We have a fast-paced interview today with none other than Owen Video from Video Marketing School. Owen provides high-level YouTube channel strategies for brands & industry thought-leaders. His techniques are proprietary, proven, and highly effective for raising brand awareness & driving online sales.
Owen has a unique process for creating and scaling success on YouTube with videos that leverage the YouTube algorithm to get hundreds of thousands of minutes of watch-time from targeted audiences.
He is proof of his methods, as he has more than 61.3K subscribers and 4.44M lifetime views! He has worked for SaaS companies, Fortune 500 Brands, and Industry Thought Leaders (Coaches, Consultants, Executives, and Agents).
WHY IS VIDEO MARKETING IMPORTANT?
Brandon Birkmeyer: We get to dive deeper into something that we don’t talk a ton about with experts like you, which is video content. We’re going to gear that towards personal branding today. This obviously isn’t a new topic for a lot of people. Video has been around a long time.
Many people are still afraid of launching video, doing video for themselves and for their businesses. Let’s start there. Why is video important for personal brand businesses? What’s the role of it? Why is it so important?
VIDEO MARKETING COMBINES ALL THE BENEFITS
Owen Video: I think that video is the only thing. I saw a great post the other day that said online marketing is now video marketing. That is the truth of the scenario. It used to be, “Oh, you’ve got SEO. You’ve got Facebook and social media marketing. You’ve got video marketing and YouTube and these different things.”
However, they’ve all come together now and it’s video that everyone is paying attention to. I’m not saying that there isn’t room for some SEO blogs and there isn’t room for social media marketing, but what are you posting? What keeps people on your page longer? Video. What keeps people engaged more on social? It’s video.
Video marketing is not a part of your marketing anymore. It is your marketing and everything else stems off from there.
VIDEO CAN BECOME CONTENT SOURCE MATERIAL
Brandon Birkmeyer: I like that. There’s something to be said about thinking of video not as even the final result, but as maybe your source material, the thing that you create that will go everywhere else.
You’ve done this for a long time, so you’ve now figured out all the different things, the nuance of how to speak, where to look, how to present yourself, how to get lighting so that it looks better.
That’s a lot and that’s intimidating for someone who’s just getting started. If I think of it as step one, start the process of figuring out how to record your voice and get started with producing content. I think it’s a different way to think about it for some people out there.
Owen Video: You bring up some really good points there, and it brings me back to the four disciplines of video marketing. We call this the video pro system.
In fact, if you search the hashtag video pro you’ll find a lot of our stuff. (There are some other people that have used the hashtag as well, but it’s our core hashtag.) A video pro, what that means is a professional use of video.
For some people, that’s going to be a YouTube channel that generates subscribers. For others, it’s going to be a YouTube channel that generates leads, and still, for others, it’s going to be a video presence that’s on multiple platforms, IGTV.
We believe in a YouTube first. Your top-down content starts on YouTube, and then you repurpose that into the other platforms.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
VIEWS MEAN SOMETHING DIFFERENT ON YOUTUBE
The reason for that is on Facebook three seconds is a view. Let’s just time that out for a second. You click on the video and one, two, three, you click off. It counts that as a view and you go home and say, “I got 267 views on Facebook today.”
You got 267 people to watch your video for one, two, three seconds. That’s not a view. In my worldview, that’s someone who just clicked on your video. They may not even have turned on sound yet.
On YouTube, a view is thirty seconds. One view on YouTube is ten views on Facebook. That’s really important to consider why YouTube is so important. People are actually watching your content.
THE FOUR VIDEO MARKETING DISCIPLINES
The other part of that is the four disciplines of video marketing, the video pro system. When you master these four things, the blur of what camera should I get, how do I look better, what do I say, et cetera…all of those confusing things come into very clear focus.
Here’s the good news. It boils down into four main points. Programming, Production, Promotion, and Progress, the video pro system.
HOW TO SET UP YOUR VIDEO MARKETING
Programming is the art of knowing what videos you’re going to produce ahead of time, what you’re going to say in those videos, literally how you structure them.
What I see a lot of video creators doing, (especially business creators) is going way off the prairie. “Hey, today, I’m going to talk to you about X, Y, Z,” and then you end up talking about Trump and Biden in the election and this whole thing. How did you get there?
You really need to keep your stuff in a scaffolding because I promise you this: if someone tunes into a video called “How to market your business” or “How to do SEO”, I guarantee you they are not interested in your vegan recipes or your political views.
You have got to have scaffolding. What do you say? What do you not say? That’s the programming discipline.
WHAT PRODUCTION DO YOU NEED?
The production discipline: what camera light and microphone are you going to use? If you’re filming in front of a window, you really don’t even need a light. You just have to make sure you film during daytime hours.
You need to have a setup. We recommend a video creation station. This is a three-part system. It’s a camera, a microphone, and a light, for example.
You’re looking at my video creation station right now. I film right here every single day. I have other stations as well. That’s part of what I do. I’m a YouTuber.
You only need one. You could just do a webcam, a light, and a microphone. Be in a place where when an email comes in or an instant message or a text message comes in and you go, “Oh my gosh, that would be a great video,” (like a question from a client) you can just press record and start recording.
It is very, very simple. You set up everything in a standard concrete environment so that whenever you sit down, you could technically film something. That’s production.
HOW DO YOU SHARE YOUR VIDEOS?
Promotion is where you share the video. Where do you upload, and when? Do you share it on Facebook? If so, where on Facebook? How often on Facebook? Do you use your email campaign? Do you share it on Instagram and how?
Every business needs their own specific promotional plan. It’s going to be different. For some people, I’m going to say, “You should be sharing this on Facebook.”
For other people, I’m going to say, “Let’s wait a week, see how the video performs, and if we need help, then we’ll share it in some Facebook groups,” that sort of thing. That can change.
DO YOU KNOW HOW TO TRACK PROGRESS?
Then finally, progress. When you’re looking at your progress, what you’re looking at is did people watch the video? Where did they exit out of the video? How long did they watch the video?
What you’re looking for are peaks and dips. With peaks, you want to do more of that. With dips, you want to eliminate that.
If you do a video where it’s a talking head, it’s you the whole time, and you notice that people watch for a minute and then it just dips, that’s a good indication that you need to mix up the scenery a little bit.
My point is that YouTube gives you tons of analytics. You learn what analytics to read and when. The analytics of the first three days when a video is published is one thing. After three months, you’re looking at different analytics.
Knowing what to look at and when will help, and will affect your programming. You see how it comes right back into a full circle. Your programming impacts your production, which then impacts where you share the video in promotion. Then you get progress reports and your progress helps to impact your programming.
Master those four things, and YouTube is easy and your business grows.
CONNECT WITH OWEN
Website: TheVideoMarketingSchool.com
YouTube: Simple Business Video
Instagram: @owenvideo
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like more content about how to build your personal brand, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
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- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
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Talk soon!