Video Production In Your Brisbane Business

People love to be entertained; if you have some good ideas for making people laugh, for example, then why not put them out there? It worked well for the likes of Old Spice Man didn’t it? If you’re no comedian, don’t worry – focus on engaging your audience with content that will interest and inform them.

6.     Reduce Travel Costs

Online video conferencing is a great way to be able to talk to other branches of your business or to meet customers or suppliers without travelling to the other side of the country. A lot of business is done over Skype these days – and that can cost nothing at all!

7.     Say More In Less Words

You can also record web video to send messages to customers or suppliers rather than sending emails. With video you can say more in less words – some people just communicate better via video message and don’t like writing long-winded and complicated emails. Video message programs like “Jing” make it easy and save time too.

8.     Brand Your Product

Online video can be a great way to build your brand, with a YouTube channel and social media pages supplementing your website; video can be embedded into blog posts and you can really get your message out there across many platforms, working for you.

9.     Advertise

Of course, online video advertising is becoming huge too; this can be very cost-effective compared to advertising on traditional media and is an area that will see a lot of growth this year, according to most industry experts.

10.   SEO

Last but not least, video can help you dominate search engine listings; it is increasingly featuring in search engine results which is not surprising, since Google and YouTube are one and the same! Your business should be taking advantage of the SEO aspects of video to boost your rankings.

If you are a Brisbane business with video production questions, contact Michael Hanson:michael@videolabs.com.au.

Is Your Video Achieving Its Objectives?

As online video production starts to become an integral part of most Brisbane businesses’ marketing strategies, you may be asked by the “money men” about ROI.

Financial controllers are obsessed with ROI so how do you have the answers ready for them, so that they can get to sleep at night and rest easy?

How exactly can you measure whether your video strategy is earning its corn?

First Question: Is Your Video Achieving Its Objectives?

You should be able to develop a fair idea of whether your video is hitting the right notes, be it on your YouTube channel, embedded into your website or blog or distributed around your social media sites.

Different videos have different objectives of course – how-to video are for educating your audience and demonstrating expertise, testimonial videos are for providing credibility for your business, FAQ videos demonstrate your expert status, storyline videos can connect to your audience through telling your personal/business story…and so on.

You need to define the business objective of the video before planning and recording it…and certainly before you hope to measure its success. Is it simply to boost sales, improve branding, demonstrate expertise or credibility, save costs or some other goal?

Ultimately, whatever the objective is, you want your target audience watching them all the way through to the end – this firstly means that they have been able to find them and secondly, that the content is engaging enough to maintain their attention. Therefore you are doing something right and your chance of a good ROI improves.

Video Analytics

As with all marketing campaigns, it’s important to be able to assess a bit more analytically how your videos are doing – it’s not enough to be quoting general trends in video watching around the globe. How many are watching YOUR videos and are they converting to sales?

There are tools to help you with this.

Simple free tools can measure how many people are watching, how long they are watching for, at what point they are clicking the stop button, where the people who are watching are from and whether they share it with others.

Slightly more complex calculations allow you to work out a value for each visitor, based upon the numbers that watch the video and then take a desired action…. this can provide a dollar figure but remember ROI can be measured in advantages to the business other than instant dollar values.

Measuring and adjusting is an important way to improve ROI of videos, because you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Improve Your Chances of ROI

You will improve your chances of getting the ROI that the money men will like, by partnering with a professional video production company that understands your objectives and not only knows how to shoot videos but how to plan, script, edit and distribute your videos for maximum marketing bang for your buck.

In Brisbane, for professional video production speak to Michael Hanson on 0447 610 823.

Brisbane Video Production

OK, you’re a Brisbane business owner and everyone’s been telling you that you must get online video; everyone from clients through to your 7-year old daughter has been asking you why there’s no video on your website and why you don’t have a YouTube channel.

Below we lay out the plan for successfully taking the plunge into the world of Brisbane video production.

1. Know Your Audience

The first step has nothing to do with video, but everything to do with knowing your market. As with all successful marketing strategies, you need to have a clear idea of who you’re talking to before you embark on making videos.

This will ensure your videos are targeted, resonate with the people that are watching and get your message across to the right people. Don’t miss this critical first step.

1. Know Your Story

All business owners have a story that is of interest to your audience; how do you structure and present that story in a way that will get your audience nodding in agreement or smiling in recognition at what you’re saying. That’s the aim of your video, because then you are connecting with your viewers – and once you connect with them, they will start to see you as a trusted authority that can help them with their problems.

1. Find the Right Video Production Company

Once you have considered the first two steps then it’s actually time to start planning, shooting and producing your videos.

The problem with some Brisbane businesses is that they have jumped straight into making videos through a friend of a friend and have not put enough time into getting a professional job done. There is a difference between what you get from a video or photography course graduate and what a professional video production company provides.

Video that sells your business is not just about shooting great-looking footage; it’s about planning your message, capturing that message in the best light and getting it out there to all the right places. That means pre-production and planning, scripting, filming, post-production and distribution.

1. Variation

Don’t limit yourself with your videos. Once they are made, make sure your production company provides them in formats that can be used in multiple places – uploaded to YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo as well as embedded on your website/blog and shared amongst social media sites. A variety of content appearing in a variety of places is a good rule of thumb and can help drive traffic to your site.

1. Conversion

Online video is a great tool to get people in buying mood and sent to somewhere where they can actually purchase your product or service or sign up for your offer. Make sure that when they visit your URL that you keep them interested. If your video has asked them to go to a URL and they have done so, then they are already interested in buying or signing up; assume that they want to be told how to do that when they arrive on the landing page. Make sure your landing pages have clear calls to action, no clutter and no time wasting.

You will note that three of the steps don’t actually involve any video expertise whatsoever; that’s because your video marketing strategy needs to be just that – a strategy, not a case of just churning out videos.

Take a little time to find the right Brisbane video production company and much of the rest will fall into place, as they will guide your hand and advise you through the whole process. Michael Hanson at Video Labs can get you on the right road from the beginning: email him michael@videolabs.com.au.

Turning Small Projects Into Big Profit, A Case Study | Smashing Magazine

For Video Production

Turning Small Projects Into Big Profit, A Case Study | Smashing Magazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/12/19/turning-small-projects-into-big-profit-case-study/

In the Web world, hearing businesses and freelancers alike complain about low-budget projects is not too uncommon. Let’s say that a local coffee shop needs to update its Web presence and contacts you for a redesign. It also requires a blog so that it can announce new coffees, events and so on. However, during the course of the first meeting, the client mentions that they don’t have a budget.

Being the inquisitive businessperson that you are, you say, “Well, we work with budgets of almost any size. What price range were you thinking of?” The owner of the coffee shop reveals that he has only $1500 to spend on the website. Thinking it would be a waste of time, you walk away.

This is where our design studio found ourselves. We had potential projects all over the place, but the budgets were all smaller than we thought we could handle. In the Web world, demand for small websites is up. There are always start-up companies and small businesses around that need some form of a Web presence. And, as a Web design community, our job is to answer those needs in the most utilitarian way possible.

We began questioning our business practices. We knew that there was money to be made on smaller projects, but it wasn’t until we sat down and did some simple math that we realized the business opportunity we had been missing.

Video Production

Here’s the simple premise on which we began to transform our business: if you turn away 10 to 15 small projects a year at $1500 per project, that’s declining between $15,000 and $22,500 every year.

Video Production(via Instapaper)

Simplenote and Instapaper

Gold coast Video Production

 and Instapaper
http://bettermess.com/simplenote-loves-instapaper/

Geeky Quick Tips is a series of simple, code-free tips and tactics for doing more with your Mac or iOS device. For more detailed geekery, be sure to checkout the Techie Scheky series.

Simplenote’s latest update is a good one. While you won’t notice anything obvious, a lot has changed “under the hood.” As Shawn Blanc points out, it is dramatically faster. But, better yet, they’ve added in what are known as a URL scheme which allows it to integrate with other applications. Many will be excited by the tie-in to Launch Center, but this geek is thrilled about Instapaper integration.

Thankfully Marco Arment, the man behind Instapaper and Simperioum, the team behind Simplenote, anticipated the release and have added integration.

How Is This Helpful?

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I do a significant amount of reading and writing on my iPhone on the subway and one often informs the other. I’ll be reading and I will want to add my own context to someone’s post. The goal has always been to get the source text into a document as quickly as possible and start writing. In the past, there were a few ways to go about this, but all of them were a little clunky. Now, my reading app of choice, Instapaper makes it seamless to highlight text in Instapaper and share it to a new note in Simplenote along with the title and a link to the original post.

Step 1 – Hightlight Text In Instapaper and Hit Share

Step 2 – Select “Create a Note in Simplenote”

Step 3 – Your Note Is Automatically Created In Simplenote

Step 4 – Name Your Note, Add Any Formatting and Start Writing

This subtle change lets me capture an idea on either my iPhone or iPad, like the post above from Yuvi Zalkow on using Twitter, and lets me begin expanding on it instantly. It also works offline, so it’s ideal for working in circumstances where there is no internet service (a common occurrence not only on the subway, but in many ares of Manhattan thanks to the joys of AT&T). Once I’m back at home or at my office, my work will be synced through nvALT to my other devices.

Video Production

It’s a tiny bit of pleasure for a heavy user of both Simplenote and Instapaper and should make my contextual writing significantly easier when on-the-go. This is also a trick that should work with any other iOS text editor that includes a URL scheme and has taken the time to coordinate with Instapaper.

Be sure to subscribe for free by Email or RSS to automatically receive future Geeky Quick Tips and more from A Better Mess.

(via Instapaper)

Article: The Copyblogger “Secret” to Creating Better Content

Brisbane Video Production

The Copyblogger “Secret” to Creating Better Content
http://www.copyblogger.com/content-creation-secret/

But when you publish content, you want someone to do something.

When you’re doing it right, the work you put into your content gets your audience to take a specific action.

And there’s a “secret” to making this kind of advertising work better … a secret that the very best and brightest traditional advertisers have been using for more than a century.

Most advertising ignores this entirely — which is why most advertising doesn’t work very well.

The “secret” might seem like common sense, but your fellow content marketers aren’t getting it right … which is a great opportunity for you.

The secret of great advertising is keep it from looking like advertising

The reason content marketing is so powerful in the first place is that it doesn’t tend to look like an ad — it’s useful information, presented in an accessible, interesting way.

Video Production

The Copyblogger “Secret” to Creating Better Content

http://www.copyblogger.com/content-creation-secret/

The Power of Web Video for Link Building: Video Attracts Links

Gold Coast Video Production

The Power of Web Video for Link Building: Video Attracts Links
http://www.reelseo.com/power-video-link-building/

Casey Henry over at SEOmoz did some number crunching on the posts there to get a grip on what kind of in-linking was going on and what kind of content was generating the in-links. In terms of quality, four of the top five categories had video in them which gave me an idea, does video have some mojo in terms of link-building for SEO?

The author of that post broke down content into three types; lists, images and videos. He looked over data for some 3800 articles there and normalized for number of articles per category for some types of data analysis. However, what we’re interested in really is how well video works for building up in-links to a site. Of course, there are some other factors that will come into play like quality of content both in the text surrounding the video and in the video itself, the relevance of the content to the readers, etc.

For Gold Coast Video Production

Posts with lists, images and a video in them scored the highest in terms of in-linking domains with content that just had images and video not far behind. This reinforces something else I read some time back talking about reader perception of important of news based on whether there was video in it.

With video, the perception of importance soared, and that caused me to work more video into the news posts at my own site, Gamers Daily News, whenever possible. Of course, because we’re news we always have an image in the article as they gets pushed out to the social networks and Google News. It makes for far more interesting presentation there which is extremely important in getting people to click through to the site and since that’s the whole point of being on Google News it’s best to do all you can to get those people to the site.

(via Instapaper)