Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love video not only because it's so versatile and engaging, but moreover from a business perspective it can be an incredibly effective marketing tool. My name is Renee Teeley and I'm the Chief Evangelist at Powtoon. In today's course is about video marketing. Video is exploding right now. You can find it on almost all social media platforms. So companies are now finding that video is really a great way to connect with your audience. The challenge is that many marketers are attempting to dive into video, but without a strategic plan in place, their video falls flat. So in this course, we're going to walk through the process of actually creating your video strategy, including defining your target audience, setting your business goals, and then picking the right video based on your audience and business goals. Then will pull that all together by scripting and creating a 60-90 second explainer video. So I hope you are able to walk away from this course with an understanding of how to build a strategy around your video marketing. So it's not just about creating the video, but it's also about understanding how you're going to use that video to connect with the right audience and achieve your business goals. I created this course with marketing professionals and entrepreneurs mind. However, the information is relevant for companies of all sizes, especially for just getting started with video. If you're following along with the class project, I'd love you to share your video strategy or your final video in the project gallery. I'm so excited that you've joined this class. Let's make it awesome.
2. What is Video Marketing?: So as part of this course, we're walking through the step-by-step process of creating a video strategy, and then we're also going to go through the process of scripting and creating a 60 to 90 seconds explainer video. I'm going to walk through this process using Powtoon and actually create a strategy and a video for Powtoon so you can see a real-world example of what this looks like. If you'd like to follow along, I encourage you to create a video and a strategy for your business. Under the class resources, there's actually a worksheet that you can follow along as you're creating the strategy and video for your business. But before we dive in and talk about how to create a video marketing strategy, I want to talk a little bit about what video marketing is and some of the benefits. Video marketing is the practice of using video as part of your marketing. So this can take a variety of different forms, and it can be including video in email marketing or content marketing. You've probably seen video that's emailed to you or you've seen video that's through your Instagram or a video about accompany on Facebook. All of that is video marketing. So often when people talk about video marketing, really what they mean is a YouTube strategy. YouTube is definitely worth considering as part of your video marketing strategy, it's just one channel for consideration. Why use video? Well, because video marketing can be one of those powerful ways to drive marketing results for almost all types of companies. So according to a study done by the Aberdeen Group, the human brain is shown to process video 60,000 times faster than text. Now, even if it's just a fraction of that, that is an incredible stat. So companies that use video often see an increase in organic traffic. So it means that there's all sorts of SEO benefits of video, and people are finding out about your company through video. Then once they get to your website, they're spending more time on your website because they're watching videos and interacting with other parts of your website. Then there's also an increase in conversion rates. So you're getting more people to sign up for a newsletter or to actually convert from a lead into a paying customer. It's also one of the best ways to build trust with your audience, especially if you have someone on camera. So this helps to build the know, like, and trust factor of your company. Most people are more open to buying something from someone or a company that they know, like, and trust. So think about it. How open would you be to buying something from a person or a company that you don't know, that you've never heard of before? If you do know them, how open would you be to buying something from them if you don't like them or you don't trust them? So just recently, I had a CEO of a very large company come up to me at a conference and tell me that he feels like he knows me because he's watched so many of my videos. As a marketer, that's a great thing to hear. Companies of all sizes and types can use video marketing. So maybe you're a marketer at a startup company and you're looking for ways to communicate how a product works, or maybe you work at a large enterprise company and you want to use customer testimonials in order to win new clients. You can even be a local restaurant owner and you're looking for ways to use video to show how your restaurant is different than other restaurants in the area, or maybe you're a freelancer, and you're looking to use video to showcase your past projects in order to win new clients. So there's really no limit in terms of the type of company or size of company when it comes to using video marketing. So as we've talked about, video can be a powerful communication tool to connect with your audience. But it's also something that you can incorporate into your existing marketing. So if there's things that you're doing today that are working really well, you can also look for ways to make it even better by including video as part of that marketing. So now that you understand what video marketing is and some of the benefits, next up, we're going to actually develop a clear strategy so that you can be as effective as possible with your video.
3. Know Your Audience: So it's important to have a clear strategy in place before you jump into your video production. Without a strategic plan, you could be wasting time and money on a video that does very little for your business. So you can think about your goals as the destination, your strategy as your map, and your video as your vehicle to get you there. So before you start your video production, think about what are the business goals that you're trying to achieve? Who's the audience that you're trying to reach? What is the next step that you want your audience to take after they watch your video? That'll help inform your video production as well as your video strategy. Everything starts with knowing your audience. So just like with the rest of your marketing, it's important to have a clear target audience for your business. Understanding who you're trying to reach will help you tremendously as you build out your plan to reach them. So you should clearly define who is your target customer? What is their pain point? Another way to think about a pain point is, what is your customer's goal? So you have a goal with your video, but your customer has a goal as well. So what is it that they're trying to achieve? How can you help solve that pain point or help them achieve their business goals? Then lastly, how are you different? So typically, there's a lot of companies that are trying to do a similar thing or solve similar pain points. How are you different from those companies in a way that benefits your audience? So to illustrate this, we will walk through the Powtoon example and answer each of these questions for our target audience. So here, we're going to define our target audience. Where do they live? What type of company that they work for? What's their job title? Here, with this video, we're going to target founders of an early stage tech company in the US and they have a new product and a very small marketing budget. So it's important to understand that you might be targeting different customers with your business, but for your video, pick one type of customer and that way, the video is specific to them and will help them with their specific pain points. So what's the pain point that you're trying to address for your target audience? For our video, customers are looking at ways that can promote their new product and they want to use video marketing. But they're not video professionals, they don't have in-house video resource, and they don't have a large budget. Plus, they don't have a lot of time to waste since they need new customers right now. So how can we help solve those pain points? Well, for our target customer, which in this case is an entrepreneur with a new product and they're looking to use video marketing but they don't have a large budget, well, Powtoon can help them because it's a video creation platform that they can use to create their own marketing videos. How are you different from your competitors in a way that benefits your target audience? Well, Powtoon has an easy to use interface. So it doesn't have a steep learning curve. There is a large library of stock videos, images, music, and tools for recording voice-overs, and the platform is built to be easy enough for anyone to use, so you don't have to be a video professional to create a professional looking video. So now that we've gone through this process for Powtoon, I encourage you to do this for your own business. So think about how can you help your target customers? How are you different than other competitors out there? So this worksheet is really for you to figure out your own video strategy and for you to use it internally. So don't worry about it sounding perfect. We're not actually scripting the video here. We'll do that at a later point. But just make sure that you clearly understand who you're trying to reach and how you're able to help them through your business.
4. Define Your Goals: So the next step is to define your business goals. So we've already determined who you're trying to reach with the video. Now, we need to figure out what you're trying to actually achieve for your business with a video. So people will often try to use one video to do everything. They want to take someone from not knowing who you are, not knowing your company all the way to making a purchase. But really it's a process. So when you're thinking about your video, I want you to pick a specific goal that helps to move your audience through the buyer's journey. So what is the buyer's journey? Well, there are three main stages that a buyer goes through leading up to a purchase. So the first stage is awareness. So they're aware of some problem or need that they have. The next stage is consideration. So they're considering different options to help solve that problem. The last stage is decision. So they're deciding on a product or service to buy to help solve that problem. So awareness, consideration, and decision. So you can think of the buyer's journey and the marketing process as two sides of the same coin. So as your target customer is going through the buyer's journey, in parallel, you're going through a marketing process by building awareness, generating leads, and then converting those leads into paying customers. So for example, maybe someone first sees an ad about your company. That ad leads them to your website. On your website, you can have a video that's in the consideration stage and is talking more about your company. Maybe from that video, you get them to sign up for a trial of your product. Then after they sign up for a trial of your product, you can send them a video or other type of marketing that helps them really understand how other companies have used your product to help them achieve some results. So that will help them decide, "Yes, this is the product that I want. This is something that could help me." Then they turn from a lead into a paying customer. So your goal for each video should be targeted towards one main stage of the buyer's journey and then help move them to the next stage. So I'll give you some examples of business goals for each stage of the buyer's journey. In a later video, I'll walk through some specific examples of types of videos that you can use to achieve your business goals. But here, we're just trying to define the main business goals of the video. So what's the purpose of the video? So let's start with the awareness stage. So in the awareness stage, you're typically trying to reach people who maybe have never heard of your company, or they don't know that much about your company. But they have a problem that you can help solve. So this stage is really used to get your brand in front of your target audience so they know that your company exists, and you can start to build a relationship with that. So the goals here can be pretty high level, and here are a few examples. So generate more traffic to your website, build awareness through targeted video views, get new YouTube subscribers or subscribers on other social media platforms, or to build credibility in your industry. It really can be as simple as building awareness of your brand. So most advertising that you see is part of a brand awareness campaign, but other forms of video can also be part of brand awareness. So for example, the show that I host that Make It Awesome series by Powtoon is an example of a brand awareness video series. So the goal of our videos is to get in front of marketers and entrepreneurs so they're introduced to the Powtoon brand and to build credibility. So it's okay to have multiple goals, but pick one main stage of the buyer's journey and optimize your video so that you're able to meet your main goals. So the next stage is the consideration stage. So if you're targeting someone in the consideration stage, here they're typically researching different options to help solve a problem that they have. So typically in the consideration stage, it's really about generating leads for your business. So that means that someone is showing interest in your business. So the goal could be to increase product trial sign-ups. So it means that someone is signing up for a trial of your product to test it out and see if it's going to help solve their problem. Your goal could be to grow your list of email subscribers. So this means that you can email them and keep in contact with them and build a relationship with that, or your goal could be to get people to register for a webinar. Then you can use the webinar as content for the next phase of the buyer's journey which is the decision stage. So if you're targeting someone in the decision stage, they already know who you are, they've done a little bit of research about the different options, and now they're ready to pick an option and make a purchase. Your job is to get them to pick your company, your product, or service and get them to buy from you. So in the decision phase, usually your goal is around getting new customers or selling a new product with existing customers. So the goal is really to make a sale. So now that we've walked through the buyer's journey, and you understand what that is and how to move buyers through that process, it's time to actually define our business goals. So for the Powtoon example, our primary goal for the video is going to be the consideration stage and getting people to sign up for a trial of Powtoon. So even in this stage, you want to start thinking about what does success look like for this video, and so if our goal is to get people to sign up for a trial of Powtoon, then the metric that we care about is really the number of people that have signed up for a trial of Powtoon. So we care a lot less about just views of the video, and really we care about how many people actually sign up for a trial after they watched the video. It's important to figure that out before you do your production and publish it so that you can put the right things in place to actually measure the impact of the video.
5. Plan for Distribution: So it's helpful to pick your distribution channels in advance before you actually produce your content. So the channels that you pick could impact the story and the message that you want to tell in your video. By distribution channels, I really mean where are you going to publish your content and how are you going to share it with the world. So this can be social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, but it can also be sharing the video on your website, linking to it in an e-mail, or embedding it on a blog post. So when deciding on which platforms and channels that you're going to use to share your video, don't over complicate it. Go where your audience is already. So if you have a large following on Twitter, but only a handful of people following you on Instagram, it might be easier to reach a broader audience using Twitter. So also keep in mind how people use the platform in different demographics on each platform. So for example, if you're looking to reach an older professional audience, Snapchat might not be the best platform and LinkedIn might be a better option. So picking your distribution channels upfront will also help you determine if you need different versions of the video. So I'm not going to go deep into what works well on each of the social media platforms because social media marketing could be, of course, all on its own. But there are some key things to think about when you're figuring out what channels that you're using for your video and changes that you might need to make. So for example, videos that you upload directly to LinkedIn will start to automatically play with the sound off as people are scrolling through their feed. So for LinkedIn, it's a good idea to include captions as part of your video. So for you to make it awesome show, we create two versions of the video: One for YouTube and then another for LinkedIn which actually includes captions for the video. So when the video auto plays in the feed, people have some contexts to what the video is about. So we also make the videos square so that it stands out on the LinkedIn feed and we include a branded background that includes the Powtoon YouTube URL so that we can direct people to YouTube since getting new YouTube subscribers is part of the goal for the video. So we use the square version of the video on Facebook as well. But in the text, we use more casual and playful tone so that it appeals a little bit more into our Facebook audience. So it's okay to re-purpose your video, but think about ways to repackage it so that it fits the platform and your audiences viewing habits. So with our Powtoon video, I'm picking two different places as the main distribution channels. So I'm going to publish this video on YouTube and then I'm also going to publish the video on the Powtoon website. In the video that I'm publishing on YouTube, the main call to action is going to be to visit our website. So here we're taking someone from YouTube and directing them to our website. Now when we have the video on our Powtoon website, we're going to change the call to action. So the next step that we want someone to take is to actually sign up to a trial. The reason that we're not just listing the Powtoon website is that they're already on the Powtoon website and watching the video. So again, when you're thinking about your distribution channels, think back to your target audience and the goal of your video. So here, I decided to pick YouTube and Powtoon's website as the places that I want to show this video because on YouTube, we have 48,000 subscribers and not all of those subscribers are Powtoon customers. Now on Powtoon website, when people land there, it's also important that they understand how we can help them and deliver some results for their business. So when you're picking these distribution channels, you can start thinking about what are the small changes or big changes that you need to make to your video so they fit with the platform. So the changes that you make to your video could be something like changing the aspect ratio. So instead of being a horizontal video, it's a square video. But it could be something as simple as just changing a URL on the video or even a verbal call to action in the video. So I'd like to encourage you to do this for your own business. Think about the different distribution channels and different social platforms available that you can use to actually share your video. If you have a social platform where you already have a large following, that's a great place to start. Also if you have a social network where you don't have a lot of followers, but you want to start to build them up and it's going to be more of a priority for you, you might want to consider including that as part of your strategy as well. So now we have defined our target audience, we know who we're trying to reach with a video. We've defined our business goals. So we know the purpose of the video and the next step is to actually choose the type of video that we want to create.
6. Plan Your Video: So when you're picking the type of video to create, think back to your target audience and your goals, and then pick the type of video that's going to help you best achieve those goals. So there's a lot of different types of videos and here are few examples. Influencer interviews such as Make It Awesome show, explain our videos to easily provide an overview of a product, service, or a company. Customer testimonials to showcase how other companies have used your product and their results. How to videos, to walk through a step-by-step process of how to do something specific with your product. Event videos, to promote an upcoming conference or workshop, or a recap event video to recap the learning lessons from the event. So if you're targeting a customer in the awareness stage, you want to optimize for discoverability. What that means is, really think about what are your customers searching for that's related to your company. So remember in this stage you're trying to reach an audience that may not even know that your company even exists, so they're not searching for information specific to your company or product. So for example with the Make It Awesome show, we talk about how to get more video views or how to create attention-grabbing thumbnail images. This is a way for us to reach people who aren't searching specifically on how-to-do something with Powtoon, and this is a way for us to introduce marketers and entrepreneurs to the Powtoon brand and build credibility. Some types of videos that were well for the consideration stage are how-to-videos, product explainer videos, webinars, or webinar replay videos. So a great tip of video to use in the consideration stage is a product explainer video, since it provides an overview of your product and how your product helps to solve your customer's pain point. This is also the type of video that I've chosen for a class project. This fits in with the consideration stage, it fits our goals and our target audience for the video so it's a good type of video to use. So in our explainer video, we're talking to our target audience and we're describing how our product can help solve their pain point, and then we're inviting them to sign up for a trial so they can test out the product and see for themselves. So if you're targeting people in the decision stage, is people who are ready to buy and they need to pick a company. Some types of videos that worked well in the decision stage, are FAQ videos, so frequently asked questions, customer testimonials, a sales offer, or even a company culture video. So people have already gone through the awareness stage, they know who you are, they've gone through the consideration phase and now they're ready to buy. So this is the time to ask for direct sale. So for the class project, I picked an explainer video. So this is one type of video that works very well as an entry point into video marketing. It's pretty versatile and this is why I chose it for Powtoon. Now you might want to pick an explainer video for your business as well but think back to your audience and your business goals and then you can pick the type of video that works best for your business. So now that we've picked the type of video that you're going to create, there's different ways to visualize that and there are three main styles. So the three main styles are screencasting, so recording your screen, live action, there's usually someone on camera, or an animation, you can also think of that as motion graphics. So screencasting is mainly used when you want to show the step-by-step process of how to do something from a computer or an application. So it's a recording of your screen. Screencasting is typically used for how to product tutorials, and this way you can show the step-by-step process that you go to on your computer and this way your audience can follow along. So Quicktime and Screenflow are both tools that you can use to record your computer screen but there's other tools available as well. So live action video, sometimes referred to as on-camera video is often used when you want to show physical products, live environments, or real people such as this class. If you're just getting started, don't over-complicate this. If this is your first video, I recommend using what you have or getting some inexpensive equipment to get started. You can produce a decent video with an iPhone or an Android device that you might already have. If you're going to go that route and use an iPhone or an Android device for your video, I highly recommend that you get an external mic if you need to capture audio as part of your video. One good option for an external mic for your iPhone is the Rode VideoMic. It runs about $80, but there's some cheaper options available as well. There are different lighting sources that you can get, but if you don't have budget to buy an external light, you can also just use natural lighting. The sun is a great source of light. So the third type of production style is animation. So usually when people think of animated videos, they think of the cartoon style animation videos. But really, there are a lot of different types of styles including animated infographics. So doing something like an animated info-graphic is also a great way to re-purpose some of the other content that you might have and turn that into a video. You can also add animation over the top of live action video. So this is the style that I use for the Make It Awesome show. So you're able to blend different styles together to suit the needs of your video. Animation and screencasting were particularly well if you're not comfortable actually being on camera. So when picking the type of video that you want to create, make sure that you revisit your target audience and your business goals so that you are creating something that is effective to actually drive some business results. When you're thinking about the style that you want to use for your video, I recommend picking something that fits with the equipment that you have and where you're comfortable. So with a platform like Powtoon for example, you can start by using the templates that are already pre-built that have animations already ready for you. You can also create your animated video from scratch once you are a little more familiar with the platform. But it's really easy just to get started with some of the templates. So I know we've covered a lot of information. We've already worked through our target audience, our business goals, we've created essentially our video strategy and now it's time to jump in and start making our video.
7. Bonus: Video Equipment: If you're going to do more than one video, you might want to consider investing a little bit in some additional equipment. So just to give you an idea of what a full equipment package might look like, I'll show you what I use for the Make it Awesome show. So currently I'm using the Panasonic GH5S. So I recently switched over from a Canon C100 camera which was a lot more expensive, but didn't quite fit the needs of what I needed for this particular video series. This camera I think new ran about $2100 and the lens was separate. This is a 70 millimeter lens. Then I also bought an adapter that goes on the top so that I can plug in XLR cables directly into the adapter that works with my camera and I'll show you what that looks like as well. So here's the camera. Then the mics that I'm using for my series is the Sennheiser E835, I think it's the AVX series. These are wireless mics, so it has a wireless transmitter and then here's the receiver. Then the receiver goes directly into this little adapter at the top. You can see what that looks like. When I'm doing my videos, I'm recording interviews so I have two people on camera. So I actually use two different microphones. Same style of my expert two microphones. So I have adapters for both of those. Both of those go into the adapter here so that the sound actually goes into the camera and records directly. So I have those and then I also use- this is a travel tripod. I don't remember exactly how much this one cost. I think it was about $80. It's a Manfrotto so it's pretty well-built but it's still light enough to use for travel. So this is what I use as my tripod. Then when I'm doing my videos, I typically use natural light. So I try to find a window that has direct sunlight coming in and use that. But if I don't have access to nice, natural light then I might use something very travel friendly like this which is a Litra. This is the second edition called The LitraTorch 2.0. This was about $80. It's a tiny little light. There's an attachment that goes onto it. This little attachment makes for nice kind of soft lighting. So you don't get hot spots on your face and I'm not going to shine it directly at the camera because it's pretty bright but I'll turn it on so you can kind of see what this looks like. So you kind of see that's the first setting. The second setting and the third setting. So skits very bright and it's amazing for travel. The fourth setting is actually kind of strobe flash. When I'm using something like this, it's got a cold shoe adapter and it just goes directly at the top. So this is a nice kind of travel friendly kit. I think total the kit was under $5,000. I know that that's an investment but when you're thinking about the equipment that you need like I said you can start with what you have. So you can start with an iPhone and then upgrade from there if you're going to do multiple videos but makes sure that you're picking equipment that's going to work well for your particular setup. So again this setup works really well for me for travel. I might use something different if I'm just producing videos in a studio.
8. Script Your Video: So now we've gone through the process of creating our video strategy, let's dive in and start creating our video. In the pre-production process, there are some things that you can do to make your workflow easier when you're actually creating your video. So things such as scripting your video and story-boarding or generating a few ideas that will help you when you actually get to the video production process. So a common question that I hear is, how long should my marketing video be? You should always strive to make your video as short as possible, while still being able to include your message and your critical information. So really, the video should be as long as it actually means to be, but no longer than that. So I've personally published videos that are one-minute long, five minutes long, 10 minutes, even 60- minute videos. So really, your videos can be as long as they need to be, but never make it longer than that. For a video such as an animated explainer video, you can usually get the important information across in 60-90 seconds. Here's a common structure for these types of videos. That's a pretty easy process and almost maps to your video strategy. So let's jump in. So here when you're scripting out your video, you want to go back to your strategy for the video, and this can help guide that process. So here with our problem statement, we're going back to our video strategy, and in this case, for our video, we've defined our target audience as an entrepreneur with a product that they want to tell the world about. So we're going to call that out directly in the problem statement. You have an awesome product that you know have a lot of people, and you want to tell the world about it. The second part of this is talking a little bit more about our solution. So you've heard that video marketing is an incredibly effective way to easily explain a complex solution and reach your potential buyers. Now we're really going to hit home with the challenges for that. So the challenge, is that you're not a video professional and you can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a custom animated explainer video, weeks to get it back from our production company. So the next part of your video script is the solution. So how can you help solve the pin point that you just talked about to help your audience and help them achieve their business goals? So in this case, Powtoon, is a video creation platform that you can use to create your own short engaging videos, without the need for technical or design expertise. The next section in our script is the differentiator. So how are you different from competitors in a way that benefits your target audience? So here, what sets Powtoon apart, is to create an awesome video for your business you can customize one of hundreds of templates or create a video from scratch. You can even import your own footage, such as a person on camera, and import music and voice-overs, or choose from a huge selection of royalty-free HD videos, stock images, animations, characters, fonts with text effects, and music to help set the mood. Powtoon was built to be easy enough for anyone to use. With Powtoon, you don't have to be a video professional to create a professional looking video. Then lastly, we're going to finish off the video with a call to action. So what do you want your audience to do after watching your video? Sign-up for trial of Powtoon and start creating awesome videos today. When you're going through the process of scripting your video, sometimes it's helpful to storyboard it as you work through that process. By story-boarding, it could be actually illustrating what you actually want to include as the visuals, or it can be as simple as just jotting down a few visual key points that you want to make as you're going through the video. So based on the scripting that we did for our problem section, the visual that might fit with us is something along the lines of, a founder of a startup company at their desk thinking about how to promote their product. Notice I said founder at a startup company, because again, we're targeting entrepreneurs in this video, so we want to use visuals that fit with our target audience. For the solution section, we're talking about how your company can help solve the pin point, really the main visual that we need to show is to introduce the Powtoon branding. So this is where you introduce your company branding into the video. So I've gone through each of these sections and just loosely planned out a couple of key visuals that I'll show as I'm creating the video. If you're following along with the class project, this is the time you can actually use the worksheet to go through and script out something that works well for your business. Great. So now we've done the hard work, and it's time to jump into the fun part of the project, and actually create our video.
9. Create Your Video: So we've created our video strategy and now it's time to jump into the fun part and create our video. I'm going to use the Powtoon platform to create our animated explainer video, but you can use whatever tool and production process works well for you and the style of video that you are creating. So now we're in the Powtoon in studio, I've logged into my account. If you want, you can start with a template and edit that template to fit your business needs. In this case, I'm actually just going to start with a blank Powtoon and then build my video using different animated scenes, music, voiceover and things like that. Let's jump in and get started. I am going to click on Blank Powtoon. Great. So now when we're first starting to create our video, we see a couple of different options here, and this basically is just a shortcut to each of these different styles. So when you're looking here, you can see I'm looking for a video that is more modern or do I want a white board style video, more cartoon style, are you doing something that's more of an infographic or real, that's more of where you can actually see some live action video. You can always switch around between these but really it's just a shortcut to give you a new style. So here I'm going to pick the modern style, and now I'm in the studio. Over the left here, you can see these are your slides, you can think of these as each different scenes that you're putting together. This is our main stage and this area here, and then over to the right here you can see a number of different aspects for your video. So for example, we can actually just use scenes that are already created for us. I am going to show you what a few of those look like. There's a lot to choose from here. So if I click into industry, you can see some of the different scenes here and we've got people at an office, we've also got construction workers, at the bottom here we can see there's some medical scenes, and so you can pick a scene that works with the type of video that you're doing or the industry that you're in. So to get started, I'm going to pick this little section here, that looks like someone who is working maybe in a server room. So our video is targeting entrepreneurs. This is a standard style entrepreneur scene, so this actually fits with our video. So here, let's see. We've got some animation that's preloaded in, but we can also change the different elements if they don't fit what we're looking for with this video. So here I have a blonde woman sitting at the desk. I'm going to swap this out for a different character, I want someone that looks just a little bit different here. So I'm going to click swap, and then in the character section here, I can pick a new character that fits exactly in the spot where our existing character is. So let's see. That doesn't fit quite the style that I'm looking for. Let's look in our new collection of characters. So you can see we have a lot of different styles of characters here. Great, you know what, this character actually fits pretty well. So we're going to swap our character, and now we see she's actually typing the wrong direction. So an easy way to fix this, is we have a flip area. So we can flip, and now she actually looks like she's typing in the right direction. So we're going to move this around, we can make it a little bigger if we need just by using these scaling indicators, great. So now we have our scene, we've got our entrepreneur who's typing at a desk, and this is really our opening scene. So this will be our main stage for creating the video. When you're building out your video, you want to make sure that you're following along with your script. So you know what's going to be happening in the video and make sure that you're matching the visuals so that they correspond to your voiceover. So here we're just building the video, we don't have our voiceover created yet, but this helps to set that style. Great. So if you want to just preview and see what the scene looks like just to make sure that it actually fits with your video, you can just play the slide, and then we can see our entrepreneur is busy typing away. Awesome, that's perfect. So in the second scene that we're setting up here, the second slide, we actually want pretty much everything to be the same but we want to change the emotion of the character. So here I'm just going to continue this scene on a new slide. So keep everything the same, it's going to continue. Now, we can go into the scene and our scene looks exactly the same, but we're going to go into the character. So if you click on the character and you see this little icon that looks like someone's running, this is the pose icon. So we want our character, we want our entrepreneur to be thinking about video marketing. There we go. Now they look like they have an idea, that's perfect. So we've continued this scene, but we want to make sure that everything stays on the scene. So down here you can see that there's a timeline for our scene, and if you click on this number here, you can see all of the different elements, all of the different props and characters and the background and everything that's already on our scene. So if we click this, as all together, all of those are selected and we can actually extend this on the timeline, so we're going to extend this all the way to the end of our timeline so that everything stays on the scene, and now we're going to add some new elements here. So our entrepreneur is thinking about video marketing. So let's give them a little light bulb that shows that they've got a brilliant idea. They are thinking about video marketing, and if you want to play the scenes, you'll see what it looks like. Again, we can see our entrepreneur is thinking, they've got a great idea to Video Marketing and now we're going to see how we can help them. So let's move on to some of the other aspects of your video. So once you start creating your scene, you've got some good visuals, you've got a character that fits with the style that you're looking for, you might want to add your voiceover. So there's a couple of different ways that you can actually get voiceover into your video. So one option is to actually record the voiceover using your computer microphone or an external microphone and recording directly through the app. So here we can click on my voiceovers, you can actually click on the top here or you can just click add voiceover. So we're going to record directly in the application. So you've got a couple of different options here. You want to record in the application, just click the record button and then it will use the microphone to record your voiceover. Now, you might already have a voiceover that you've recorded in another application and you can take that file. So if it's a WAV file or an mp3 file, you can upload it directly to the platform here. The other option is that, you can hire a voiceover artist to help narrate your video for you. So if you're uncomfortable actually going through and doing the voiceover yourself, you can easily get a professional to help you out with your video. So a couple of different options there. In this case, I actually have a voiceover that I've already recorded. So I can upload it, but I want to show you what the recording option looks like. So if you want to record your voiceover, just click the record button. See it's a pretty simple process, you can just start recording and then you can start narrating your video. So it's a good idea when you're doing an animated explainer video to use visuals and voiceover, they work together to illustrate what you're talking about. So you're using voiceovers, you're using audio, you're using visuals, and that helps to illustrate your point a little bit more. So now, we've already created a couple of scenes to our video, we've recorded our voiceover and added that to the video. The next thing that I wanted to talk about, is music. So music is a great way to just set the mood for your video. You can find something that's happy in a beat, you can also do something that's daunting or feels like there's some tension. So there's a lot of different ways that you can use music to help spur on motion with your audience. Great. So now we're still in Powtoon in studio and the section for music is in the same area of sound that you'll record your voiceover, but now we're going to add music that's already here. So here you can already see there's top hits, there's happy music, unicorn musics, so have having some fun here, motivation, corporate, and then there's also music that fits specific types of videos. So here there's music that's six seconds long. So you can scroll through this, you can see a bunch of different options. For this video, we want something that's, maybe it's a little motivational. We want to give someone a feeling of inspiration that, yes, they have this amazing product and we're going to give them some tools that they can use to help spread their message. So we want something uplifting. So here I'm just going to play a few different types of music that you can choose from. That's catchy, doesn't quite fit the tone that I'm looking for for this video, but we can play a couple of other songs. We even have something here called failed. Now, I'm probably not going to use this just based on the name, but it is something you can strategically use in your video as well. So you can see we have a bunch of different options that you can choose from here. So I invite you to come in, play with this, and figure out something that works well for your video. The next thing I want to talk about is, there are the different pre-made scenes that we've already seen as we are building our video here, but you can also add your own video. So if you want to upload videos of yourself on camera, you're able to do that within the platform, and then you can also pick from stock footage. So this is all included in the account, its royalty free. You can use any of the stock footage that we have to supplement your videos here and enhance that. So here I'm just going to add a new scene, and then we can pick a couple of different types of videos here. So if you're looking for something that's like cityscape or urban videos, we can look in this selection. So you can see there's lots of different types of videos here. So this way you don't have to record all of your own footage, you can use some pretty amazing imagery as part of your video. So here I'm just going to add a video. You can see what that looks like, and boom, there's our new cityscape video. If you want to see what that looks like, again you can just play the slide and now we can see this is outside of our entrepreneurs office. This is their wonderful amazing view. So I'm having some fun here creating the video. I'm going to continue working through this. I encourage you to create a video that works for your business as well. So this is a good time to explore and see what fits.
10. Bonus: See the Finished Video: So we've just finish the video. Let's dive in and see how it's all coming together. So in our opening scene, we have an entrepreneur that's sitting at the desk and remember our voice over here we're talking about an entrepreneur who has an awesome product. Let's see what that looks like. There's our entrepreneur, hard at work. Great, and in the next scene here, we're showing that they're excited about their product. So we've got some emotion so our entrepreneur is jumping up and down, they want to tell the world about their products. Great. So the next thing here we're talking about one potential solution that they can use to get their product idea into the world and that's video marketing. So here they're thinking about video marketing. They've heard that this is an easy way to explain the complex solution. Brilliant idea. All right. Next scene here, this is really where we drill into the problem. This is the problem that we're trying to address with our customer. So the challenge is that our entrepreneur while they have a great product, they're not a video professional. They can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on an animated custom video and they don't have weeks to wait for production. So now we really get into the solution part of our script. So with the solution, this is really where we're introducing Powtoon. So we have the Powtoon in branding here. So it's the first time they're seeing it as part of our video. So good news, we have a solution for our entrepreneur and it's really round easily creating that video. So the next thing here is really where we're getting into the differentiator. So there's a lot of different companies that do similar things and so we want to talk about why we're different. So here we're showing some of our web images from our website. So you can see that we've got templates and we're encouraging them to create their own short, animated videos. Through this video, we're showing up a couple of the features of the product. So they're able to import footage such as face to camera and they're also able to import music as part of their video. Yes, that's me wearing my favorite Powtoon shirt. All right. So this scene, we're talking a little bit more about some of the other features that you can do with Powtoon. So for example, you can create videos using stock footage, stock images. We've got pre-made animations, different characters that you can use, different font and text effects, also different music that you can choose from. We've got a library of music. Here we're just showing off a couple more additional features to drill this home and then lastly, we're following up with our call to action. So here we want people to make it awesome with Powtoon and we want them to visit our website. So now we're going to watch it with the music and the voice-over and you can see how everything comes together and compliments each other in the video. You have an awesome product that you know will help a lot of people and you want to tell the world about it. You've heard that video marketing is an incredibly effective way to easily explain a complex solution and reach your potential buyers. The challenge, is that you're not a video professional and you can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a custom, animated explainer video or wait weeks to get it back from our production company. Introducing Powtoon. A video creation platform that you can use to create your own short engaging videos without the need for technical or design expertise. To create an awesome video for your business, you can customize one of our hundreds of templates or creative video from scratch. You can even import your own footage such as a person on camera and import music and voiceovers or choose from a huge collection of royalty free HD videos, stock images, animations, characters, fonts and text effects, and music to set the mood. Powtoon is built to be easy enough for anyone to use. With Powtoon, you don't have to be a video professional to create a professional looking video. Sign-up for a trial with Powtoon and start creating awesome videos today.
11. Customize for Distribution: So now I've finished my video, I have a complete video, and I'm ready just to dive in and show you a couple of different ways that you can modify the video if you need different versions of the video for different platforms, or if you want one version of the video for a social platform and one another version of the video with a different call to action for your website. So let's dive in and see how we can make some of those changes very easily within the platform. So now we have our video and here you can see that we've created just a standard horizontal 16 by nine video. But there's also an easy way that you can modify this so it fits for different platforms. So this is our horizontal video and you've got some cues here to see what type of platform this video version might work well for. So here we can see it works well on YouTube and Facebook, we also have another version that works well for Facebook and also Instagram. This type of video works well for LinkedIn as well and that's a squared video. So if you want to take your existing video, is horizontal and create a square version, you just click on this section here and now we can see our scene has changed. So now it's fit to a square video. You can see that some of the components of the video actually are spilling over. So we just want to modify this so that everything is actually within our square scene. So here we can take the desk and we can move this little bit, we can even scale this. So it's just a little bit smaller. Super easy way to get that plant in there too, I'll scale that down a little bit as well, super easy way that you can start creating different versions of your video for all the different platforms. You don't have to do this while you're creating your video, so you're able to go back into the platform and do this at a later date. So for example, if you create your video and then later you find this video is actually performing really well across certain platforms and you want another version of the video to say post on Instagram, you can start modifying your video to fit with that. So here everything that I want that's important in the video, actually fits within this square space. So I'm going to leave that alone. The last thing that I want to point out is, we have a section here for calls to action. So these pre-made scenes make it really easy for you to start putting together your video. So we used a call to action here, and now let's say you don't want people to actually go to your website. So I'm going to actually make this a vertical video or horizontal video again. So we've got horizontal video here and all I want to do to this video is take out this URL. So here I'm posting this video on my website, so I don't need to direct them to my website. So I'm just going to take that out and instead I'm going to say sign up for a trial. So here I'm encouraging people to sign up for a trial of my product instead of going to my website because they're already there. Awesome. So I'm feeling really good about the video. We've gone through the step-by-step process of creating the video using our voice over and visuals, and now it's time to figure out how to share this video with the world.
12. Prepare to Publish: So now we have a marketing video that we're eager to share with the world, but we're not quite ready to publish this yet. We still need to package the video, so that it's enticing enough to get our target audience to click and actually watch the video. So in this section, we're going to walk through best practices of creating thumbnail images, titles and descriptions for a video. The title, thumbnail and description should all work together to communicate the value that your audience will get from watching the video. Give them a reason to click and watch. So the thumbnail image is the image that a viewer will first see when they're looking at your video. It's typically what compels them to click or not to click and watch your video. So different platforms will choose thumbnails differently. For most social platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, the first frame of your video is what's used as your thumbnail image. So it's important to pay attention to the very first frame, so that you're not caught off guard on what are thumbnail images. On YouTube, you can upload a custom thumbnail image. There are some best practices that you can follow for creating custom thumbnail images for your video. So if you have a person in the video, it's a good idea to actually show an image of the person on your thumbnail. You want that person to be big enough, but you can actually show their eyes. There's something about being able to see someone's eyes that helps to build trust. Also with your thumbnail image you want to use contrasting colors. This way your thumbnail image can stand out when you are on YouTube and someone is deciding whether to click and watch your video or click and watch somebody else's video. If you're using texts as part of your thumbnail image, make sure that it's larger text with easy to read on mobile devices. So next we're going to talk about giving your video a title. Some platforms actually won't allow you to specifically put in a title for the video, but platforms such as YouTube allows you to actually define the title of your video. So when people are looking at YouTube they see your thumbnail image, but they'll also see text that it calls out what the video title is. So on platforms like YouTube, a title is especially important. So you can think of your title in your thumbnail image, kind of as the book cover for your video. It's really what is able to communicate the value of the video and get people to click. On most social platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, you're not able to specifically include a title for your video. So in this case you'll want to use texts in the social post to include the title. Regardless if you're going to use a title or just descriptive text, the most important thing is that you clearly communicate the value of the video. A couple of best practices to keep in mind when you're writing titles. So you want to use phrases and keywords that your audience might be searching for. You know this is a great way to let them know what the video is about and then it's actually relevant to them. You also want to communicate the value of the video in a clear and concise way. This is more important than being clever or witty. You really want to let people know what the video is about. Another best practice to keep in mind is that, you might want to lead with the results someone might get after watching the video. For example, with my videos that I created for Powtoon, the result of someone might get is that at the end, they're going to be able to create a video for their business and share that with the world. The last thing I want to mention is the description. Now again, not all platforms allow you a space specifically for a description for the video, so often you'll want to describe the video within the social post. YouTube does allow you to actually create a description specifically for the video. A couple of things to keep in mind again, just like when you're writing the title, you really want to emphasize phrases and keywords that your audience might be searching for and really communicate the value of the video. Label any people that are in the video. So mention who they are, why they're in the video and why your audience should care. So congratulations on going through the full process of creating your video strategy, producing your video. Now it's time for you to actually go share that video with the world. So make sure that you're going back to your video strategy, figuring out where you're going to post that video, share it on social, include it in your email, on blog posts and make sure that you're really getting out there and sharing this video. So next up, we're going to talk about how to actually measure the success of your video.
13. Measure Success: So now that we have shared our video, you've started seeing some of the performance that you've gotten from this video. Now it's time to actually measure the success. So there's a couple of things that we can do to, one, measure the success and, two, optimize our video. So if the video is not performing as well as you might have expected, there's a few things that you can adjust to see if you can actually get the video to perform a little bit better for you. So when you're measuring success, don't just think about vanity metrics like video views. Go back to the business goals that you've set up for your video, and then you can figure out the best way to measure the performance of that video. So for example, if the goal of your video was to get people to sign up for a trial of your product, then the number of people that signed up for a trial of your product matters a lot more than the number of video views. Getting people to sign up for a trial of a product was the goal that we set for the Powtoon video. So that's how we are going to measure the success of our video. I'll give you a couple of examples of different tools and platforms that you can use to measure the success of your video. So Google Analytics, this is a great place to get information about the source of traffic to your website, landing pages, and data from unique tracking codes that you might have set up as part of your video. So for example, if you've posted your video on the homepage of your website, Google Analytics is a great place to check and see the performance of that video. A next tool that you might want to use is a marketing automation system. So if you connect your video player with a marketing automation system like Marketo or HubSpot you can get a wealth of information about your video performance and tie that with your customer information that you already have in Marketo or HubSpot or another marketing automation system that you're using. So this is incredibly helpful when you're trying to figure out your video marketing ROI, so your return on investment. The last source that I want to mention here is video platform metrics. So each video platform and social network offers a unique set of video metrics and insights. So make sure that you understand what's available and use this to help determine the performance of your videos. So for example, if you're using a platform like YouTube, it shows you things like video retention rates, so how long are people watching your videos. So if your video is not doing as well as you expected, there are some things that you can look at and optimize to potentially boost the performance of your video. So here are a few things to review. Does your video deliver on the promise that you said with your title? Do you have an engaging video thumbnail that accurately represents the value and the content of the video? Does your title and thumbnail complement each other with a consistent message? So your video thumbnail and your title really is about communicating the value of your video and setting the expectation with your viewer. So if your thumbnail has an image of a person and then they click and they watch the video and that person never appears on camera, it's actually a little misleading and they might stop watching the video because it's not quite what they expected. Another thing you might want to consider is look at your video retention rates and see where people are dropping off in the video. This isn't available through all platforms, but it is available on certain platforms like YouTube. So look to see where people are dropping off of the video and view what's happening in that video. So is there something that you can edit out of the video that might be causing people to leave? So if your videos isn't performing as well as you thought it should be, then maybe you should go back and just revisit your strategy and make sure that the video actually fits with the goals that you originally set for the video and the audience that you're trying to reach. Lastly, was the video incorporated into your marketing? Also look at is there a way that you can incorporate video with other types of content so they're working together and give your video new life? So when you're thinking about new ways to incorporate your video into your marketing, think about how that can fit with other content that you might already have. So for example, if you have an e-book, you can use the video potentially to get people to download that e-book. So instead of directing them just to your website, you can direct them to a landing page where they can download an e-book. We've covered a lot of information. We've gone through a video strategy creating our video, and sharing that with the world. The process doesn't stop here. There are learning lessons. I'm sure there's a lot of things that you could have done better on this video, same with every other marketer out there. It's always good to just continue refining the process and figuring out what works, do more of that, and figure out what doesn't work and do less of that the next time around.
14. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much. We're at the end of the course now. We've gone through an amazing amount of information. So we've created our video strategy, we've actually produced a video, we've shared it with the world, we've measured our success and we've optimized it, so it is performing the best that it possibly can. That is a huge initiative. So congratulations for coming this far. Now, I hope that you have the confidence to start including video on a regular basis as part of your marketing. So if you've been following along, I'd love for you to actually share your video strategy or your full video in the project gallery. Thank you so much for joining the class. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Until then, remember to make it awesome.
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