Justin Briggs will be speaking on Video at the Engage Conference, which will take place March 9, 2017 in Portland. For more information, or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
Originally from Nashville, I moved to the PNW about 6 years ago and fell in love with it. I run a small marketing consulting company in Portland, OR that works with a small number of clients, typically very large, national ecommerce sites. Our work is varied based on the experience of each consultant, but we do a lot of technical SEO, content, web analytics, and video work. I’ve been doing digital marketing work for almost 9 years, but my background is in programming and engineering, so I’ve always had a technical approach that helps us work well with in-house technology teams.
Outside of marketing, I love films. After establishing Briggsby, I decided to go back to school to get a degree in film. Since then, we’ve been expanding our video line of business, doing both production and video marketing work. I’ve also had a chance to work on a few independent narrative productions in the last year.
2) With my PPC clients, I’ve found video to be an excellent remarketing tool but a zero for customer acquisition. What are your thoughts on this?
My POV of this is limited because we don’t do paid marketing work. Within organic channels, we’ve seen excellent results using video for engagement. We typically work on video for content marketing (lot of “how to” and “learn” content) or social media. While we don’t often report on paid channels, video content has been a strong performer in organic when it supports top-of-funnel content and keywords. Due to the nature of this search traffic, it doesn’t covert as well as more bottom-of-funnel commercial content, but has a lot of strong indications associated with engagement, brand, share of wallet, and assists.
There are some areas where I think video can be very powerful at acquiring customers. Those include areas like reviews, longer purchase cycles, and products that require subject matter expertise.
3) What are the hallmarks of a top notch 15/30 second marketing video?
The video should be clear on its goals. A 30 second commercial ad, a 30 second social media video, a 30 second instructional video, and a 30 second product video have dramatically different goals. Each of these should be shot and cut to meet those goals. One video’s goal might be recall, so repetition is key, while another might want to focus on a customer need state. This might be different from social media content that is entirely focused on a topic over the brand or product marketing.
That said, I think there are a few best practices:
Upfront hook and action. Get it in quick.
Have amazing sound quality.
Make it “work” without the sound turned on, for those on social platforms or mobile phones where audio isn’t on by default. This doesn???t always require titles or overlay text. Watch old silent films to see how much story can be told with action and expressions.
Jump cuts. Jump cuts. Jump cuts. Make it snappy. YouTube has trained us to follow really fast cutting videos.
Cut out pauses in dialogue / audio. Cut out pauses when a person isn’t speaking. This works with the above point.
Consider a CTA. This can just be the video’s “point” or the brand. What do you want the viewer to know or do? Is it clear?
Make custom thumbnails when you can. Use best practices on this, exploring overlay text, saturation, and contrast to improve CTR.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.