Increase Your Company Video Visibility as Often as You Can (Episode 71)

Chris Schwager 0:01 Imagine a prospective buyer lands on your website page. And instead of inquiring with you, they leave confused because you fail to clarify to them the basic function of your business. You're not memorable, and you've missed an opportunity.

Well, this is happening every day. To be profitable, you need to be credible and to be credible, you need to be visible, and video may just be the key to improving your business.

Hello video marketers, welcome to the podcast that takes the mystery out of video. This week we talk about how to improve your visibility using video so you come across more credible, more memorable and communicate clear up to your market. So by the end of this episode, you won't only be inspired but ready to take action.

I'm your host, Chris Schwager joined this week with co host Brendan Southall. Hello, Brendan.

Brendan Southall 1:06

Hello, Chris, how are you?

Chris Schwager 1:07

I'm so good man. We've been working together for a long time, right? For a long time,

Brendan Southall 1:13

We are approaching 20 years as Ridge Films, and they're probably another five or more before that.

Chris Schwager 1:19

Can you give people a little bit of background? Because it's been some time since you've been on the show? Where and how did we first meet?

Brendan Southall 1:26

So Chris and I went to the same high school together many, many years ago. And we found out not long after leaving high school that we're doing the same thing, but independently. So we thought, why don't we combine our forces and start a production company? Doing short films with the inspirational idea of wanting to do feature films.

Chris Schwager 1:46

Like every video company in the world it seems? Let's go back to the 90s. Because this is kind of where it all began pre internet, I guess in terms of not having access to all the technology we have now. But what was life like for you? I know you had your own production company before Ridge Films. But how did you market yourself?

Brendan Southall 2:08

Good question. So I started doing wedding videos back in the day with the old good old VHS tapes. And then I finally bit the bullet and bought a nonlinear editing suite. And that was just a complete game changer. I think at the time, I had a nine gigabyte hard drive, which was I think it cost me like $1500, which back then was a lot of money. So you're in terms of marketing, I think, doing wedding videos, it was a case of going to the electoral roll and picking off names from that within my local area and going I've seen your ad in the leader, the local paper, and I'm going to go and try and send you a little letter

Chris Schwager 2:54

No way and that was it. Oh, my God, and what was in the letter? Like what it was? Was there any sort of like sales feeling there? Or was it like, Oh, hi, I'm Brendan. I'm here to do some really videos. Can I help you? It was like, Did you get any advice? I mean, I only say this because you know, I know how little creatives know about I guess sales and marketing. But I'm just sort of interested, what was the premise of the letter that you put in?

Brendan Southall 3:24

I can't remember. But all I do remember is I had a special bit of glue that put my business card onto the letter.

Chris Schwager 3:35

Wow. So there was no video to drive your inquiry. There's nothing back then it was all like good old fashioned, lick the stamp, stick it in a post? And how and what was your conversion? Like? How did things? How did that work out for you?

Brendan Southall 3:49

Conversion rate? I didn't even know what conversion rate was. Probably one in 100.

Chris Schwager 3:57 Guess I you had one up on me because. I didn't even get that far. I mean, you know, the creative process was so much of a big deal that the sales and the marketing thing was not even on the radar. So there was a lot more energy poured into, you know, doing the work and being inspired by doing the work and telling the story and all that type of stuff. But like when it came to distribution, marketing and sales channels, forget about it. Right. Has it changed? In 20 years? You know, is it that much different now?

Brendan Southall 4:31

I think it has, because everything's so readily available now. So in terms of being able to send a message to someone, it can be quite instantaneous. You no longer have to go looking at names in the electoral roll and hoping for the best. It's a case of you know, there's so much information available now that it's a case of just picking someone in your target market and going I really want to work with this person. What do I need to do to start that conversation?

Chris Schwager 4:57

Yeah, but when you did your outreach those good old fashioned letters. What sort of follow up? Did you do with that?

Brendan Southall 5:04

So the second part of what once I found the name was to then go on to the yellow pages, and find the name in the good old alphabetical list of all the names and numbers and hope for the best that I got the right one. And I think I actually followed it up with a phone call, which I think for me at the time was such a gutsy move, because I hate the phone. Particularly back in those days, yeah. Not so much now, obviously, because the videos definitely warming the conversation up, which is making a massive difference

Chris Schwager 5:38

It' s the visibility of businesses, are they still struggling to get visibility? You know, it's we've got access to technology, we've got access to free resources, like email, and social media, and all these other wonderful things that people can do to get their message out there. But are they still lacking the basics, you know, like, we all know how important the follow up is, you know, I get five, six emails a week professionals wanting to do work with us to come on board, be crew, maybe freelance, whatever we get, not professionals that want the experience as well. But I get like five or six of these things. And, you know, that might not seem like a lot every week. But when you add it up over the years, that's hundreds of emails that come through. And do you know how many actually like follow through with a phone call or any other sort of follow up correspondence, it's practically zero.

Brendan Southall 5:50

So I guess it's funny, because it's one of the most common inquiries, I think that we receive as well. It's like, everyone wants to build their brand awareness, because that's what they know they want to do. Because it's a common denominator, that's, that's missing, basically. So I think people don't really know how to communicate what they do in a format that's easy for their audience to understand

Chris Schwager 6:59

94% of marketers in this country fail to demonstrate the basic capabilities of their organisation in video form. So that's what we're talking about when we're talking lack visibility.

Brendan Southall 7:11

And that's right, you know, yourself when you go onto our website. And there's a whole bunch of words that sound amazing, but don't actually mean anything. They don't help convey what they do as a business. So you're left kind of scratching your head going? Can you help me? Yes. What is it that you actually do?

Chris Schwager 7:32

If you confuse you lose, I mean, it's the constant mantra we have here at Ridge Films. you know, you go to a website, and you tell me, if it's conveying clear enough message that you would be able to pick up the phone immediately and have that conversation. And I would argue that often people miss the fact that there is a hierarchy of information of communication, and it's often lost in text, it's often lost on the web page.

And when you start to think about the way that web pages have evolved, and websites have evolved over time, they are kind of in some cases, when you back up, side by side, certain competitors, they look the same, you know, and so it's even increasingly more difficult to differentiate. And so this is where video comes into play, right? So company profile or something there to articulate who you are, what you do, and how you help,

Brendan Southall 8:26

There's often a lot of attempts to support what they do by photography, which is often stock imagery as well. And that certainly doesn't help convey any sort of meaningful capabilities of what the organisation does. So you just end up getting more confused.

Chris Schwager 8:44

Businesses still do business with people that they know, like and trust, and the stock images are pretty sort of eye candy, but they're not conveying anything necessarily about the company and what the company does. So for instance, in IT or a tech company might have you know, great imagery, stock imagery there have like data and data flowing like the matrix and all that type of stuff, but it's still not opening up the imaginary doorway to the business so that people can actually see what the business is see what the business is like are like, are these guys are hack? Are those guys just working out of a backyard office? Or are they got a legitimate office and staff and people do they look credible in a way that you convey that is by putting people first by humanising and participating?

I guess, in the kind of communication the style of communication now, your audience's almost demanding even more so now in a COVID world as they're demanding that ability to see in virtually to snoop around and to make their own assessments for they contact you in lots of regard. And so, video does become a differentiator. Would you agree with that?

Brendan Southall 9:55

Yeah, absolutely. And that's a common thing for all sides - business. is a small, medium large, and they're all trying to sound very important. But I think at the end of the day, like you said, you know, people buy from people, it's about starting that relationship as early as you possibly can, and getting that human element to it. So people can relate to it.

Chris Schwager 10:19

So if visibility's the problem, is it just going to be one video that's going to solve those problems? You know, how does our audience take what we're saying about video and the benefits, I guess, of video, and maximising their investment? If you're like to the market?

Brendan Southall 10:39

First part of that question is, you know, is one video enough? The answer is definitely not because you need multiple touchpoints across their journey to empower them. So they can take that journey themselves when they're ready. As opposed to trying to jam a whole bunch of information down someone's throat and expect them to remember it and act on it. Definitely multiple videos strategically placed over time that they can then engage with when they're good and ready

Chris Schwager 11:08

not to alienate those that are thinking about multiple videos and go Holy shit, you know, how much am I in for, you know, what does this kind of look like in terms of my resource and my energy that needs to go into this? How can you economise videos so that it can work in abundance, but still on a budget?

Brendan Southall 11:29

I had a conversation with a client just the other day, actually, and they're doing a whole lot of DIY content, which is great, you know, it's really good to see them making a starting video, because that's often one of the biggest barriers is getting that start. But they had a five minute video. And yeah, I watched it back with them together during the meeting. And basically, that just lent itself so nicely to breaking that five minute video into five one minute videos. And just making that so much easier to to digest.

Chris Schwager 11:51

Diversify the content, get it out to as many eyeballs as possible. So if you did professional video marketing, you could do the same thing, right? So breaking out even a 90 second video into three, you know, 30 second little highlight clips, and they can use that to entice people just like a trailer for a feature film or something like that, to entice people to come in and watch the longer piece.

Brendan Southall 12:23

I think the easiest starting point is to create a video that would typically live on our on our homepage of your website. And it's very much something that very clearly states your capabilities of your organisation. Because Yeah, like we said, most businesses struggle with with communicating that clearly. So that's essentially what you need to create a 90 second or less video that very clearly demonstrates those capabilities of your organisation, because you're looking to start conversations, or at least get people to want to learn more, and dig deeper build trust in your audience.

Because if you start to get that message out consistently, across all the content that you produce, then you'll start to get people to know like and trust you. The video that lives on your homepage is a great way to spark those conversations. And as long as you got that human and creative element to it to what you do, then you will spark interest and get people to want to learn more.

Chris Schwager 13:21

So what I'm hearing is a you if you start the process, you'll be more helpful. You'll be more human, you'll show people the inside of your organisation rather than making it this stocky facade that nobody really understands exactly who you are, what you do. And you're just being more useful to your prospective buyer.

Brendan Southall 13:43

That's a great word. useful. Yep, that's spot on.

Chris Schwager 13:54

Our Ridge Films clients are the best video marketers in the world and know how to get their business a huge return for this week's video marketing tip Brendan Southall you have a construction client you've been helping, and they were really struggling with some stuff. When you started working with them what was going on with them.

Brendan Southall 14:10

Brian's business provides facades to the construction industry. And his main issue was that he had really no brand presence. And people had very little evidence of what his business offered. And therefore, as a result of that, they actually lacked credibility. So when Brian went Ridge Films, we were able to show him how to improve the visibility of his business, using what we call a company profile video.

A company profile video solution summarises his capabilities, his company's offering and therefore sparks interest and builds trust with his potential clients. The company profile video helped Brian start conversations with future clients clearly and way better than what he'd done before. And as Brian tells us the true value of having even a single video was being able to get it out there and have it out there all the time to the people that matter. Here's that chat we had with Brian mob's from Everclad

Brian Mobbs 15:10

The main challenges I think we're experiencing as a new business in the construction space is credibility. You have two wildly different mediums of marketing to establish the most amount of credibility in the shortest period of time. We really had no, no online presence. Yes, we had a website, we had some static images, right? It had some about us and who we are and what we've done, but it's pretty standardised, right?

I personally thought having the website and having the social media pages that it was enough, but you really need something, some type of anchor to drive traffic to those social media pages, because otherwise, you're just another social media page in a sea of millions of social media pages.

What we wanted to do was we wanted to portray credibility through the video by showing authenticity with that's the thing that we really liked about working with you guys is you really enabled us to show authenticity by the way that you structured the video, it's so important to get it absolutely everywhere, right. So initially, when we had it, we had it on the landing page of our website. And that was zero feedback. I guess I ran a bit of an experiment, right? I said, All right, well, yes, people might get annoyed by seeing this thing over and over and over again. But I think assume that they haven't seen it. To get real ROI on the video, you need to get it absolutely everywhere. So it's in every one of my staff members, email signatures, right? It's a big bold video link. And it is a video link. It's a picture of an image. It's got a big play button, right, we've followed Ridge Films, you know, strategy, instruction, all the way to the tee. It's now on YouTube with our own YouTube channel is on LinkedIn, it's on Facebook, it's everywhere. absolutely everywhere.

What I think was sort of magical, it really gave us an edge a bit of a presence in the industry that sort of was quite unique. Receiving the feedback that I've received really solidified for me that ROI from doing that one particular video, which has led us to then come up with a strategy to continue on with video marketing as a primary means of marketing for our business, it's so important to understand that you need to continue to distribute this material on an ongoing basis, you need to continue to recycle your material on an ongoing basis. And you can continually get those touch points to a stage where you become known to that particular person in that particular audience.

Chris Schwager 17:31

I love that so much.

Brendan Southall 17:33 He was really trying to get something through social channels. The other main key thing that came out there for me was getting the message right, that there's no point having a great video, that looks fantastic that doesn't communicate. Now that's that's your starting point. Get that script, right? Get the messages clear, concise, and then go out and show it to as many people as you possibly can.

Chris Schwager 17:56

If you need help fixing your visibility to the market, getting a greater awareness of your company out there fixing the problems that come with nobody knowing who you are, and what you do and the credibility and the trust is just not there, then the company profile might be a great solution for you in terms of getting visibility so that it becomes less about people not knowing about you and more about people wanting to do business. You need to hire a Ridge Films video marketing guru like Brendan Southall today at ridgefilms.com.au

Okay, so for the listeners tell us what what is Company Profile video.

Brendan Southall 18:47

So a company profile video is a great way to generate new opportunities. Using a video less than 90 seconds that quickly shows your capability of your business. it sparks interest, and ultimately builds trust with potential clients. You know, a company profile video demonstrates the capability of your company in a human and creative way. When you deliver a video with a consistent message like that, you immediately build trust and confidence in your offering as well.

Chris Schwager 19:15

And so how does Ridge Films facilitate that?

Brendan Southall 19:18

So it's never about just switching on the camera and starting to film. Now, like I said earlier, it's very much a case of getting that message really strong. And we highlight your key messages. We get your camera ready, and manage all of the filming for on location and in our studio as well. Because we know when your production is well organised, your video becomes clear and concise. And that's really when the strongest connections are made.

Chris Schwager 19:42

What about getting it out there?

Brendan Southall 19:44

So that these Company Profile videos are great for not only your website, but they're perfect for LinkedIn. Now other social media channels, great for presentations as well. I mean, we've had clients that have used them in tender responses as well. Even in Live Meeting cases where Do they need to quickly demonstrate the capabilities of their organisation? Yeah, like Brian said earlier, he uses them in his email signatures. The audio channel to begin a great buyers journey is to get these videos to as many people as possible. And they're great channels to do that with.

Chris Schwager 20:17

Well, there you have it sounds like a perfect solution for most businesses. And if you want to learn more about Company Profile videos, go to ridgefilms.com.au/store, you'll see a whole portfolio of different video solutions but on the top there is the company profile video has everything you need to go ahead look at the examples and learn more about how it might be useful to you.

That's all for this episode of video made simple. If you want to start on the path to become a video marketing professional like Brian Mobbs just go to ridgefilms.com.au/learn and get access to a whole bunch of resources including our online course for only $47 you get instant access to our course that will give you the basics of video marketing and a nice 60 minute seven lesson course which is going to be absolutely perfect for you to start on your journey. Let us help you take the mystery out of producing videos. Just hit the learn button or go to ridgefilms.com.au/learn and see you next week.

Brendan Southall 21:21

See you next week Chris

Chris Schwager 21:24

Bye Brendan.