Growth Marketing Video Strategy
I caught up with Faris Sheikh before the COVID-19 pandemic came to America. We talked about marketing video content strategy, webinars, and how companies can supercharge their video production ROI. This interview was updated last minute to drive home the point that video is becoming even more pervasive in our daily lives now that social distancing is becoming the new normal.
Faris is a brilliant thinker. This interview captures some of his foundational views on marketing video strategy and how to implement impactful changes in your organization today.
Interview Transcript
Q: What is video marketing strategy and why do companies need it?
A: The unique thing with video is that most management is satisfied and happy with a video once they see the final cut. It’s something they can quickly consume, and if it boosts their and their company’s ego enough, they’ll smile and tell some dev to slap it onto the site. But that’s about the end of the game plan with the video. No one’s really looking at anything afterward, and if they do, it’s usually the simple vanity metric of “views”. Most companies forget about the hundreds and thousands of people who are consuming video content after it goes online. That’s where the opportunity lies.
With any kind of strategy, you must anticipate what to do weeks and months in advance in order to reach your ultimate goal. After your video is online, you have so many opportunities to get to that goal. You can:
setup smart CTAs to other videos and offers
evaluate the engagement metrics of your video
plan for more engaging video content based on actual data
enrich the viewing experience
score and nurture leads based on what they consume, and so much more.
A video marketing strategy lets you fully plan out what to do weeks and months after your video(s) goes online so that you can extract the most ROI out of them.
Q: What’s a key indicator that a company is at the right stage to invest in upping their video game?
A: I’ve always advocated for people to start thinking about video strategy the moment they record their first video. As the years go by, when it’s 2021, 2022, 2023, the barrier in producing video is only gonna keep dropping. Almost anyone in America working at a company can start production today from their pocket; the iPhone can do wonders. Selena Gomez shot her latest music video “Lose You To Love Me” on an iPhone 11. The moment you have 1 video ready, you should be thinking about adding CTAs (“call to actions”) and monitoring the video’s engagement.
Q: How did your education and experience drive you into this focus on video and how to use it for effective marketing?
A: That’s a great question. There’s definitely a repeated set of circumstances in my childhood that led me to focus on webinars and video marketing today. I have always been fascinated by the camera and filming growing up. I remember taking my parent’s silver camcorder with a slot for a mini DVD and shooting silly videos all over the house.
In the 6th grade, I entered F.A. Day Middle school in Newton. That’s when everything changed. I learned about our school’s morning video program that would broadcast daily in homerooms and the in-house video studio that powered it all. Immediately, I joined our weekly after-school program and ended up spending my evenings in that video studio learning flash animation, video editing, and more.
By the time I was 15, I started posting iPod Touch software tutorials online. Within a year I had a home-made green-screen studio in my basement. A year later, my YouTube channel was bringing in over a million views.
After I graduated college, I took my first job in sales at Wistia, the largest video hosting and marketing platform for businesses in the world. I talked to hundreds of marketing associates, managers, and directors and learned about the variety of needs they had in hosting video for their businesses. I spent almost two years there helping businesses use Wistia for lead generation, stats, and more.
After leaving Wistia, I joined Formlabs to focus on long-form video marketing to generate new leads and influence our direct sales funnel. I currently run their webinar program and have produced over 90+ live webinars. On the side, I’m consulting other companies on how to launch webinar programs to impact their bottom line. I love teaching others how to create effective webinars and to use them for growth marketing.
These experiences have allowed me to look at other companies’ existing videos, understand there’s no real “owner” for getting value out of them. Throughout my entire life I’ve had a love for video, entrepreneurship, and marketing. I’m grateful to have opportunities to learn how to produce, edit, and scale videos to get massive viewership.
Q: Which funnel stages do most companies align their video strategy with? Should they look to others, too? Where does it all typically go wrong?
A: Most companies tend to start their investment in video production at the bottom of the funnel. This is generally the right move. It’s usually a three-minute product explainer video or a testimonial/case study video. Companies should definitely focus their efforts on case study videos because no form of content is better at capturing emotion than video is. Video practically exists to capture a good narrative and the emotion that comes with it. Definitely utilize that when you can, because product demos don’t often have that much pathos to them.
A note about testimonials: as the internet has evolved, so has insincere content. It’s common for people to not trust a set of written reviews. There’s a whole industry that has evolved to serve vendors who want to purchase fake reviews. But with video, you’re offering a face to your review. It’s human. It offers credibility. The subject of the video has her reputation on the line. Creating testimonial and case study videos really offer a sense of trust to your buyer, so it’s a great place to start.
After the first video, marketers should move backward up the funnel for their next set of videos. After the “Electric Scooter Demo”, create the video comparison on “Bikes vs Hoverboards vs E-Scooters”. After that, go even more top of the funnel, film the video on “Renewable Energy: The Future of Transportation”. What this enables you to do is strategically add CTAs every time a new video asset is published. When the Renewable Energy video is done, you can point people to the comparison. When the video comparison is ready, you can point people to the demo at the end. Presto! You’ve created a clean-cut video marketing funnel with thoughtful CTAs.
People shouldn’t just stop at the standard types of B2B video content that exists. They should look at people pushing the envelope in the industry. They should look into creating webinars (long-form and short-form), episodic TV-style shows, documentaries, Superbowl-like commercials, 30-second video ads, tik tok videos, etc. There’s so much to explore and invest in.
Q: Within the field of video content, it seems like you’ve really carved a niche in webinars. How should companies create a framework for a webinar strategy?
A: Webinars are a powerful asset in a company’s video marketing strategy. For many companies, webinars are one of the top channels for lead generation. Why? Because they’re really good at establishing trust. There’s a sense of a raw and human element to them that you can’t really polish up like you can in a blog post.
In terms of strategizing webinar content I suggest following the same model for strategizing short-form video content; work backward from the demo. Keep in mind, there are some unique types of webinars you can choose from.
I categorize webinar content in 3 buckets:
Standard (speakers are only internal employees)
Partnerships
User-driven
Choosing which type really depends on the most pressing KPI you have. If it’s “net new leads,” spending time to develop a webinar with a partner could probably be the most cost-effective investment out of your entire marketing mix for next month.
Implementing webinars successfully takes some thought and a solid process. As a rule of thumb, for live webinars I follow a 4-step process:
Promotion
Live execution
Post-production
Q: How do you see video evolving? I imagine your time at Wistia gave you a lot of insights into where that world is headed.
A: Yeah, being there definitely helped. While at Wistia, I was fortunate enough to be on the founding team of their product - Soapbox - one of the only webcam & screen recording software apps that actually highlights the speaker. Back then, it was clear that the current challenge in the world of video is to make video production more accessible. Today, that’s still the case, but I think the future really lies in technology that will lower the friction in making high-quality videos.
A great example of a company doing this is Tik Tok. I’m absolutely fascinated with the platform. From 13 to 40-year olds, it teaches people the importance of sound in a video and how it plays a role in editing. The app makes it really damn easy for users to time their edits, add effects, add supers (“text overlays”), and more. Last year, I used to dismiss the app as some silly teenager fad. Today, I realize Tik Tok and companies like it, are the future.
Another future trend I’m observing is TV show-style content, companies like Wistia refer to this as “binge-worthy content”. The general idea is that business video will be competing with people’s allotted time for Netflix, Hulu, and more.
Some great examples for this are Invision’s “Design Disruptors” documentary, Additive Manufacturing’s “The Cool Parts Show”, and a series of documentaries by Mailchimp Presents that focus on the stories of small businesses.
Q: In today’s climate, with most people working from home due to COVID-19, how is video going to impact businesses?
This is a weird phase in our lives where we’re all forced to immediately lose the best and most effective method for communication: face-to-face conversations. Day by day people are realizing how necessary that is in life. People who once never showed their camera or worked remotely, are now having to use technology to fill that need for face-to-face communication.
Now, people are adopting video conferencing tools like Zoom for multiple hours a day. Ultimately, this is lowering the barrier for people to be comfortable on camera.
Events teams are going fully digital now and switching to digital platforms for webinars. Scores of people are adopting online video as a medium to connect. As marketers, a silver lining in this crisis is that this will make us all better at using video to educate our buyers and communicate amongst one another.
After this passes by, we’ll all be more comfortable using our own video to communicate to the human on the other side of the screen.