Of course cats dancing the Harlem Shake won’t have much relevance to your average business owner. But these viral videos do give an indication (we’re thinking especially of girl-twerks-upside-down-falls-down-and-garners-15m-hits, here), of just how accessible the medium is even to those without berets, clapperboards or a director’s chair.
Frequently told to ensure they’re not selling themselves short, print businesses may, then, want to consider making video a key part of their marketing toolkit.
The most important consideration in deciding whether to channel resources into marketing videos should always be who your customer is. Some will, of course, be more open to watching a couple of minutes of video than others. “It’s all about your audience. If your audience is viewing video then you should be producing video,” says Luan Wise, a marketing consultant with experience of producing video content for several print and mailing houses.
Think first what you are trying to achieve in marketing your company, and if video is likely to get you there.
“It’s like any part of the marketing mix; it depends who you’re trying to talk to and what you’re trying to say. I would always say consider it, but it will depend on the campaign,” says marketing manager Tara Pickles, whose company GI Solutions has so far produced a range of different types of video including an animation, and ones where a GI team member’s explanation of a print job or process is interspersed with customer testimonials.
The sorts of video content that tends to work best for businesses falls into two categories: “It should either tell a story or be something that makes life simpler for the customer,” says Thomas Brown, associate director of research and insights at The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).
In the ‘telling a story’ category are videos humanising a company, and, particularly pertinent to print, videos demonstrating a process.
Leeds-based print and merchandise business Awesome Merchandise has dabbled successfully in both, shooting behind-the-scenes footage of the company’s new premises being kitted out, and of products being printed.
“We established eight and a half years ago and the first few years we were trying to look corporate and professional. Now we’ve switched strategy to appear more human,” says founder Luke Hodson, adding: “We make 95% of our products in-house so we’re keen to showcase that. It adds a little bit of value to what we’re doing. Print can be commodity-based so we’re trying to show that even with something like flyers there is a lot of skill involved.”
Less obviously for marketing purposes are the ‘making life simpler for the customer’ category of videos. But such videos, perhaps showing customers how to correctly prepare artwork or use W2P facilities, for example, will still be highly valued.
“There’s quite a big skills gap now in terms of people coming into the print buying industry knowing lots about digital but not necessarily print,” says Wise. “So even simple stuff like folds or the fact you can’t have a 14-page brochure are quite difficult to explain in words – to show people is a lot easier.”
“Videos work really well in bringing FAQs to life, so where people don’t want to scroll through lots of words on a page,” adds Wise.
The first question to address is whether to execute in-house or enlist a professional.
The general consensus seems to be the latter. Awesome Merchandise gives an indication of cost. The company pays a professional £350 a month for around 50 hours of video shooting and editing (along with other media-related tasks such as photography).
Sean Davies, managing director at vehicle wrappers and regular wrap video producers Creative FX, points out that a good way of covering some of the expense can be to partner with a customer, as Creative did on a Volkswagen video where Volkswagen covered half the cost.
But even with a professional marketing company or digital agency onside, it’s still crucial to stay in control of many aspects of production. “Even if you’re getting a professional involved you need to be in charge of the planning and storyboarding because you know your business best,” says Wise.
Which of course may lead to many, after learning the art alongside a professional, to switch to going it alone. “Our aim is to go in-house to save costs, we’ve bought a couple of Go Pro cameras – they’re £350 each, so nothing really,” reports Davies.
So what will printers need to consider if they are creating a video solo? Wise’s top tip for shooting the footage is to stand behind the camera while someone is speaking and ask questions to make responses natural and unselfconscious. She adds to brief the speaker to always include the question in their answers, so that all sound bites are complete when the questions are edited out.
Pickles’ top tip is to script the video if you have a speaker, but not too tightly. “The best thing is not to be too prescriptive – have an idea in your head of what you’re going to say and then talk naturally. We create a rough script but pinning people down to exact words tends not to work.”
There’s a range of free editing software you can then use to put your footage together, including Windows Movie Maker, iMovie (which comes as part of the iLife bundle supplied with every Mac), and Lightworks.
“Short sharp changes in image work well,” says Awesome’s Hodson of the sorts of creative decisions involved in editing. “You can even make printing on a big litho machine interesting by mixing far away shots with close ups of the internal mechanisms; you can time lapse with people working around the machine.”
“If there’s no voice-over there should definitely be some sort of (royalty free) music,” adds Wise. “It’s really helpful with pace – you can edit to music to keep the pace.”
The general consensus is that the length of the finished video should rarely go above three minutes, with a minute or slightly less the optimum length. Remember that people are typically in a very specific, fairly impatient, frame of mind when browsing online, says Brown.
“The traditional approach to advertising in a three minute TV spot would normally be to have a crescendo towards the end of the advert. Online, people don’t watch in that way, they expect that gratification up front within the first few seconds,” he says.
Now you’ll need to ensure people actually see your masterpiece. If producing video for the purpose of explaining a task or replacing FAQs, it’s obvious this content should go on the part of your website where you’d normally have this information in written form.
Videos as part of a wider marketing campaign can be trickier. For most, having them embedded somewhere relevant on your website is better than simply linking from your site to a YouTube channel. Awesome Merchandise intends to go down this route in a couple months’ time.
Then it will be a case of posting to appropriate social media channels, and mailing out to customers where relevant.
Davies says he uses Creative FX’s wrap videos to demonstrate the process to those unsure of what’s involved, while Awesome’s Hodson recommends emailing and posting video at relevant times of the year, as his team did with a greetings card printing video last Christmas.
CIM’s Brown agrees that a video should always be part of a campaign or overarching marketing strategy: “Video needs to be part of a story,” he says. “B2B customers tend to engage with five different types of content before speaking to a salesperson so if video is being isolated then it’s probably going to be less effective.”
Once people get to know you for your interesting content, as many have with Creative FX (their most popular video, of a Ferrari F430 Spider being wrapped in matt black, is nearing 1m hits), they may subscribe to your YouTube channel. They may also Google your videos, so be sure to add key words into your YouTube page.
“If people are talking in the video then always transcribe the script and include that, along with key words, on YouTube so it becomes searchable,” advises Wise.
Finally, it will be a case of analysing to see what’s worked. “There are lots of tools out there, many of which are free, such as Google Analytics,” says Brown. “They enable you to understand when and why someone drops off when watching your video. YouTube itself has a suite of analytics embedded. Vimeo is a similar site to YouTube, and again that can show if people have been sharing your video and where.”
Key, explains Brown, is to keep experimenting with different sorts of video, then using the above tools to see what’s worked.
“If you think about the consumer landscape and look at something like television advertising, we have had decades of the likes of Unilever and Procter & Gamble doing testing to understand what works best,” he says.
“If you look at the world of video and social media it’s been a much shorter gestation period of just a few years. So I don’t think there’s a definitive ‘this is what works’. So it’s important to experiment.”
Inspirational examples
Creative FX wrapping a Ferrari F430 ‘Stealth’
GI Solutions explaining transactional and transpromo mail
Animation explaining GI’s new digital envelope mailpack product
