At Skylark Media we help companies to get the basics right.
When we meet a new client we like to spend some time getting to know them and understanding how we can help them to make a successful video.
To this end we have created these top 7 tips to help companies looking to create a corporate video.
We hope they prove useful.
commissioning a corporate video
A few years ago, videos were these huge, cumbersome things that you could only share if you had special video players and broadband Internet. Video SEO was largely unnecessary, because people couldn’t watch videos very easily.
But, events now make video SEO necessary: more people have cheap broadband, videos have become smaller, and it’s now possible to stream videos on mobile devices. A video with your key search terms as its title is 50 times more likely to appear on Google page one that text or a still image.
80% of Internet users are watching online video around the world. Part of that is because Generation Y (people between the ages of 11 – 27) outnumbers Baby Boomers, 81 million to 78 million. So we’re starting to see more and more people use smart phones and mobile devices to watch online video.
There are several free video sharing sites around, all of which are excellent candidates for video SEO. Of course, there’s the big dog, YouTube. So many people are aware of YouTube, it’s a must-submit for any of your online videos. But smart search engine optimization pros also use other video sharing sites like Vimeo, Viddler, or PhotoBucket. There are dozens of video sharing sites that make video search engine optimization easy.
Just like the difference between Google and Yahoo/Bing, when it comes to video hosting, YouTube has the biggest audience, but it’s harder to get seen. If you host your video on a smaller site, like Vimeo and Viddler, you have a much better chance of being that big fish in the small pond.
Consider Specialized Sites for Video SEO, like VideoJug.com for how-to videos or ScienceStage.com for science, teaching, and research.
Video works today because it aims to provide users with an inside view into your site and what it has to offer. If structured properly, your video can be focused around your site’s unique value proposition. Video SEO can also help to promote the content, especially if the content includes those keywords most sought after by your potential customers in online searches. The title of the video is everything, but the content within the video speaks volumes!
Just remember to create videos that are short and easy to watch, fun and interesting for viewers, and hosted on one or more video sharing sites. You’ll see your efforts pay off time and again.
As videos become easier for marketers to produce, and easier for consumers to, consume, video SEO is becoming a necessary part of any online marketing campaign.
Your logo says a lot about you and your company.
The colours you use, the shapes you employ can reveal your company’s values and ethos.
Having given the logo such thought, the crowning glory is to animate it in a way that tells your story – to attract customers and sell more products.
We are currently working with a recruitment company to create an animation. We started with understanding the message that they wanted to relay, then used their logo to inform the visuals.
The logo is the spark that has ignited the creative.
Our clients are increasingly putting their rushes to good use. Once we’re with them, on location, we’re filming for not just one, but several films at the same time. Our ‘Virtues of Video’ video explains more…
With a little pre-planning so that we know which shots to get and which questions to ask in the interview, it’s relatively straight forward to edit together a number of films based upon the same footage.
For example, you’re having your company filmed for a promo to show at a trade show. Whilst we’re there we film your staff at work and find out more about the quality of your company – all great material for an induction or a recruitment video for new staff. What if your customers want to know more about working with you, well answer their queries in an interview and help build trust and understanding.
So, if you’re thinking of commissioning a video, think about all the other uses your company has for video and get the very best from your rushes.
At Skylark Media we work with you on your business development plan and can advise you on the different styles of video that could be put to work for your company.
In June, Atrium Software launched their new product, Atrium Vision.
The launch was given via a series of presentations by industry experts in the top class venue, The Institute of Mechanical Engineers.
Atrium wanted a series of short YouTube videos from each of the speakers. We filmed these against a green screen so that we could be creative with their backgrounds, and also add in the relevant slides from their Powerpoint presentations.
The event videos will be used to promote their new software on YouTube and for internal training purposes.
When you’re visiting a busy trade show, plastic bags full of flyers in hand, you scan upcoming stands wanting to understand what they do. A video display is one of the most effective ways for you to find out what a company does and how it may be able to help you.
Put another way, a video on YOUR trade stand is one of the most engaging, informative and entertaining ways of attracting your customers. If your product is too large or too small to display, then a video will provide all the context you need. It can also show how your product is put to use by your existing customers – there might even be a client testimonial to help with your sales message.
Staff who are manning your stand can use the video as a sales aid, pointing out features and benefits as it plays on the screen behind them.
The same video can be put to use as a marketing handout. DVDs of the video can be printed with your sales message and handed out to delegates for less than the price of a brochure.
Skylark Media Group is currently producing a trade show video for precision components manufacturer,Polamco, to appeal to their customers from the defense, aerospace and communications industries. Through the video Polamco can show off its state of the art machinery and production processes, also its high caliber staff and the quality of the company. After the trade show a version of the video will be used online as a recruitment tool.
How to use social media to increase the audience for your corporate video. An article produced for Skylark Media Group
The use of video sharing websites is nothing new, the one dominating the net worldwide is without a doubt YouTube. With more than 2 billion views per day, it’s easy to see why. We’ve all done it, looking for something in particular, we go to the site, looking for a how-to video or conducting some research on a company or product, and before we know it we’re watching a clip of the talking cat.
One way of solving these distractions is to use a business only sharing site – the yellow pages with video – an online directory for local and national businesses.
Many times on the Skylark blog we’ve highlighted the importance of video on a company website. But we’ve yet to discuss the importance of a video sharing site. Uploading promotional video, client testimonials and product news has endless benefits to the business and its potential clients.
But why is video sharing better than just video on your site?
Although nowadays an essential, a company website can only do so much in the way of attracting new business. Most of the time, a site is only reached if the client already knows about you but would like to know more, or if you have found a way to appear high on a search engine results page. But conventional search engines can also present a problem when getting your business seen and heard. A user may have to trawl though a number or irrelevant search results in order to find what they are looking for. Most people who use search engines do not look beyond the first page of results before moving on. If your website is relatively new and you are just beginning to increase the traffic to your site, you may not rank on the results list until page three. By which time your potential customer could visit your competitor.
This is where the online video sharing site comes in, by categorising and moderating all content so that it makes a browsing experience as simple and enjoyable as possible. A company profile with links, contact details and, of course, video can be added. Similar to Youtube, a user can leave comments and questions – allowing for not only potential custom, but also networking opportunities with industry partners and a chance to check out the current competition. Some sharing sites are industry specialist and others are open to different business types but are multi-channelled, dividing each industry sector.
Features can include screenshot previews of videos, description of the content and user submitted video ratings. All of which enhance the viewing experience. The best sites have a large library of good content.
The current market
Living.tv is a front-runner hosting a selection of online video. This site also displays previews of local businesses in each county across the UK. The home page will ask you to select which area of the country you want to search within. The layout of the website makes it very easy and efficient to locate a particular service in a single area. These two national online services represent the online video sharing sites as an advertising and information centre for different industries.
Current Video options
Dedicating a part of your own website to company video and uploading your content to a sharing site are two ways of getting video views.
Trade magazine for the Signage industry, Signlink, has come up with a way to combine the two, Brendon Perring, Signlink Editor said: “We saw a gap in the market for the Sign industry and that was video. Many of the companies we work with and feature in the magazine produce video and a number of our readers who work in the industry come to us with questions, asking how to use particular products. With our site, they’re questions can be answered, they don’t have to ask us directly and they don’t have to go to a company show room.”
SignlinkTV organises the site by categorising the industry sectors such as digital signage, trade-shows and master classes. It also offers the usual comments box and company information.
However, SignlinkTV offers more than just company video for the signage community, Brendan explained: “We didn’t want it to be a site where we have no interaction or input. Other sites tend to lose momentum after a launch and become almost like ghost sites where there is lots of content that has been uploaded but nothing is recent, therefore it’s not being viewed.”
Brendan continued: “We see it as a value added service for our readers, our advertisers and the sign maker. We will also be producing a video cast by me. This is in-house news, including the top five stories in the industry that week. This aims to bring people back to the website on a repetitive basis, it will keep the content current, fresh, and also encourage more uploading from outside sources.”
If you’re considering creating a company profile and uploading video to a sharing site, the key thing to remember is that the site must be regularly updated by its creator. “It’s the cool factor with these sites, popularity. Our key aim is to push return visits and for that you need to update all the time,” said Brendan.
“A way we are doing this is with sign7news. Soon, we will be creating bespoke video ourselves. Firstly we will be creating short news packages and informative pieces of outside companies within the signage industry. Outside professional video production companies will be brought in for this,” he continued. We will also be creating a weekly video cast, presented by myself and including the top 5 industry news stories. This will keep current content flowing into the site. We see this as a value-added service for our customers.”
The new sharing site will be linked to the original company news website Signlink.co.uk, driving traffic to all of the companies online services.
Remember – any uploaded video on sharing or a company websites is a reflection of your business and what it has to offer. Therefore your video must be interesting, information, stand-out from the crowd and produced to the highest quality. Please email Jo Haywood, director of Skylark Media if you’d like to have a chat about the best way to showcase your skills to your market.
produced by Skylark Media Group
1. Boost your search engine optimisation (SEO).
• A video on your index page can make your site 50x more likely to appear on a Google first results page, if you link back from YouTube to your site.
• Google has already begun to factor in the use of video on a web page when determining where it ranks on a results page – after posting a video to your site potential clients will more easily locate your URL and its video content.
• People like it – over 21 billion videos are watched online every month worldwide.
2. Keep visitors on your site for longer.
• Video is one of the best ways of increasing the amount of time visitors spend on your site. Video appeals to anyone who wants easy access to information.
• 60% of us are visual learners.
• Retention of information is 6x greater when presented visually and orally.
• Video widens your potential audience because it adds an extra communication channel.
3. Improve the experience for a visitor to your site.
• By including video on your site, you are offering viewers some entertainment and a welcome break from text-heavy web pages. When reading online we are about 25% slower than when reading a book.
• Video is an interactive medium and an opportunity to target potential clients.
• You can use video to promote new products and to notify customers of upcoming specials.
4. Find new customers
• By uploading a corporate video to a social networking site, you are opening up the possibility to getting the attention of people that otherwise would never have found you.
• YouTube has over 500 million unique users worldwide every month, producing around 92 billion page views/month.
• An estimated 3 billion hours are spent on YouTube every month.
• On average there are more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link.
5. Add a personal touch
• Including yourself or a member of staff in a corporate video is an effective way of creating a more personal relationship with viewers.
• Video brings: a face to the name, shows body-language, voice and personality.
• It can tell your audience a lot more about you than just the written word.
You’ve just carried out an extensive report. You’ve got lots of lovely data to present to your customers. You want it to make the biggest impact you can. But how?
Passenger Focus, an organisation focused on getting the best deal for rail and bus passengers decided on a video, but didn’t think an interview would carry the ‘wow’ factor they were looking for. They had conducted a survey into bus passenger satisfaction taken from 21,000 responses from over 23 areas in England outside of London. The video was to present the headlines of this research to the minister for transport.
After discussion with Jo Haywood at Skylark Media, they decided that a more dynamic (and cheaper) way would be to use motion graphics. A detailed storyboard was agreed and passed over to Skylark Media’s dynamic graphics team. These masters at the highly sophisticated motion graphics software animated the research findings to presents them in a clear and manageable form, with music to set the tone.
Skylark Media’s video for Passenger Focus can be seen above. Its stylish and upbeat tone gives bus operators a clear summary of the research. Once enthused and motivated, they can get full details of their individual areas from the online report. The video has been a huge success and is now being used at presentations across the company, both internally and externally.
An article by Skylark Media Group
YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine in the world so it makes a lot of sense to understand how to optimise your videos for You Tube. A well optimised You Tube video is one of the best ways to get high organic search engine rankings. So how do you do it?
1. Cunning Backwards Engineering
Start with your keyword search terms. What are your customers looking for? Is it advice that you can give? Is it a service your company offers? Is it a local initiative? Make a video about what your customers want and they’ll be delighted to watch it. Do your research for some niche terms within your industry – that will really cut down on the competition.
2. Titles & Descriptions
Once you have your keywords ready I like to follow a fairly similar format for all my titles and descriptions. Keep the title long, start with your keywords then add a sub clause. So for Skylark Media Group’s showreel the title reads: ‘Video production Bristol – effective business communications with video’ (start and end with your main keyword)
Description – Here we recommend following best practices for SEO copy writing. It’s debatable whether or not you should lead with a link to your website. Obviously the exposure for your URL is great, but then again it takes away from the characters you have to compel the user to view. I suggest trying both ways and see what works best for you. You definitely want to use several “related” terms that are highly relevant to your keyword. Don’t keyword stuff and make sure to write the content in a compelling manner that drives the user to take action. This description is what the user will see before viewing your video, so write it for the user and not for the search engine.
Tags – Just like with a blog post you can add tags to your videos. I recommend sticking to around 5-10 tags for each video.
Skylark Media Group’s showreel
3. Annotations
The Annotations Editor is a You Tube tool that lets you layer text, hotspots and links over your video, thus enriching your viewers’ experience with information, interactivity and engagement.
4. Captions
This is the tool you can use to associate your script with your video. This is a powerful way to get all those valuable search terms that are contained in the script into a searchable file.
5. Identify Link Partners
You need to establish some links to your video to boost the video SEO. You could write a blog around your video content and then link to the video in your post. With such quality content as a video you can usually find some established blog owners who would welcome a guest blog post.
6. Relevance
Last but not least, give YouTube and Google some additional relevance as to what your video is about. Hopefully you’ve chosen some link partners that are relevant in site content but there is another way to build relevance. Use the Video Reply option in YouTube to simply associate your video with other related videos. Since this is a somewhat “spammy” technique, I only recommend replying to 1-2 videos at most.
So there you go. Video is very powerful SEO tool that can boost your position on organic search engine rankings. When you upload your video to You Tube, follow the steps above to get maximum advantage. If you’d like any advice, please get in touch.