Creating audio and video content for marketing and PR purposes requires the same attention to appropriate topics as other techniques outlined in this book. It requires targeting individual buyer personas with thoughtful information that addresses some aspect of their lives or a problem they face. By doing so, you brand your organization as smart and worthy of doing business with. However, unlike text-based content such as blogs or news releases, audio and video might require a modest investment in additional hardware such as microphones and video cameras, as well as software, and, depending on the level of quality you want to achieve, may also necessitate time-consuming editing of the files. Although the actual procedures for podcasting and video are a bit more convoluted than, say, starting a blog, they are still not all that difficult.

Video and Your Buyers

Organizations that deliver products or services that naturally lend themselves to video have been among the first to actively use the medium to market and deliver information about their offerings. For example, many churches routinely shoot video of weekly services and offer it online for anyone to watch, drawing more people into the congregation. Many amateur and professional sports teams, musicians, and theater groups also use video as a marketing and PR tool.

Video follows both blogs and podcasting on the adoption curve at organizations that don’t have a service that naturally lends itself to video. Companies are certainly experimenting, typically by embedding video (hosted at YouTube or another video site) into their existing blogs and online media rooms. I’m also seeing video snippets of CEO speeches, customer interviews, and quick product demonstrations.

Business-Casual Video

In the United States, there has been a several decade trend toward so-called business-casual clothing in the workplace. My first job, on Wall Street in the 1980s, required me to wear a suit and tie with polished shoes every day. At that time, casual (for men) meant that after 5 p.m. you could loosen your tie. When I lived in Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, things were even more formal; you could loosen your tie only while drinking beer late at night.

Casual Fridays started as a parallel to the dot-com boom on both American coasts in the mid-1990s and was partly led by Dockers, a Levi Strauss clothing brand. Casual Friday very quickly became casual every day and spread throughout the United States. These days, except for banking, the law, and a few other professions, business casual is the norm and the trend has spread around the world.

I’ve noticed in the past five years or so that business video has been going through a similar trend toward the casual. More and more content is created with much less formality. This is a good thing! Both professionals and citizen content creators now reach readers and viewers faster and with less interference from the stuffy conventions associated with content creation.

Perhaps the tremendous rise of social networking tools has helped fuel the desire to consume content that is less formal. At the same time, stiff and structured media like white papers aren’t getting as many readers as they did a decade ago.

My friend Cliff Pollan is the one who first brought my attention to what he calls business-casual video. I love the description! The concept is simple: In the beginning, corporate videos were highly produced, like an episode of 60 Minutes. They tended to cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to create.

Some classics of the formal online corporate video genre include slickly produced corporate overviews; in-studio, lights-and-makeup customer testimonials; and product managers explaining their amazing new offerings. Because many executives’ experience with video is of this genre, when the subject of online video is discussed at companies, most people immediately think expensive and difficult. It’s because they’re thinking formal.

But if you think about business-casual video, all of a sudden videos can be low-cost or even no-cost and can be completed in a few hours or even a few minutes. The video quality of modern smartphones is stunning! Some people say that quality is essential. While I agree that a video should be appealing, I’m convinced that a lack of a studio, high-wattage lighting, and makeup artists isn’t a big deal. If the subject is interesting, people are plenty tolerant of the conditions under which the video was filmed. Of course, you need to stay within reason. I don’t advocate poorly shot video, terrible lighting, or bad editing.

I’m convinced that the trend toward casual content means consumers want to get closer to the organizations they do business with. When a company, hospital, educational institution, government agency, or other outfit comes across as friendly and engaging because of the way it communicates with people online, the content will be better received. It’s okay if the person in your video doesn’t speak like someone with an Ivy League MBA—in fact, it’s probably preferable.

Like that transition from wearing formal clothes to putting on a polo shirt, it might feel unprofessional at first. But the increasingly informal nature of business—a willingness to tell it like it is—will make us more efficient and successful. Like the business-casual video that is the result, the equipment you use to create videos for your organization need not be fancy.

Stop Obsessing over Video Release Forms

Part of the trend toward business-casual video is the rise of interviews quickly recorded and used for marketing purposes. However, many people tell me that their companies’ legal departments obsess over getting signed release forms from interview participants prior to posting the video online.

In my experience, the mere act of thrusting a legal document in front of potential participants and demanding that they sign causes many of them to rethink the whole thing; some end up choosing not to participate. When this happens, you miss opportunities.

I want to emphasize that I am not a lawyer, and I am not offering legal advice. As always, you should check with an expert before proceeding with an action that may have legal consequences. However, I do want to offer a practical alternative to the formal signed release. It’s a simple strategy that I use myself. When I first press “Record” on my iPhone, I simply ask the person I am about to interview if it’s okay to post the video on YouTube. I also ask about name spellings and company affiliation and title. I then know how to refer to my interview subjects throughout the video, and I have a record of them giving me permission to record! During the video-editing process, I save the video permissions and post the interview. It works great.

I’ve interviewed and posted video of rock stars, Fortune 500 CEOs, and top government officials using this method. And it turns out I’m not the only one. I was recently interviewed for a special segment to be aired on MSNBC’s Your Business program. The first thing the producer did was have me spell my name on camera. There you have it—a technique even the pros use.

Your Smartphone Is All You Need

One development that is helping change the relative formality of corporate marketing video is the ease of use and high quality that you can achieve with today’s smartphones. As I write this, I currently use an Apple iPhone X, and the videos it produces are stunning. I love mine and have it with me at all times when I am on the go. You never know where or when a great video interview might present itself, like the one I did with Jim Bridenstine, the Administrator of NASA. Other times, an idea pops up that is best told in video, like the idea in “Social media drove the Egyptian revolution but can it bring back the tourists??,”¹ which I filmed at the Pyramids and at Tahrir Square in Egypt a few years ago.

Your smartphone’s camera allows you to always be ready to interview customers, employees, and industry analysts and to quickly post the video on your site or blog. It can also help you shoot short clips showing how your products are made or used. No professionals required.

The thing couldn’t be easier to use. Even a technology-challenged person like me can use it. I do simple edits like shortening clips, adding graphics, or including B-roll footage (video to show the location that the video is about), such as images of the area around Tahrir Square in my Egypt video mentioned earlier. Or you can upload directly to YouTube, Vimeo, or other video-sharing sites right from your smartphone. Really, it’s that easy. In fact, when people push back on the idea of creating a corporate blog or writing an e-book, I always suggest making some simple and short video interviews as an easy way to create valuable content that helps get the word out right away. Hey, did I mention that this is easy?

Facebook Live Is Great for Real-Time Content Marketing

The Facebook Live video application has quickly emerged as a premier live-streaming tool. Facebook Live turns your smartphone into a broadcast television station that people can tune in to live or watch as a replay.

Facebook appears to be giving strong preference to Facebook Live broadcasts. The Facebook algorithm will often give your video priority, showing the feed in real time to your friends and followers at the top of their time lines. Images alone are powerful storytelling tools, but live video pulls your followers right along with you in the moment.

Facebook Live can turn anyone into a citizen journalist. Indeed, news outlets are using Facebook Live too, allowing their reporters to upload live video between their more formal broadcasts or written stories.

And for marketers, live streaming opens up the possibility of sharing all kinds of information that can serve as marketing for you or your company.

A tour of a home for sale, a peek backstage at a rock concert, a manager’s pep talk before the big game, or a product design meeting at a company all become shareable in a way that builds excitement and intimacy.

When I delivered a two-hour talk about the ideas in this book at the Tony Robbins Business Mastery seminar in Las Vegas, a 20-minute segment of the talk was filmed by a friend in the Facebook Live app on my iPhone and broadcast in real time.²

As followers began to see my live broadcast, many shared it on their own time lines, growing the audience. Tony Robbins also shared it with his nearly four million Facebook followers. Soon there were more than 10,000 people tuned in to my Facebook Live broadcast.

Less than a week later, the recording had been shared by 181 people, liked by 770 people, and viewed some 65,000 times. This turned out to be a wonderful way for me to share information with my existing followers and reach people who didn’t know me yet. It can do the same for you.

What I like most about Facebook Live is its simplicity. Simply turn on your smartphone, connect via Facebook, and begin broadcasting. No writing (like for a blog post), no advanced preparation (as in typical video shoots), and no complex uploading process after you shoot your video (as with YouTube).

Unlike almost every other form of content creation, with Facebook Live your media are immediately online and shareable, promoting you or your business right away.

There are many marketing and PR uses for Facebook Live. Politicians, artists, musicians, chefs, authors, teachers, CEOs, and others in the public eye have a great opportunity to create instant video stories about what they are up to. Organizations can showcase how their customers use their wares, especially with highly visual products and services like sporting goods, cars, hotels, restaurants, and hair salons.

In fact, surgery is now being broadcast on Facebook Live. Yes, really! More than half a million people watched as neurosurgeons at Soroka University Medical Center in Israel performed a procedure on a woman suffering from expanded blood vessels in her brain. Medical privacy laws in most countries require a patient’s agreement before sharing on social media, something that Dr. Wilberto Cortes, a Houston, Texas, plastic surgeon asks of his patients. When someone agrees to be filmed on Facebook Live, the doctor is giving potential new patients a peek into how he works, which serves as an excellent way to market his practice.

When a news story breaks, Facebook Live can also be an excellent way to do some newsjacking (see Chapter 21), getting your take on the story into the marketplace instantly with the potential to generate media coverage, produce sales leads, and grow business.

Video to Showcase Your Expertise

When Mary McNeight couldn’t find anyone in the Seattle area who would help her train her own dog Jasper for service work (dogs that help people manage disabilities and diseases like diabetes), it fell to her to teach her pet to be her service dog. Later, she enrolled in puppy classes to train Liame, her new Labrador retriever puppy. In the process, she became fascinated by dog training—so she made it her business. McNeight spent countless hours learning all aspects of the business, got her accreditation from the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers, and is now owner and director of training and behavior at the Service Dog Academy.³ This business offers private training sessions and small-group adult-and-puppy training classes for both service and pet dog training. It even offers a groundbreaking program for training your own diabetic alert dog.

But credentials, skills, and even passion alone don’t bring in customers. Her excellent website (featuring dozens of videos that she shot and edited herself) educates buyers and generates high search engine rankings, driving business her way. “I’ve gone from barely having any students to getting anywhere from 20 to 40 emails per day requesting my services and advice and verbally praising my work,” McNeight says. “If that isn’t a story of success, I don’t know what is. I have the power to create an audience for any product or service I put my mind to. But I think I will stick with what makes me happiest: helping dogs and the disabled live more productive lives.”

In 2010, McNeight started making YouTube videos with an inexpensive video camera and the software that came installed on her Mac notebook computer. “Seeing a need for my students to understand how to make a Kongsicle, I produced my first instructional video,” McNeight says. Kongs are natural rubber food-puzzle toys for dogs, and a Kongsicle is a Kong with frozen food inside. The video is titled “Best Dog Food Puzzle: The Kongsicle.”

“A couple of months later, I went to the Association of Pet Dog Trainers conference, and I was startled by a young trainer who said, ‘You’re Mary McNeight, right? You made that video on Kongsicles! I use it as a reference video for my students.’ Here was this dog trainer in Florida using my materials for her classes. That was the day I understood the power of YouTube.” Since then, McNeight has made many instructional videos, with titles that include “Diabetic Alert Dog Scams,” “Puppy Doggie Ants in the Pants,” and a multipart series on diabetic alert dog training.

The content on the Service Dog Academy site, including the video series, is created for three buyer personas: pet dog owners, service dog owners, and people who want to train their own diabetic alert dog. After her initial success, McNeight purchased a $400 HD video camera, a $20 microphone, Final Cut Pro software, and, as she describes it, “some funky alien-adjustable-arm-looking lights at Home Depot, since I couldn’t afford to light my videos with professional lights. The really cool thing about my content is that it proves that it doesn’t have to be shiny, flashy, spiffy, or cost thousands of dollars to produce. People will watch anything as long as it’s packed full of useful information.”

McNeight’s repute and search engine results are aided by her willingness to post content that others in the dog training business are fearful to post because they don’t want to give away information for free. “A great success was a video on how to travel with your service dog, something nobody on the entire Internet was teaching people how to do,” she says. “I also hosted a webinar that gave an overview of how to train a diabetic alert dog. I placed the webinar capture video on YouTube and was afraid of being banned in the dog-training community. This information was not available [elsewhere] on the web because nobody wanted to share how they trained dogs for tens of thousands of dollars. I started getting emails and phone calls from people all over the world asking me for advice on training their dog or just outright purchasing my online diabetic alert dog training program. I’ve had dog trainers who want me to fly out to their location and teach a class on diabetic alert dog training for them.

“How cool is it that this now three-person service dog training organization is getting worldwide attention? I never would have gotten that type of exposure printing brochures or running expensive ads on local television. A couple of months ago, I even had a woman tell me the video I made saved her life! It allowed her to get enough information to help her train her own medical alert dog by herself.”

You could hardly ask for a more dramatic example of how low-cost videos can expand reach and drive business. And it all started because McNeight identified a problem that no one online was helping people solve.

Getting Started with Video

Whether they’re new to the game or have been offering web video for years, organizations get their video content onto the computer screens (and smartphones) of buyers in several different ways:

• Posting to video-sharing sites: YouTube⁴ is the most popular video-sharing site on the web, although there are others, such as Vimeo.⁵ Organizations post video content on YouTube and send people a link to the content (or hope that it goes viral). You can also embed a YouTube video into your site, your blog, or even your news release. Creating a simple video is easy—all you need is a YouTube account and a digital video camera or the video app on your smartphone. There are all sorts of enhancements and editing techniques you can use to make the video more professional. IBM has experimented with mockumentaries, including a hysterical six-part series called The Art of the Sale, which is like a cross between The Office and a sales training video. And the viral components of these corporate videos clearly work, because here I am sharing them with you.⁶
• Developing an online video channel: Companies that take online video programming seriously develop their own channel, often with a unique URL. Examples include Weber Grills’ “Grill Skills” videos,⁷ which feature instruction on how to grill like “mastering turkey.”
• Attempting stealth insertions to YouTube: Some companies try to sneak corporate-sponsored video onto YouTube in a way that makes it seem like it was consumer generated. The YouTube community is remarkably skilled at ratting out inauthentic video, so this approach is fraught with danger.
• Vlogging: Short for “video blogging,” this term refers to video content embedded in a blog. The text part of the blog adds context to each video and aids with search engine marketing.
• Videocasting: A videocast is like a podcast but with video—a video series tied to a syndication component with iTunes and RSS feeds.
• Inviting your customer communities to submit video: This technique is how some companies try to generate viral marketing interest. These companies sponsor contests where customers submit short videos. The best are usually showcased on the company site, and the winners often get prizes. In some cases, the winning videos are also played on TV as real commercials.

“Video is a remarkably versatile medium,” says Dave Jackel, a partner at Shave Media, a Boston-based studio creating video content for corporate clients around the world. “We can use it tell stories, share ideas, and pre-sent information at all levels of complexity.”

Like me, Jackel is particularly appreciative of how-to furniture assembly videos, which are now mercifully replacing those 12-language illustrated instructions that come folded up along with the screws.

“Video allows you to show it, rather than just say it,” Jackel says. “The medium is particularly well suited for conveying emotion, and it can do so in a matter of seconds. As a means of touching the heartstrings, making us laugh, or rousing us to action, video may be the most powerful tool we have. Our clients come to us not to replace the text on their websites, but to tell the stories that can’t be told properly through text alone.”

Video Created for Buyers Generates Sales Leads

As I’ve mentioned throughout this book, tailoring content to buyer personas is essential to good marketing. Guess what—it’s true for video as well. Rather than creating gobbledygook-laden drivel about products and services, shooting video especially for your buyers makes it important for them.

Attivio, an enterprise software company, uses a buyer-persona-based approach on the company’s website. While the different personas might actually all purchase the same product, each one has different problems that can be solved by the company. For instance, marketers at Attivio target what they refer to internally as tech-savvy business champions, people who care about new revenue sources, better customer relationships, regulatory compliance, competitive advantage, and controlling costs. Another buyer persona, information technology professionals, describes the people responsible for getting and keeping the company’s systems up and running, so they want to hear about reliability, security, performance, scale, and ease of integration. A third buyer persona is those who work within government and the intelligence agencies. These buyers don’t want to hear about improving profitability; instead, they care about sharing information among agencies, which improves their ability to connect the dots and detect threats. Each set of buyer persona pages has video made especially for that buyer, and the goal of the video is to drive buyers to want to learn more by connecting with an Attivio salesperson.

“Video has been a particularly valuable tool in helping us convey the appropriate [information] to each customer segment,” says MaryAnne Sinville, senior vice president of marketing at Attivio. “When we do a video shoot, we often ask the same question two or three times, guiding the speaker to frame their answer with a specific audience in mind so we get relevant content to parse out to multiple persona pages.”

One of the benefits of this approach is that salespeople know what a buyer is interested in and what persona that buyer represents based on what page the buyer is on when he or she asks to learn more. “When a visitor comes to the site, self-selects a persona path, and then converts to a lead, it’s much easier for us to respond with additional information they’re likely to find compelling,” Sinville says.

Now let’s take a look at how to create a podcast. While the general approach of creating valuable information especially for your buyer personas is the same, you do have technology choices to make.

Podcasting 101

A podcast is a piece of audio content tied to a subscription component so people can receive regular updates. The simplest way to think of podcasting is that it’s like a radio show except that you listen to each episode at your convenience by downloading or streaming it either to your computer or to a mobile device like an Android phone or iPhone. The equipment you need to start podcasting will range in cost from a few hundred dollars at the low end to a bit over a thousand dollars for professional-level sound. Plus, you’ll probably want to host your audio files on an external server requiring a monthly fee.

How do you get started? “I’ve found that the most important thing is show preparation,” says John J. Wall, Partner and Head of Business Development at Trust Insights. He’s producer and cohost with Christopher Penn of Marketing over Coffee,⁸ a 20-minute show covering both new and classic marketing. “Unless you are real comfortable talking extemporaneously, you will want to have a script laid out ahead of time. It just sounds more polished when you do.” I don’t have my own podcast, but as a frequent guest on radio shows and podcasts, I agree with Wall—the best shows I participate in are those where the interviewer knows the material and keeps things focused.

Beginning with developing a script, following are the steps and technical issues involved with producing a podcast.

• Show preparation includes gathering ideas for the show and creating a script. Think about your buyer personas and what you can discuss that interests them. If you plan to interview guests, make sure you know how to pronounce their names (don’t laugh—this is a frequent mistake) and you have their titles, affiliations, and other information correct. It’s common practice to plug a guest’s business, so know ahead of time what URL or product you will mention.
• Recording when you are near your computer is done with a microphone (many options to choose from) that delivers the audio into your computer. You’ll need audio editing software such as GarageBand, Audacity, Adobe Audition, or ProTools as an interface to create and publish your podcast.
• Mobile recording gear is required if you are going to do the roving-reporter thing and interview people at events or perhaps your employees around the world. Mobile recording gear is made by several companies, including Zoom and Tascam.
• Phone interviews require a way to record both sides of a conversation. A good way to go is to use Zencastr, Skype, or Google Hangouts on your computer and then record on a digital recorder.
• Editing your audio files is optional; you can always just upload the files as you recorded them. If you choose to clean them up, you can edit at the microscale (removing um, uh, and other audible pauses) or at the macroscale (e.g., removing the last five minutes of an interview). Many podcasters edit segments that they recorded at different times, putting them together to create a show. Audacity⁹ and Apple’s GarageBand¹⁰ are two software packages that include many of the audio capabilities of a professional radio station and make editing simple.
• Postproduction editing sometimes includes running a noise-reduction program (to get rid of that annoying air-conditioner hum in the background) and sound compression (to even out the volume of sections that have been recorded at different times and places). The Levelator¹¹ is an excellent free tool that does compression and other dynamic adjustments. For less than $100 SoundSoap¹² is another excellent tool to clean up audio.
• Tagging the audio is an important step that some people overlook or perform without taking due care. This step involves adding text-based information about the audio to make it easier for people to find. This information is what appears in the search engines and audio distribution sites such as iTunes. Your tags also display on listeners’ iPod displays, so don’t ignore or gloss over this step. If you are hosting your podcast on a blog, look for a plug-in that allows you to automate this tagging when you post the file.
• Hosting and distribution are necessary to ensure that people can easily obtain your podcasts. Services such as Liberated Syndication¹³ host the (sometimes very large) audio files and syndicate them to the distribution networks such as iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora.
• Promotion is essential to make sure that people find out about your podcasts. If you do interview shows (which are an easy way to get started, and provide excellent content), make sure that you provide links to the show to all of the guests. Many people will help you promote a show that featured them. You will also want to network with other podcasters in your space, because very short on-air plugs cross-promoting other podcasts are common and a good way for people to build audiences. Don’t forget to put links to your podcast on your website, in your email signature, and on or in your offline materials, including business cards and brochures. Also, you should tweet about every show and add a link to your Facebook page as well as send out a news release alerting people to important shows.
• A companion blog is a key component used by nearly all podcasters to discuss the content of each show. An important reason for having a companion blog is that its text will be indexed by the search engines, driving more people to sign up for the podcast feed. A blog also allows the show’s host to write a few paragraphs about the content of that particular show and to provide links to the blogs and websites of guests (so people can get a sense of a show’s content prior to listening). Most organizations that use podcasting as a marketing tool also use the podcast blog as a place to move people into the sales process by providing links to the company site or to demonstrations or trial offers.

As of March 2018, Marketing over Coffee serves up an average of 65,000 downloads per month. “Podcasting has been a huge benefit for both Chris and I in earning the trust of our listeners which then gives us credibility for both speaking opportunities and the work we now do at Trust Insights,” Wall says. “It’s been very satisfying to be in situations where businesses are looking for data science to light up their dark data and do a better job of understanding the flow of leads and customers. They talk with 50-person firms or larger and then say, ‘Yes, but we’ve known you for years through the podcast, we trust you.’”

Wall says you can be up and running with your new podcast in less than a month. “The principles are all quite simple, but it takes a bit of time to figure out the various hardware and software elements,” he says. “Be sure to write up accurate show notes, including time codes. Listeners can find the content they want, and you get some extra search engine juice.”

Audio and video content on the web is still new for many marketers and communicators. But the potential to deliver information to buyers in fresh and unique ways is greater when you use a new medium. And while your competition is still trying to figure out that blogging thing, you can leverage your existing blog into the new worlds of audio and video and leave the competition way behind.