Search Engine Watch - Three ways to up your video marketing game by Ann Smarty #497

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners here at EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram. I'm your SEO expert. And one of the owners here at EWR Digital. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast. Now, we threw in a couple interview podcasts. You may not have seen all of them yet. I'm going to call it podcast 419. So, we released one this morning, but the other two, I'm saving them. Okay, so then this is podcast number 491. I don't know how that happened. Did you title it that way? Did you title it? What did you title? Like, did you put that in the title? No, no, no, no, I didn't. So, we can change that at the end, but if you're listening. See, look, the live counter just started counting. Good morning. All right. This is kind of weird. All right. We are broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas. We're actually at different locations. But Matt and I, we are your results. I do have a review. I wanted to get this in here really quick. It's from Richard Ortiz. He says, the title is, he's a local guide. So, he's got like 28 reviews, five photos. It says, positive, professionalism, quality. If you are a, if you're a standalone SEO provider, you have, all cap, have to subscribe to this podcast. I listen when I'm walking my dog in the morning and take, taking an afternoon run. It's like having an entertaining meeting with SEO experts. It's like taking an extended water cooler break with a couple of down-to-earth SEOs and talking shop. Great inspiration, new ideas, fresh excitement, and the craft, all about the craft of SEO. Every time I hear that podcast theme music, I feel the endorphins pumping through my brain, getting me excited about heading back to my work desk, enthusiastic to put their suggestions to work for my clients. It's Shikau. By the way, that wasn't me. He wrote

Shikau. Like, that's what it says. It says Shikau. How cool is that? That's a good one. Yeah. Wow. That was, that was a really powerful review there, Chris. I'm a little taken back. That's great. Like, I really like our song, our interest song. It's very solid, Chris. You know, I think it's a lot. Yeah. Goldmine. Tell everybody the best song. Marcin, uh, Louichi, I'm maybe butchering that name. Uh, he actually said, ha, real review and with a big muscle icon. So, uh, thank you, Patif, to you, uh, Marcin, if I'm pronouncing that right. I hope I am. Uh, we got a great article today, uh, three-way. The song, tell us about the song. We're like your friends, right? Yeah, so, um, it's actually a good friend of mine, uh, Joe Trevino. Uh, I went to college with him. He was actually a roommate of mine at one point. He was in a band, uh, in LA called Circle the Cat. It may have been plural, Circle the Cats. I think it was Circle the Cats. And they've got an album. It's actually a pretty phenomenal album, if you ask me. I don't even know if it's available anywhere. Uh, and the intro music for our podcast is from a song of theirs called Goldmine. And, yeah, I love it. Like, it's, it's, I don't know. What's the cat song? Well, no, I don't think there is a cat song, but the band is called Circle the Cats. Oh, that's what it is, yeah. Right? And so they've got, they've got a number of other good songs. He actually inspired me. I picked up for a little while, uh, Bongos. I was playing Bongos because he, he's, uh, a Latin percussionist. And he's just phenomenal. I can tell you a short little story. I was at this kind of artsy party, uh, in kind of the arts, an artsy area in Houston. And there were like people in the back and literally they are like banging on pots. And it just sounded like a cluster, right?

It was just bad. And I was there with my friend Joe and he's like, oh, I'm going to go home and come back with my drums. And I was talking with another friend and all of a sudden this like banging on pans and cluster became music. And my friend Guion looked at me in the eye and goes, oh, Joe just got back with his drums. Cause he turned it into music. It was, it was awesome. Anyway, circle the cat is the band. I don't know if you can find anything out there. And a gold mine is the actual, uh, song that we use. So three ways to up your video marketing game. Who doesn't want to up their video marketing game? Uh, this article is by Ann Smarty. I feel like we're going to learn stuff in this article. Yeah. Right. Like we're, we're learning from Smarty. Um, I'm sure she got all sorts of hell when she was in school. Right. Uh, videos allow companies to reach a wider audience. Um, and they can help you increase your sales and conversions. There's a lot of brand owned video content floating around, but how many of those companies have achieved real tangible results from those video production efforts? Like ultimately what's the ROI, what's the results from those videos? The question, what, and you've got to ask this question. There's lots of, actually I skipped there. Uh, here are three ways to up your video marketing game before you decide to invest more into it. So I love the approach here. Like maybe you're doing a little bit of video, maybe you're doing, uh, no video, but try a little bit more or increase it a little bit, or at least try some of it before you decide to throw a whole lot of budget at it. It shouldn't be the case. You're like everybody else. In fact, they're like the usual arguments. My competitors are doing that. It seems to be the thing now. Those are not exactly reasons that you should be doing

really anything in marketing. Those are reasons that you might want to test those things in marketing and then throw in big budgets. If you've got a good positive ROI. Ultimately, the right question is, what am I trying to achieve here? That question always, always comes first. It goes back to planning. We often talk about, do not throw money against the wall and see if it sticks, have a plan. Uh, also goes back to, you know, it's not test and measure it's measure and test, know what you're going to measure, uh, and then start doing stuff and then make sure you continue measuring. So Chris, one of the things that we're doing right now, um, is when people come in and want like PPC services, um, we're running a cost analysis on, you know, basically what their budget is, uh, how much the keywords cost. How many clicks they're going to get. And then how many clicks it would take to convert to a lead, how many leads it would convert to a sale and see, you know, if it's profitable or break even because, you know, AdWords used to be at 30 cents a click. Right. And now you're talking, depending on the industry, it could be 20, 10, $165 per click. Like you got to figure out what, what is that customer potentially work to you and can you get it? And so we've been running those numbers for customers because really some of these web 2.0s, um, traffic's a lot cheaper. Um, or always SEO has just a greater ROI by, um, you know, leaps and bounds really. And, and so we're running these numbers to make sure the campaign's profitable before we get started. Um, to make sure that these numbers like based on industry metrics, here's, here's what it would take. Here's what it's going to need to take for your campaign to be successful. And sometimes it's out outside the realm of possibility at that budget point. Right. And so, um, it's better to kind of know what that is

eyes wide open going into it versus, you know, on the back end going, Hey, I just spent a bunch of money and nothing happened. Well, and, and, and what we've found in PPC campaigns is that the more mature the industry, the more things you got to have on point before you even start down that path. Right. So there are some industries where you look at, um, I'm trying to think of one, a dental industry, right? Like it's kind of known good common knowledge that a typical new patient is worth $10,000 lifetime to a dentist. Right. But it's lifetime. So however long they're with you, if that's 10 years, if that's 40 years or whatever, the average new client for a dentist is worth $10,000 over the lifetime of that client. If you're a smart, savvy dentist, um, franchise manager, right? Then you know, to use that to your advantage because you're actually building up the value of the franchise. A smaller dental office has a little bit less opportunity to do that. Cause if I can tell you it's a $10,000 lifetime value, is it worth paying a thousand dollars for that customer? Yes. Well, if you can, if you can bankroll it, it's like, can you float, can you know, how, how much can you float? Because you know, we need cash now versus, you know, five, 10 years from now and let it all mature. Um, and that's like an average. And so, no, I, I agree with you, you know, but I, again, when you're running ads, like, you know, like we've run Facebook ads of like teeth cleaning, right? Teeth whitening, that sort of thing. You know, you get a lot of different kinds of people coming in, but you run ads on like crowns, you know, like dental surgery, like emergency, like that ROI is there today. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the difference is like a small new mom and pop kind of dental office. They like may freak out about if they spent a thousand dollars per customer, they're

going to be so far in the hole, um, by the end of the first year, but in reality, they'll be making money long-term. So that's that mature business that understands its lifetime value of the customer that ends up being willing to spend more and more. And that's what we find the more mature, the business, the, the, the more the, that the marketers who are in that PPC space have taken advantage of the actual lifetime value of the customer. Well, and I think also it, it, it's important to understand too, that I have no idea what I was going to say. Like, that's why it's not that important. Moments ago, it was really, really important. And we were talking about lifetime value. And then all of a sudden, like, it's just, it's not as important anymore, but we'll come back to it when you remember. Let's get into video. Yeah. So start defining your goals. Maybe one of your goals is just to manage your reputation, right? So that'd be a good goal. Set that as a goal. Maybe it's build loyalty and turn your company into a niche knowledge hub, right? So, so obviously we have the podcast, we've got videos of the podcast, that's information going out there and we'll get into what else could we do to become that niche knowledge hub. The easiest, just understand the easiest way to explain complex things and show off how good at those complex things you are is on video, right? Create monetization opportunities. It's difficult to put a price on things like reputation, authority, and, and loyalty, but videos can be monetized in a number of ways, right? You could offer sponsorship opportunities. You could do video creation services. Cause you know, Matt and I were comfortable interviewing people. We could just say, Hey, we'll interview you for free and it'll be on our podcast. That's a monetization process. You can use videos to put together paid content upgrades. So, Hey, what is it? If we do it for free, it's not monetization. Well, I

mean, like, I think you had to make the leap, but I get it, but yeah. Um, we haven't done that many interviews yet. And, and actually we just did three back to back. Um, we're going to end up doing more of those and yeah. And I'll say that again, uh, you can use video to put together again, paid content upgrade. So, Hey, here's, here's access to deeper, more elevated SEO content. Um, video courses, premium video add-on services. So there's a lot of ways that you could monetize your video. Uh, if, if direct monetization were the thing that you were going to do. Um, number two, remember this is three ways, uh, to up your video marketing game, plan your video marketing strategy as well as each of the campaigns properly. Well, it's easy to say plan them, but is it easy to say properly? So, so number one, let's say you wanted to manage your reputation. Online reputation management is tricky to put it simple. There's never enough here, right? No matter how solid your reputation looks like at this very moment, you may always want to do more, or if somebody starts coming after you and trying to damage that reputation, you may need to do more. So it's something that you probably should be doing on a regular basis. You should always be pursuing reviews, get those litany. I remember we had one, um, uh, how do we want to describe this client? We had this one client, um, who was not agreeable, right? We'll call him not agreeable. And he actually yelled at multiple team members. And so we fired him as a client and he threatened us to write a bad review. And we're like, well, we have a hundred and one positive, like five, 4.95 star reviews. Um, we're not like, that's not really a big threat to us. Uh, but just know that if you do that, we're just going to share the entire story, including screenshots of the emails and, and all this dysfunctional stuff. Um, it may

not surprise you. He did not leave a bad review for us. Well, I, I think that you're, you're, I mean, I, I actually know what client you're talking about now and it wasn't actually you saying that we're going to all leave bad reviews. It was the team members that were so upset that we had to stop them from leaving a bad review. Um, it wasn't like, Hey, we're going to do that. It's like, we're holding them back because, um, you know, like it, it goes both ways. But I mean, that, that was like a rare instance. I feel like that was, that's only happened. I mean, one time since I've been here that it got that bad and the guy was just irrational. Honestly. Yeah. He was disagreeable to be sure. I feel like we disagreed with almost everything. Um, yeah. So you may always want more content and that's one of the advantages of continuing to push for good reviews. And then you, then you build a good reputation out there. Strong brand has a lot of benefits, right? Loyalty, return visitors and buyers, word of mouth more often, right? You want to go out there and create those raving fans. By the way, great book, uh, called raving fans. Videos are a great way to solidify your online reputation because they also tend to rank well, right? So if you get one bad review, maybe somebody has even thrown up a website to say how horrible you are. If you've got all these reviews, your positive review of you, um, being, uh, being on the video or some company representative being, uh, you know, talking about the company and your policies and your process, like that's going to have a lot more weight than one person who's just, you know, written a couple of paragraphs about you that are, that are not good. Chris, I can tell you we're doing some, I would call it reputation management for a client. So there's a number of clients in certain industries that name themselves like

the same name as other people name. Like it's like a popular name that like there's a bunch of companies that have that same name. So client came to us and basically we structured a deal where, uh, eight out of the 10, uh, positions, when you search for their name on Google are going to come up their properties or property associated with them to basically push, um, the other competitors off. One of the strategies that I'm using to, to, to, to achieve this is video, right? Videos are very, very powerful. Um, and they rank quite well, especially YouTube videos rank quite well because right. Google owns YouTube. It's the second largest search engine. And so there's things that you can do video SEO on YouTube that will rank well in universal search. Um, and also it tells a better story, right? We're talking about, you know, telling your story, that storytelling, the customer branding, that sort of thing. Videos are by far, uh, one of the best ways to do that. And, um, you know, Google recognizes that and, and ranks that stuff higher or gives it more weight. Yeah. And, and then, uh, she goes on to give some kind of tools. Uh, she mentions use a tool called Animoto. I actually pulled it up. I've never used it and I'd be worth, worth trying out. She actually mentioned blue jeans, uh, for video interviews, obviously kind of zoom is the one is the go-to now. And we're actually, yeah, out the stream yard here, like it does good things. You can make Matt real nervous when you zoom in. Um, and then work with different video creation tools, kind of get creative. He talks about, in fact, I'm sorry, it's she, um, she talks about, uh, one video, she has a roadmap of like making a video month to work on your kind of video marketing game and working on your reputation. And she aligns like each video presentation to be associated either with a company event, like the anniversary of the company or

with one of the holidays and just make sure those videos are coming out on a regular basis. So, um, next build loyalty and turn your company into a niche knowledge hub. If you decide to engage in, in creating educational videos, she has this really nice roadmap of how can you map out all these videos and these processes? And sometimes it's a blog post or an iTunes post or whatever, and have them designed so that ultimately they create a video course, right? So if you're going to create this content, if you just map it out, right. One, that content is going to serve well, uh, serve you well. And then two, you just kind of fold that into a video course and you've got a way, something that you could monetize. So, um, check out the article. Yeah, no, Chris, I think that, um, this even goes back to, uh, like how to write a book, right? A book's like 10 or 12 blogs, right? If you write them in sequence and then you kind of loop them together, um, you can write a book by writing like a blog a month. That's kind of what, what I did. Um, you know, and I think that, uh, there, there's some opportunities there and also taking free content, repurposing it, um, you know, add it in some, some more goodies in there and boom, you got a, you got a info product of some sort. So I think that there's a lot of, uh, ways to go, uh, when you're like video course emails, right? Like, so they buy a product and you send them a video one a day or something like that for X number of days. Um, I plan on making a few of those and we were working on kind of taking all the podcasts and kind of organizing them in a different, uh, content realm. So, uh, or playlists. So when people like go, Hey, I want to learn, uh, you know, I want to learn how to, uh, optimize meta titles,

right? So like, okay, here's on page SEO, here's all the things you need to do. Here's the order. So we're worried we're, we're working on something like that. Um, to, to answer this question here. Um, yeah, I would AB test it, but if you, uh, add, uh, the keyword twice into the meta description, uh, you'll get, um, you'll get more juice out of it. So that's my answer. I'm glad you noticed that. I got that posted up on the screen. I'll leave it for, uh, for a little bit. Um, yeah. So follow the flow chart, design the content with a course, with a course in mind, um, so that you can ultimately, you know, turn around and monetize that create alternative traffic and monetization sources. So, uh, she never advises limiting yourself to YouTube. Um, it's very, it's never advisable. This is what she said. It's never advisable to put all your eggs in one basket, uh, and rely on third party platforms, take full ownership of your own content and your own community. And Matt and I talked about this really briefly, briefly before the podcast, there is a school of thought that says, instead of never put all your eggs in one basket, it says always put your eggs in one basket and take great care of their basket. I think the point that Anne is making in this case is if all your eggs are in the YouTube basket, like you can only take care of the YouTube basket so much at some point it's outside of your control. Uh, and so make sure that you control your content. The last thing you'd want to do is like the only way people can access your content is on YouTube. Make sure you have it on your own website, um, and any other platforms that make sense. I mean, I think, I think two things. One is, um, the analogy that I like is like, it's better to own than rent, right? Um, because you're renting on a, on a third party platform.

You know, what I recommend is, you know, post it on somewhere that, that you host it, that you get the original credit for it. Um, and then you can, you can modify it actually YouTube, a different video on YouTube is about three seconds. So you could put like black on the beginning or the end of it. It's actually a different video. Um, you know, in Google's eyes, but, but you want to, um, even like blogs or like people ask me, Hey, I want to write on LinkedIn, but I wrote this blog. How should I do it? Um, I think how you should do it is you, you write the article, you post it on your site, then you write kind of an abstract or a summary, post that on LinkedIn and then link to your blog because ultimately you, you want, um, it to be kind of a funnel to properties that you own and manage because you have more control. And I think that that's what she's really talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's not just the case that, Oh, you know, uh, don't put your eggs in one basket means I should have multiple companies. In that case, if you control the basket, put them in one basket and just, just watch the basket really closely. Like I'm a big fan of that. Just putting them all over the place. You don't know how you're going to lose them. You know, uh, what's the solution? You're all, make sure you own the video content you are creating. So make sure you have one place where you can take advantage of it. And specifically, she says on your website, if you create educational videos of any kind, consider packaging or selling them, uh, on a content tool. She mentions you screen.tv. I've never used that. Never seen that. It's just probably, she, she talked about, uh, say that again. I like teachable like as a platform, but said that you've recently made some moves that limited your rights as a creator and what kind

of stuff you own. Um, like they like standardize the pricing so you can't. I'm going to make a Udemy video, Chris. I'm going to make a Udemy course of deciding. What? Maybe it needs to be a new screen done course. $4. One dollar. I just want to force people to like get out the credit card. Yeah. Yep. That's an important, important process for sure. All right. So finally, three ways to up your video marketing game. Finally is diversify, diversify, diversify. It feels like what's the most important real estate is location, location, location. Uh, you cannot really come up with any, with one single format that will work for every audience. So maybe you need to do like bite-sized pieces. Maybe it needs to be really long explainer video. Um, maybe you need different format. That's, you know, going on Instagram TV, like understand where you can push these videos out and what differences they have in terms of format, uh, to go on each of those individual platforms, keeping your long-term goals in mind, try to come up with different tactics for achieving those goals. So here's kind of the list that she came up with. Brainstorm viral video roundups to try and pick up some solid engagement. This is especially in powerful and Facebook invite prominent YouTubers to get interviewed on your channel, right? So that helps you take advantage of their audience. It's certainly a strategy that's out there working on, uh, on podcasts. Now, um, put together video reviews and tutorials to be able to control more search results. So this is interesting. We could actually, and we haven't done this, we could do video reviews of SEM rush. One of the more popular SEO tools out there of, of whatever PPC samurai, all these tools that are out there, we can actually write reviews about them, uh, and that can give credibility and really create that, um, uh, that marketing niche, uh, create solid explainer videos. We've got that create beautiful video slideshows of your holiday special offers, uh, live stream

your company events. Um, I don't know about that. Um, and use Instagram and Snapchat to create and market stories. Uh, likewise, experiment with link background music topics, all of that good stuff that I think was a really good rundown of diversify, diversify, diversify. So, so we're, we're doing a lot of videos, right? We're, we're doing a lot of videos now. Um, we've won some awards for some of our videos. Um, really, I think it's a really important component of SEO now, right? Um, and, and also conversion optimization videos, you know, highest converting, uh, medium there is, um, we do tutorial videos, FAQ videos, location. We'll take your blog and make it a video and we can get voiceover and it's pretty cool. Um, put in some stock art, stock videos, commercials about us are really popular. Testimonials are super popular portfolio videos, um, product videos. Uh, we've done all those. Um, we have a really good portfolio, UWR digital, go to the portfolio. You can check them out. Um, we're in the process of, uh, porting some of that stuff over, uh, because we have it on Wistia, right? And so, um, we need to add it to the website, but, um, you know, we've done all kinds of different videos. We just did a big, uh, power plant, not a power plant, but like a industrial plant. We've got some great, uh, B roll video. Um, so I think, uh, we're doing some 3d videos. We're using a Matterport to do some like 3d modeling and stuff like that. It's super cool stuff. I mean, videos can tell a story better than, than anything else. And I think it's a really important component. Um, even video searches are number one search, uh, kind of like SEO or I forget the data point on that, but you know, if you're not doing videos, you've gone, you know, from our last podcast too, look, you got everything you need right here. Oh, nice, Chris. Nice job. Yeah. Uh-huh. That's the AMA awards that we won and

tell you what they say, but all I'm looking at is a green screen. That's a pretty cool, pretty cool picture. There you go. Yeah. Um, I, I was busy getting the picture. So did, did you wrap up? I mean, I just think that people need to know how important videos are. And you should try to incorporate that. And it's like a explainer video, you know, things about your products, telling your company story. People want to know who they're doing business with. Um, I think that that's super important getting third party testimonials. Right. Like I think even in like Amazon, like the video ads, like of the products have so much more visibility and exposure. Um, I mean, you know, all, like all roads lead to video. In my opinion, no, I, I think that's true. Very true. All right. Well, that wraps up, um, three ways to up your video marketing game by Anne Smarty, patiff to you, Anne Smarty. Um, if you like this podcast, we'd ask you to do one simple three thing, and that's tell three people about the podcast, whether, uh, they're SEOers, whether they're, um, um, CMO. Yeah. Say that again. People at a company that need marketing. Yeah. Marketing officers. Um, this is a great resource for them. And, uh, and we're happy to have conversations with them if they're, if they want some, uh, kind of really high level SEO guidance. Uh, if you're interested in growing your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, Google and YouTube, call, call EWR digital for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. Uh, we were filmed live in Houston. You can get transcript, video, audio, usually upon request, just go to bestseopodcast.com, uh, for the base information. And if you go, I don't know, let me see if this is working. Uh, digital.com forward slash G plus. Did that work? I don't think I did that one. No, we need to get that. We need to get that up. Oh, it did work. Okay.

If you go to, uh, EWR digital.com forward slash G plus, and that's the symbol plus, don't worry about how old the link is. Uh, just go there. It'll pop up. Uh, if you enjoyed this podcast, please do us a small favor, uh, and leave us a review. Hopefully you'll make that review a lot harder to do over zoom. I think, I think, uh, or even stream yard, whatever platform you're on, it's a lot harder to do. Um, so that wraps up this podcast. Anything else from your side, Matt? Uh, be safe in the hurricane for all of you, uh, here locally. So we're getting ready for that. I'm working in the office cause I might not be in the office this week for a couple of days. So, so a, uh, guy walks into a bar or Corona and two hurricanes. The bartender says that'll be 2020. Boom. Yeah. 2020. All right. No next podcast. My name is Chris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye. Bye for now. Bye. Bye. Bye.