HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
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Tips on how to create authentic engagement with branded video content with Gideon Shalwick
- The key when it comes to video content is that a lot of people miss is the match that you have between who you’re talking to and the message that you have, so your message and your market match.
- How do I come up with the topics? One easy shortcut is to ask yourself, what are all the problems that your target audience are experiencing? Problems, frustrations, needs, desires, all those sorts of things.
- I remember how excited I felt because I felt for the first time you didn’t have to be like a movie star or a celebrity or get into a television show to be able to have widespread sort of recognition and sort of influence for your brand.
- But really the best camera you have always is the one that you have with you, right?
- What’s the biggest pain point? Video editing. That’s an easy fix. Use QuickTime it’s a free piece of software and it allows you just trim the front and back out and it takes a few seconds. It’s instant. It’s really easy and quick to do you don’t even need fancy software.
- But it doesn’t matter what you look like. Really what it matters is what you can do for other people and how you can serve them through your message and what you can teach them and help them with.
- Feel the fear and do it anyway.
- They just have a really good SEO strategy where they optimize for the right keywords and then they get all the longterm traffic. And they’re just crushing it at the moment.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Doug: Well welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing, Real Fast. Today’s guest is Gideon Shalwick. He’s a serial entrepreneur who’s been creating online videos and video content for over a decade. I first met Gideon several years ago at a conference called the Tropical Think Tank held in the Philippines and run by Chris and Irv Ducker.
Doug: After a couple of entrepreneurial hiccups, Gideon found his niche in video marketing with his finger on the pulse of social media content marketing trends, Gideon knows the impact of authentic engagement with branded video content. While you’ve learned that 85% of video content is viewed on mobile, he realizes that the importance of high-quality captions for that content.
Doug: So he launched a new company called Splasheo, it’s a video captioning service that’s powered by real people that manually transcribe your video and add personalized captions. Because of the human touch, Splasheo also creates meme-worthy videos using flawless captions to grab users attention and keep them engaged.
Doug: So I’m super excited to reconnect with Gideon today and welcome to the Real Marketing, Real Fast podcast today.
Doug: Hey Gideon, super excited to reconnect with you today and to invite on the Real Marketing, Real Fast podcast. So welcome to the show today.
Gideon Shalwick: Awesome to be here, Doug. Looking forward to it.
Doug: So we met a whole long time ago over in the Philippines at the Chris Ducker event and I’m just super excited to catch up with you and for you to fill us in a little bit on what you’ve been working on in the video content and online marketing space.
Gideon Shalwick: Oh man, it’s been a journey since we’ve talked last. I think we just mentioned before we started this call that when we met back at Tropical Think Tank, with Chris Ducker’s event. I was just about to start a new business Veeroll a company that I started with some co-founders of mine. J.C. and… J.C. and Sophie.
Gideon Shalwick: And that company I’ve exited from now, but it was a wonderful journey. Lots of learning experiences. We built software that would automate the video production for video ads. And we learned a ton. I think we ended up serving… last time I checked, it was about 24 million video ads for our ads.
Gideon Shalwick: And just learned a ton and earlier this year I exited that business and actually jumped back onto another older business that I had. But then pivoted that into a new service. So yeah, it’s been great fun.
Doug: So what’s happening in video? You know there are long-time video guys that have been out there saying, “Hey, you should have a video for your business. You should have the video online.” And it seems like I’ve been hearing that for like 25 years and now everybody is finally catching up.
Doug: So just 25 years late. Feel sorry for all the guys that had the big beta machines that they’re dragging around. So but just up to date what’s kind of happening in the marketing world in your space.
Gideon Shalwick: You know you’re right, it did feel like an eternity for business to get onto the video game. I remember when I started with video, it was back probably in 2007, 2008 right about then, YouTube was about a year old when I started with this. And I remember how excited I felt because I felt for the first time that you didn’t have to be like a movie star or a celebrity or get into a television show to be able to have widespread sort of recognition and sort of influence for your brand.
Gideon Shalwick: You could just do it all through a place like YouTube. And so I got really excited about it and started building a brand around that. And I thought, “Hey everyone’s going to jump on this.” And to a certain degree, some people did but I didn’t realize how early I was because not as many people jumped on. And it took a lot longer than I thought. Like at least five years longer than I thought for… not 25 but even five years in [inaudible 00:03:34] is a long time.
Gideon Shalwick: For the business community to sort of wake up to it and realize, hey actually there’s unique and really good content here and the use that as a way for building a really large audience if you wanted to for your business. And so I’ve been really delighted to see that happening over the years. And every single business or project that I’ve been working on over the last decade has been in that space. So it’s been really, really exciting to see.
Doug: So what do you think are the barriers that prevent people from moving to this? I mean it’s so simple to use. I heard Kevin Harrington speak and he was talking about when he first started creating infomercials and he said, “Everyone who’s got a smartphone, hold it up.” And he said, “You know that you have more intelligence in your smartphone than I hard in these $50,000 production cameras I bought near 20 years ago.”
Doug: So obviously technology’s not a barrier, so why do you think people have not gone to video and leveraged it for the opportunities there?
Gideon Shalwick: Well I think there might still be a perceived barrier with technology. People might use that as an excuse and say, “Oh you know I don’t have the right camera or the right gear.” Blah, blah, blah.
Gideon Shalwick: But really the best camera you have always is the one that you have with you, right? I’ve heard a lot of other people say that. So often times it’s your phone or the webcam that you’ve got in front of your computer. So it doesn’t have to be fancy in that sense.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: The other challenge that probably people might not speak of if they haven’t done video before but that they’ll run into eventually is that the video production side. So it’s one thing recording it and making that look and sounds nice but then what do you do with the footage afterward. How do you get into a format that works really well online? You know that involves editing, post-production, adding sound.
Gideon Shalwick: Like there’s lots of stuff that you could do but I think I’ve figured out a shortcut where you don’t even have to do all that stuff. We could talk about that if you want. But that certainly is another barrier and I’ve surveyed tens of thousands of people over the last decade and about video marketing, what’s the biggest pain point? And the number one thing that always goes back is not the gear but it’s the video production. Video editing. That’s the most painful thing other people experience when it comes to video marketing.
Doug: Totally makes sense. You know I’ve done lots of videos on my iPhone and I’m just trying to figure out how to edit off the piece when I actually reach and turn the button off. Should see my arm come across the front of the screen. I could live with the bad sound but that always looks a bit cheesy.
Gideon Shalwick: That’s an easy fix. I can tell you in three seconds. Use QuickTime it’s a free piece of software and it allows you just trim the front and back out and it takes a few seconds. It’s instant. It’s really easy and quick to do you don’t even need fancy software.
Gideon Shalwick: Anyway, I hope I’ve solved that for you now Doug.
Doug: There you go, that was 30 seconds to come up with that video content. Well thanks for coming on the show and…
Doug: So moving past, how do we get great looking video so we could all look like Gary V. on LinkedIn.
Gideon Shalwick: Do you mind if I talk about… before we move into that, one more big barrier I think that’s maybe could possibly the main thing that’s holding people back from doing video. And they might not necessarily want to admit it and is that okay?
Doug: Yeah, fire away.
Gideon Shalwick: All right. Because it’s a big one. And that’s themselves.
Gideon Shalwick: So what I mean by that is that they don’t think that they might be good enough to be on video. Or they think they might have a face for podcasting or…
Doug: That’s why I’m podcasting. Thank you for that.
Gideon Shalwick: So I don’t actually believe anybody has the… not a face for video. I think any… you see something… some people who not necessarily pleasing to the eye who can do extremely well on video. I don’t want to mention any names because then you know that would mean I mean they’re ugly.
Gideon Shalwick: But it doesn’t matter what you look like. Really what it matters is what you can do for other people and how you can serve them through your message and what you can teach them and help them with. And so there’s a big challenge there I think for people to overcome and actually just realizing they can add value by being on camera. And maybe having this fear of them being rejected when they publish their videos online.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: I think that’s quite a big one that maybe not a lot of people talk about.
Doug: Well and a lot of people say, “Hey I’m not a writer so I can’t write blog posts.” And I remember James [Shrimco 00:07:42] saying that the only thing he does is dictate because he doesn’t like writing either.
Gideon Shalwick: Right and that’s the thing. Everybody can talk, right? So if you can talk it means you can be on video. You can talk on video, right? So…
Doug: Yeah.
Gideon Shalwick: But I think there’s definitely something you can do to help with that if that’s an issue and I heard a wonderful tip from one of Pat Flynn’s guests. He had on his podcast and I can’t remember her name right now, excuse me, but she said kind of like a follow along on the idea of feel the fear and do it anyway.
Gideon Shalwick: That’s kind of cool really but I haven’t found it as practical yet. So but this lady sitting, and forgive me I can’t remember her name, she said to do the things scared so while you feel the fear, do it while you are fear-filled. Don’t think that you’ve got to get rid of the fear before you do it. Don’t think that you’ve got to build confidence before you can do it. Don’t think you’ve got to get the courage before you can do it. Just do the thing while you’re scared.
Gideon Shalwick: And I think that’s quite a really big breakthrough idea and certainly with public speaking, right? You’re never going to be fully prepared for it. You’re never going to be fully prepared for it. You’re never going to get rid of that fear completely and so the idea is that you just you realize that. And you just go, “Okay well I’m just going to… screw it, I’m just going to do this thing while I’m scared.”
Gideon Shalwick: And then as you do it you build your confidence.
Doug: Yep.
Gideon Shalwick: Right.
Doug: Someone said just record the video, you don’t have to share it. Just get used to talking to the camera, looking at the camera and [inaudible 00:09:02]. Then I read somebody else’s tip once which I don’t think is great advice. He said if you have to have a couple of shots of whiskey before you do it, do that but eventually, you need to stop drinking the whiskey. Do it without drinking. I’m thinking okay, I don’t think I need to go down that road.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah it could turn into a bad habit I suppose, you know.
Doug: Yeah or some undesirable content.
Gideon Shalwick: Right. Interesting content for sure.
Doug: Yeah I mean maybe not good for your business.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah.
Doug: So in terms of production and engagement, everybody’s talking about engagement these days so we need engagement social if we want our organic posts to show. We need engagement in our emails if we want the email service providers like Gmail to make sure they come to the inbox. So what’s the best way to get engagement using video and on the social media platforms?
Gideon Shalwick: You know, I think the key is underlying that I think a lot of people sometimes miss and which is really the match that you have between who you’re talking to and the message that you have and so your message market match, right?
Gideon Shalwick: So I think often times it’s easy to get that wrong if you don’t really do your homework properly. If you don’t understand yourself and your audience really well and then creating a message that sits between that to bring those two worlds together.
Gideon Shalwick: And when I say yourself, it’s like you as your brand but also you as your company as well and the products and service you provide. So your message is really that thing between the audience and you and your products and services that bring it all together.
Gideon Shalwick: And so what happens is a lot of people use little tricks and shortcuts and things or whatever. Maybe not necessarily shortcuts but tricks that they think would help engagement. And it’s like trying to put lipstick on a pig, you know, or what they call it… is that the expression?
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Doug: Yeah. Yeah.
Gideon Shalwick: Like the pig’s going to stay ugly, right?
Doug: Yeah, still a pig. Yep.
Gideon Shalwick: That’s right. So I mean there are things that you can do. For example, in editing you can do things like using jump cards where you zoom in quickly and zoom out of your face, for example, to reset the attention and that helps with engagement. We know that that works. And these changing scenes, say if you’ve got multiple camera shots you can change the different angles to reset the attention.
Gideon Shalwick: You can add B roles for example which is where you’ve got maybe, there’s talking heads sort of part of the video but then as the person still speaks, it flips over to something else that illustrates what they’re talking about.
Gideon Shalwick: And you can do things like screen capture stuff, you know where you’re illustrating stuff on the screen. There’s a whole host of things you can do. Adding music, adding sound effects, adding transitions and interjections and intros and outros. Like there’s a whole bunch of things that you can do that I think in the end can become a distraction. Especially if you… like if you get the message wrong, it doesn’t matter. None of that stuff matters, it’s not going to help you with engagement.
Gideon Shalwick: So and part of getting the message right is getting connected with your audience and what I mean by the word connection is if you could imagine a lock, you know, one of these D locks where… or security locks where once it’s locked in it’s like you can’t open it up unless you’ve got the key. There’s a lock-in effect. And that’s the way I look at engagement and connection. It’s like when you can really connect with the audience in that way and visually sort of in your mind, think about that sort of image of connecting like locking people into a sort of sit on the edge of their seats to watch your video content, that’s the aim.
Gideon Shalwick: If you can do that, that’s going to be brilliant. And you can only do that if your message really resonates with the audience. There’s no other way. There’s no other real way of doing it. So that’s the first thing, getting your message.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: And then there’s a bunch of other things you can do too to help improve that as well.
Doug: Well it’s interesting because in the day now where I think that one of the words I hear overused is be authentic. So everyone’s is authentic, way authentic, tell your story. And then they overproduce the video like as a Hollywood production. It’s not nasty Housewives whatever, be a real person.
Doug: There’s got to be some production quality. I guess the main thing is the video should be in focus and the audio should be clear so you can hear it but beyond that, I agree with you. Get rid of all the other stuff. You don’t need to do a stand in front of a Ferrari, nobody cares, they all know you don’t own it anyhow. So you know, you can see the car lot sign behind you. Just whatever, just go shoot the video and make sure the quality is good so people can see and hear it.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah I think there’s I guess what you can call hygiene factors for your video and so hygiene factor some psychologists came up with the name I can’t remember who it was, way back. They found that there are some things that if it’s there, we don’t notice it. Or if it’s… we only notice if it’s not there.
Gideon Shalwick: So for example, if you’re walking into maybe your friend’s room or something like that, and it’s messy. The bed’s not made and there are clothes on the floor and there’s dust everywhere. You notice it when you walk through there. But if it’s clean and tidy and there are no impediments on the floor, you don’t even notice it because it’s what’s called lack of hygiene factor, right?
Gideon Shalwick: So the same with videos, there are some things that you should do to get it to that threshold level of production quality. Which I would call the hygiene factor. So for example, is positioned well on the video, being well lit, having good audio. Having the video quality at a good enough level. It doesn’t have to be Hollywood production but it has to be good enough. Having a background that’s not distracting.
Gideon Shalwick: So as I’m saying if you can make sure your video is created in such a way that it… people don’t notice the bad things about it then you’re all good.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Doug: That’s right.
Gideon Shalwick: So… yeah that absolutely. But you don’t have to go overboard, I think that’s the key. Keep it simple and focus on the message.
Doug: So I’d like to talk a bit more about kind of the service and the platform that you’re offering because I think that the… it helps the… reduce the barrier to entry for people if they’ve got some good tools that they can use for editing and coming up with a nicer looking, better-produced video.
Doug: I mean, you know, right now if you wanted to do text over… I don’t know that’s the right term. Is that the right term for it when text scrolls over the video?
Gideon Shalwick: You mean like captions?
Doug: Captions, thank you. Yes.
Gideon Shalwick: Yes.
Doug: You need to have somebody to edit and I’m not nearly smart enough to do that. And I know that’s what you have some expertise in. So why don’t you explain why people do that and if you’ve got any statistics or background or information on how that improves engagement or draws people in. Because I’m just not sure.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. Absolutely well… so this is really interesting. We’ve talked about this whole engagement thing and how you can use editing to improve engagement. And really when you look at the function of editing, really it’s only there to help improve engagement but what if there was another way that you could get engagement without doing any editing? And this is something that I just recently sort of discovered is that when you add captions to a video, so when you transcribe your videos and burn those that take into your videos as captions, that automatically increases the engagement.
Gideon Shalwick: Well not only that it also… it does two things, first of all, grabs people’s attention. Because you know with the videos auto-playing on people’s feeds mostly, the text is moving while you’re speaking so because there’s movement it grabs attention immediately. We are programmed to notice movement with our eyes.
Gideon Shalwick: So, first of all, it grabs attention and secondly as people then get drawn to that and they read the captions when it’s playing on silent mode, they automatically get engaged because they read your content. And that is engagement. So it’s fantastic and if your message is good enough, they might click on it to actually watch it but, I mean most… to be honest, most videos I watch now I actually don’t… there’s no sound with it, I actually just read the videos now because they’re the ones that are captioned.
Gideon Shalwick: And if there’s no caption, I don’t even watch it, you know, I don’t even bother I’d just keep scrolling. So it’s a tremendous way for getting engagement for your videos because you get people to read so not only are they engaged but they also consume and absorb your message a lot better so it’s really, really powerful.
Gideon Shalwick: We’ve had clients seeing three times increase engagement in views just by changing over to adding captions to their videos. It’s incredible.
Doug: Only 300%.
Gideon Shalwick: That’s right.
Doug: Do you have anyone’s that have been really successful?
Gideon Shalwick: Well…
Doug: I’m kidding.
Doug: I’m joking.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: Well okay I’ll give you a couple of examples which would blow me away. So the first one was my own example. I’ve had a LinkedIn account for over a decade now I think but I’ve never used it. So earlier this year someone said, “Hey you should take a look at LinkedIn, they’ve got the video now and it’s… ” The feed and blah, blah, blah so I said, “Okay, yeah I’ll take a look.”
Gideon Shalwick: And okay so it looked pretty interesting so at the time I was working on Splasheo, a new feature which was to see if we could record videos straight into the platform through your webcam. So I was testing this feature and I thought what should I talk about? So it just so happened that two weeks I made a stupid mistake on LinkedIn that I didn’t even realize I was making. And so I thought, okay let’s talk about that. Let’s create the video about that. You know who cares I’m not even going to publish it. And even if I do, I’ve only got like 500 people, you know, connections on LinkedIn so recorded this video. It took me three minutes, 40 seconds and then I pushed it through the Splasheo service with getting it captioned and stuff. And I thought, “This is kind of an embarrassing video. Should I upload this?”
Gideon Shalwick: And…
Doug: Says the video guy.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah, exactly and so I… screw it, there are only 500 people and they probably not even going to get notified.
Doug: No one will ever see it.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. A week later and 27,000 plus views later – I think close to 200 comments, heaps of likes. This is my little video that I was never going to publish and I’m sitting there scratching my head. What the heck happened here? So I think at least two things happened.
Gideon Shalwick: One, my message really resonated with the LinkedIn community and two, I think using the captions helped improve that engagement to help absorb the content better and spread the word. So that’s one example, I was just blown away by that. The other example is of one of my clients, Tim Sanders. He’s a leadership sort of thought leader and so-
Doug: Yeah I’ve heard him speak.
Gideon Shalwick: Oh, right. Okay.
Doug: I’ve got a couple of his books, yeah.
Gideon Shalwick: Okay, cool.
Gideon Shalwick: So when you look at his LinkedIn profile, his previous videos were captioned. They’d do okay, you know, but… not necessarily anything to write home about. And then, this is really interesting. There was a video of him where he was… I don’t know how much younger but he looks quite a bit younger speaking on stage. I think it was about sending emails in the middle of the night or something like that or after hours. That was the topic. But it was captioned and framed with a nice headline and stuff like that. You know the square sort of format where you’ve got the headline at the top and the content and the caption down at the bottom.
Gideon Shalwick: And within, I think it was about two or three weeks, he got like 1.4 million views on that on LinkedIn. This thing just went viral and it was crazy. Like in a way I couldn’t believe it that you could get that sort of result just… and okay I’m sure it wasn’t just the captions. I would like to say that, I mean the message was powerful too. But I wonder how effective it would’ve been without the captions.
Gideon Shalwick: But certainly there’s been plenty of tests done. I can’t remember off the top of my head now the company, I think it was… who was it now? Unbounce so them was one of… sorry I can’t remember the name but they did some tests where they, on Facebook, they ran two visions of the video. One had captions and the other one didn’t. Exactly the same video and they didn’t even burn the captions in it. It was just sort of uploaded to the platform and they got a significant increase in engagement. Things like likes, things… people clicking on the link, getting comments and this sort of stuff so that you know, a significant increase and that wasn’t even doing it, in my view, properly.
Gideon Shalwick: So it definitely makes a difference, there’s no doubt about it. For sure. I mean, you can know for yourself when you’re scrolling on your phone through Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, even YouTube these days. If the videos… there are no captions in the videos, you sort of tempt to… if it’s just a talking head then you tend to scroll past. You go… you should have gone for the ones that have got captions in it.
Gideon Shalwick: And the stats are that 85% of people watch their videos in silent at the moment so that’s huge.
Doug: Well that’s what I was thinking. I was thinking that I very rarely click on any videos to play the audio and sometimes it accidentally click and then it’s loud and it wakes up everybody that’s around me.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: Because you watch your videos while you’re in bed at night, right? So while everyone else is trying to sleep…
Doug: Yeah, I’m sitting outside the bedroom having a… working on my laptop, having a cigar and my wife’s already gone to bed and all of a sudden this loud video comes on.
Doug: Yeah so Unbounce said, “Increased page conversion by 80%.”
Gideon Shalwick: There we go. All right, so-
Doug: It was Unbounce. So I went and had a look in that.
Gideon Shalwick: Okay, good.
Doug: That’s a current study that was updated April 26, 219.
Gideon Shalwick: There you go. So absolutely and that’s the same one I was thinking about so I mean that’s awesome and it’s such a simple little thing that you can do to make such a big difference. It actually blows my mind how much improvement you can get from such a simple change.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Doug: Well… and that’s been one of the challenges like I’ve done some video where I’ve loaded to Facebook and the challenge how do I convince somebody when I’m just waving at the camera, “Hey please listen to what I have to say.” And they’re going to be like, “What’s he doing?”
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah.
Doug: And then they scroll on by. At least this way you have a chance to capture them and the other thing I do is obviously when I see video and the video’s engaging and I start listening to it often I’ll just play it in the background instead of my music and I’ll listen to somebody speaking on a topic and continue to work. So I’ll just listen to the audio if there’s nothing engaging in the video other than a talking head but you had to convince me to turn the audio on at some point.
Gideon Shalwick: Yes, it’s a pain and it’s like expecting… it’s trying to change user behavior which is one of the hardest things to do with our… I guess anywhere. Trying to change people’s behavior is extremely difficult if… not even sure if it’s possible.
Gideon Shalwick: You’re much better off going with the flow in that sense of what people are already doing and aligning with that. So if people are already scrolling and watching videos on silent, what’s the best thing you can do to help people actually engage with your content. At the moment, the best thing to do is slap a headline on the video and caption it.
Gideon Shalwick: Like the headline grabs attention and the captions bring the engagement. Bore me, you got both those things which are essential for that engagement.
Doug: That’s what we’ve been doing but I’ve been sending it to an editor to that because like I mentioned before that’s above my pay grade.
Doug: So that’s not where I’m at. But I mean it makes sense. And the reason why I mentioned that as engagement, I mean I’ve had a number of SEO experts on my podcast and one of the guys said… he quite frankly said I think that Google, one of their algorithms now is they’re looking at engagement. But so… and then I know in the email space, there’s lots of work in the email but that’s also another factor now. They’re looking at engagement. Are people opening engaging and clicking on a link-
Gideon Shalwick: It’s massive.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Doug: … in the video… I mean in your email, that’s sending an indication back to the email service provider hey this is relevant content so hey let’s promote it higher. So whatever we can do across all platforms to get engagement is not only good for conversion but it’s also good to reach a wider audience.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah and if you ask the question why. Why are they so interested in engagement? And when you think about it, if people are watching videos for longer or opening up emails and reading them for longer.
Gideon Shalwick: The companies who control these things have more opportunity for keeping them on the platform and showing them ads basically. That’s one of the reasons I would say so it’s definitely beneficial for these platforms. I mean if you’re on Facebook and you stay on Facebook, the longer you stay there, more chance you have of seeing ads and that’s their business model. Same thing with YouTube, same thing as… LinkedIn not as much at the moment. LinkedIn’s an interesting one at the moment because the ad thing is not as crazy there yet. So that’s an interesting one to watch for sure.
Doug: Well soon enough.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. Right.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah.
Doug: Soon enough.
Doug: Yeah, no I mean what’s… it’s funny is because we… years ago we were doing a lot of lead gen, some very significant campaigns for venture capital guys and we started testing video on a landing page, doing exactly what you’re saying where we would put together a PowerPoint presentation. Then we’d hire somebody to do the audio file.
Doug: So we need an English man or a woman with an Australian accent or whatever and we’d just hire the talent. And our conversion numbers went through the roof. We had people phone into us going, “Can you do video landing pages for us”? Like no, we only do them for our clients. I mean… and by our clients somebody that we’re running a marketing campaign for.
Doug: But it just absolutely crushed it and the numbers today, obviously there’s more competition but it’s still a huge contributing factor getting more time on sight.
Gideon Shalwick: Right, yeah. No, it’s big. Yeah, definitely for sure.
Doug: So walk us through the easiest way to do this?
Gideon Shalwick: Okay, the easiest way is just to get someone else to do it for you honestly.
Gideon Shalwick: Give it to someone, that’s the best way. So I mean that’s why we set up the Splasheo service, right? So we take care of it for you completely. It’s 100% done for your service. Basically, we just need your video file. We then mainly transcribe that and you just select the template that you want and we turn it into a beautiful looking video.
Gideon Shalwick: And we send it back to you within 24 hours with your headline, with the video and the caption burned in. And ready to rock for social media. Now you can do it yourself as well if you don’t value your time as much. Or…
Doug: Yeah we did talk about that earlier. If you’re happy to work in a minimum wage, you can do it yourself.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: But there’s a huge portion of people who like doing themselves and so there are plenty of tools around for that. Software that… some pretty clever software around that can automatically transcribe the videos for you, right? With using artificial intelligence and then you can use that for pushing it into your video or whatever else.
Gideon Shalwick: You know of course I’m biased because I run a business that does it for people so I definitely am biased. While I think there are some great apps out there, the problem I always run into is like if I have to do it for myself is, again, the time. The time that it takes. It’s often times some of these… the apps will promise something like 90% accuracy or whatever the number is. Or let’s say even it’s 98% accuracy for say the transcription, right, what you don’t realize is it takes you about 2%. That 2% that’s not accurate takes you about 98% of your time to fix.
Gideon Shalwick: So it’s things like some of the grammar, the punctuation, names are one that often gets wrong. If there’s any special kind of jargon in there that’s a big problem. Just sentence structure some of those. Not in terms of changing the words but knowing where a full stop goes or knowing where to put inverted commas for quotes. All these little things add up that if you’ve got to go in there and do it yourself because it’s not like you can just go press a button and quickly fixes all these things up. You’ve got to go through the thing word for word to review it and fix up these… fix up the mistakes.
Gideon Shalwick: You basically become an editor which just basically defeats the purpose again of trying to get rid of the editing function. But there’s some pretty fancy software for sure there’s no doubt about that, that does some pretty… does a great job of it but as long as you’re happy to do it yourself and spend the time on it then sure go for it.
Gideon Shalwick: But if you want to just create the video and flick it on to someone else to do, get someone else and, you know, Splasheo is one of the options.
Doug: Well and I mean you know I guess the most important thing is to get some content out there and don’t wait till it’s perfect. Having said that, I’m not going to mention any names. I have seen some videos recently that have been transcribed, so they, in theory, they look very similar to the videos that you’re producing. But I don’t know how they’re transcribing them but there’s a lot of spelling errors.
Gideon Shalwick: Oh, man.
Doug: You know when you spell people’s names wrong, you can do anything, just about anything wrong and that’s why I asked you how to pronounce your last name. You do anything wrong except for call me by the wrong name. And then you’ve lost my attention, so yeah.
Gideon Shalwick: Well that’s it and that kills engagement. Again, you know, so you’ve got to get the captions right. And we in the company, we’ve got a promise of 100% accuracy. We don’t promise 98 or 99%, we promise 100%. And so we might not get that right immediately for you but then we work with you until you’re 100% happy. That’s part of our promise.
Gideon Shalwick: And because we understand and realize and know the importance of getting that 100% right. Because when someone’s sitting there, scrolling through their phone and your video comes up and there are typos in it or they get their name wrong. Or even something like a comma in the wrong place or the sentence gets cut off before the thought is finished. It slows people down. It sort of creates those unwanted interrupts that then they go… it reduces engagement and then it introduces an opportunity for people to be distracted and then keep scrolling and then they miss out on your content.
Gideon Shalwick: So we try and make that as smooth as possible. Get rid of all the distractions so that people have a really, really good experience when they read your videos.
Doug: Makes sense to me. So what are some tips you could give our listeners too? Okay the sound’s good, now we’ve figured out how to do the editing. So there’s your services, Splasheo, there’s do it yourself but if I’m going to have someone like you do it, what’s the easiest way for me to produce a video so [inaudible 00:30:25] let’s set a goal. Let’s just, as you said, address my fears head on and let’s get it done and let’s crank out 20 videos in a month. Just to commit to doing one a day, get them batched so they’ll come out in time. How do I produce? What’s the easiest way for me to produce the video?
Doug: So I’ve got my phone, walk us through the process of what we should do to deliver you the easiest file to work with so we get the best result.
Gideon Shalwick: All right.
Gideon Shalwick: So probably a question lingers in people’s mind is what the heck do I talk about? You know, how do I create freaking 20 videos for a month or a video a day? Or something like that. How do I come up with the topics? And so one easy shortcut is to basically just ask yourself, you know, what are all the problems that your target audience are experiencing. Problems, frustrations, needs, desires, all those sorts of things.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: List all those things down sort of on the left-hand side and then on the right-hand side you write down what it is they want to achieve. What is the outcome that they want from it? So if they’re smuggling, say… let’s say, I don’t know. Give me an example and see if I can do this off the cuff.
Doug: Okay so if somebody’s struggling with generating leads.
Gideon Shalwick: Okay, generating leads. Okay, so the frustration might be… it’s my website is not converting, right? So that’s what they’re complaining about. I’m seeing traffic but I’m not getting any conversions. So the outcome then is, say, a hundred leads a day. So in between that, between the frustration and what they want, there is something in the middle that’s called a barrier.
Gideon Shalwick: Okay. And so your job with your content is to help people jump over that barrier. And you can actually visually draw this out. Draw like a little picture… I did this yesterday for a video I created yesterday. It works so well. You draw those two… you have the one word on the left and the other outcome word on the right. And then I had a line in the middle that was the barrier. The thing that was holding people back and then my content was all about jumping over that thing. And it was beautiful.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: So you can come up with unlimited amounts of content. You can go so deep with problems. You can go very superficial to make it more general. So, so basically there’s no limit to content when you use that. But once you’ve got that and you’ve overcome all the other things we talked about… you know what I do is, I… my best way and quickest way of doing it is in my studio because… it’s not even a studio. In fact, it’s a very simple little room that I have but it’s a controlled condition where there’s no wind blowing in my microphone for example.
Gideon Shalwick: There are no noisy kids, people screaming outside or talking even. Well, birds we’ve got crows, yeah, they’re terrible making noises so it’s a controlled environment for the sound and for the lighting. Which means that I can just literally come and sit in front of my camera, hit record and I’m ready to go. So you remove all those barriers. So what I’ve got is I’ve got a webcam, it’s plugged into my computer and then I’ve got a good microphone. In fact, I’ve got… it’s not even expensive. I actually just sold my expensive microphones. I used to have RODE podcaster microphones, I just sold both of them.
Gideon Shalwick: And I’ve bought these little Audio-Technica microphones. They’re recommended by Tom Schwab from Interview Valet. They’re brilliant, it’s like 150 bucks. They are so good. Anyway, plugs into my computer with USB and they use ScreenFlow so you can either use… if you’re on PC use like you can use Camtasia. I use ScreenFlow on Mac and I record straight onto my computer into ScreenFlow with my webcam and my microphone. And that’s it. You know, then because of ScreenFlow means I can chop little bits out if I want and just hit export and then I’m done.
Gideon Shalwick: Like seriously it’s… a five-minute video… a video that’s five minutes shouldn’t take me more than five minutes to create basically. Something along those lines. Or maybe not quite… maybe it takes an extra minute just to quickly process that but it’s… like if I… if there’s a video that’s like three minutes long maybe it took me five minutes all up to create the video and get it off to the servers and [inaudible 00:34:07].
Doug: Well I think the other thing you can do for topics too is what’s called news hacking, right? You just pick your… you know your sources of information for your industry, whatever industry you’re in. So what are the top five headlines everyone’s talking about on that particular day?
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: Yeah.
Doug: Create a video. Know that I can upload it to the service and I can have it out the next day. Then I’m going to pick up some of that residual traffic and it’s something that’s talkable because a third party publication, pick up a publication. You know the marketing world today is writing about X. Well, you know, somebody did the research to figure it out so what can you add to that or even your perspective on that.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah I think that’s a great idea. The more current it can be the better. The only thing you got to watch out for with current sort of events, is that they’ve got a short lifetime… life span.
Doug: Sure. Yeah.
Gideon Shalwick: But who cares in a way? If you’ve got a good method for getting people to subscribe, say, to your channel or to your LinkedIn page or whatever it is. So Facebook or even to your email database, in a way it doesn’t matter too much if that content is not evergreen. Obviously, if you can create evergreen, especially on a place like YouTube that’s going to rank for many years to come and send you nice long-tailed traffic then that’s different even official.
Gideon Shalwick: A friend of mine here in Australia, Justine Brown, from Primal Video that’s exactly what they do. So they don’t go for the current stuff, necessarily, or the viral stuff. They just have a really good SEO strategy where they optimize for the right keywords and then they get all the longterm traffic. And they’re just crushing it at the moment. So…
Doug: That’s brilliant. I mean and some of the stuff, I mean to be perfectly honest I’ve never gone back to listen to my first, second and third of my podcast because I don’t know if my ego can stand it. So I’d be happy, if it wasn’t long tail, I can just get it out of the way and consider it.
Doug: Consider it practice. I get some people to opt-in, that’s great. In the meantime, if I do enough of them I’m going to get better.
Gideon Shalwick: Yeah, okay here’s something really interesting Doug, that I didn’t realize but I felt it first hand with my YouTube channel. Like as I was building my YouTube, I thought I could create content that’s evergreen and it would send traffic into everlasting foreverness. Not the case. Not the case at all.
Gideon Shalwick: When you stop publishing on the platforms like for YouTube for example, and I can’t have a blanket statement here about this but for me, when I stop publishing my traffic started drying up as well.
Gideon Shalwick: So it’s interesting like even though you might create evergreen content but if you stop publishing and you stop sending the signals out that you’re relevant and current, I feel like the platforms… I feel like they know and they want to serve information that’s relevant and recent. So I think that shows… you were talking about with finding the news, the current news sort of events, I think that could work really well.
Gideon Shalwick: And I think that maybe the good view to have with this… a good way for looking at it is that it’s not necessarily an asset that you’re building. That’s maybe not the right way of looking at it, your content. It’s more like a river that you’re building. A river of flowing information and so the information’s never static. It’s always new information coming along so if you can sort of think about how can you create a river of information and expand that river. How can you make the river wider and how can you make the river flow faster, that might be quite a good way of looking at content.
Doug: And I learned a lot from my wife because she writes some original content but she also curates content that’s out there. She has lots of good content so you don’t have the feel, this burden that I have to create all this original content. And I’m not speaking for anyone else other than myself but I probably don’t have very many original thoughts. Like somebody else has already thought it or said it in the world so you know, let’s not beat ourselves and let’s produce some original content but there’s nothing wrong creating other good content and pointing people in that direction because it also builds goodwill.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Gideon Shalwick: Absolutely and you can always put your own spin on it or have your own opinion about someone else’s content piece, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean that could work really, really well for sure.
Doug: Well there we go. So I’m going to wrap it up and ask you a couple of questions. And one of my questions is who’s one guest I absolutely have to have on my podcast?
Gideon Shalwick: All right. So I had a chat about this before and I think who I’d like to recommend is Yaro Starak, he’s a fellow Canadian so he’s a longtime friend of mine and we actually ran a company together called Become A Blogger. Back in the day, I think we were one of the first video-based training courses for blogging back then. I think we launched it in 2007, 2008. But Yaro’s been a really interesting guy in the… his blog used to be called Entrepreneur’s Journey and so… and he’s really been on a journey as well and he’s a really interesting guy. I think your audience would really love hearing from him.
Doug: Well that’ll be amazing. I’ll ask you to make an introduction and I will follow up with Yaro and we’ll get him booked on the show.
Gideon Shalwick: Brilliant.
Doug: Now where can people learn more about you and what you’re doing and your superpowers and how you can make them look amazing in a video?
Gideon Shalwick: Well, okay, there’s a couple of places I guess. I mean, guess we didn’t cover this Doug but we do have a link that we could send people to for Splasheo with maybe something special there for your audience. Would you like me to mention that link?
Doug: Sure that’d be great. Anything special for the audience, bring it on.
Gideon Shalwick: All right. All right so if they go to Splasheo.com/RMRF so Real Marketing, Real Fast, right? So Splasheo.com/RMRF, it’ll take you to a page where you’ll see Doug’s face and you’ll know you’re in the right place and we’ll have something special there. I think at the moment there’s like a free trial or something that you guys can get access to there. And… so yeah, that’s ready there for you guys. And if you want to follow along more what I’m doing personally and reach out to me personally, you can hook up with me on LinkedIn because I’m pretty excited about LinkedIn at the moment, so just search me, Gideon Shalwick, and-
Doug: And he’s a really handsome looking guy, you’ll find him. With a big smiling face and a really sharply trimmed goatee.
Gideon Shalwick: Goatee? I don’t have a goatee anymore.
Doug: Well you have to update your LinkedIn picture.
Gideon Shalwick: Well it’s more an of a… well okay, okay. All right.
Gideon Shalwick: It’s actually… I was trying to grow a beard there for your information.
Doug: Oh, sorry.
Doug: Okay the picture’s the size of a dime so…
Gideon Shalwick: I do have problems with growth.
Doug: That wasn’t my intention here. I mean I…
Gideon Shalwick: That’s all good. It’s all good.
Doug: Where there you go. So hey I want to say thanks, it was really great to connect with you again and see what you’re doing. I was really impressed with what you guys were doing in the video quite a while ago and I’m super excited to… I want to come over and try what you guys are doing to see if you can make me… make my podcasting face look good on video.
Gideon Shalwick: Absolutely. Definitely, do that.
Doug: So there you go. I’m going to suggest you head over to Gideon’s website. Splasheo, check it out. Have a look around, click the buttons and take a look and see if this tool that they’ve provided or this service they provided for marketers and entrepreneurs like you and me is a fit for your business.
Doug: So I’m going to say thanks again to Gideon for being so generous and for making an offer to our listeners and for sharing his valuable information about video content and on how we too can look better in our videos.
Doug: So thanks listeners for tuning in, I’m sure you got some great information on video content from this episode. Don’t be shy to leave a comment on the blog once the show notes are up and/or on iTunes account make sure you’re subscribed to our email list. And I look forward to serving you on our next episode.
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HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT
The key is the match between who you’re talking to and your message, so your message and your market match.
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Get in touch with Gideon:
- SEE SPECIAL OFFER
- Website – Splasheo
- Gideon on LinkedIn
Find out more about Gideon:
Links to other related podcasts and or blog posts:
CREATE YOUR OWN WINNING VIDEO CONTENT STRATEGY
GET RESULTS WITH ANIMATED WHITEBOARD VIDEOS