Optimize Your Blog Content With Organic Video

Looking at the numbers, video content is one of the best ways to boost engagement with your audience. When 64% of consumers report that watching a video increases their likelihood hood of making a purchase, it would be foolish to not include video content in your marketing strategy.

We have seen an increase in engagement and conversions since starting out video series. This week, we discuss how things have been going, what we have learned and give actionable advice on how you can incorporate video into your marketing efforts today!

Transcript Below:

Matt Mroczek: For judging the success of your blog, do you think people give up too fast and stop blogging or do you think that blogging isn’t for everybody?

Matt Lo: Well everyone blogs if it’s for your business, everyone blogs in the notion that they will get more customers out of it, right?

So they’re immediately measuring the success of the blog based on how many new customers they get.

And what happens is they get really excited, be it the business owner or the marketer, and they write and they write and they write…maybe 5…6…7…8 blogs in, and they get no customers…and then they give up.

There’s nothing wrong about that, you see it not working, why should you invest more time and money into it?

But what you have to really measure is the value of your blog and how much of its impacting the reader before you measure the customer impact.

Matt Mroczek: How do you measure value and impact?

Matt Lo: I’m going to quote Content Machine, it’s going to be “comments, shares, and email or direct messenger replies.”

So we started blogging…what…from September to December and I think we were doing one article a week…and we weren’t doing it with quantity over quality.

We were doing maybe 8 to 24 hours of research, editing, eventually publishing, and then going through distribution channels.

For a long time, it just didn’t work. So then we switched to this new process where we record these videos, very very quickly, and then transcribe it and that becomes our content.

Matt Lo: Why does that work?

Matt Mroczek: Well whether it works or not is to be…we still haven’t proven that out…but what it does allow us to do is fail much faster.

The videos that we do create, it’s a quarter of the time and truthfully to our audience it’s hopefully much more relatable; It’s much more relevant.

Would you rather connect with a business owner or a marketer or somebody else who you know what you’re going through…or read 2000 words and hope to find a golden nugget somewhere buried in there as well.

Matt Lo: It’s not just that…you can use video and social media like when you do video embeds that immediately play.

Also, a pet peeve of mine is a lot of business owners use a virtual assistant outside to write a quick 500 article and they put their name on it.

And it’s like well you don’t really know if they really are a subject matter expert because they got someone else to write it.

But for us, this is us on video. We put our own reputation on the line.

Matt Mroczek: I’ve heard you say a lot the key for marketing in general; whether that’s content, that’s video, or whatever that may be, is delivering value.

How do you deliver value in a video?

Matt Lo: You have to tell a great story.

You must deliver…you must connect the audience with a common pain point and you must be very concise about it.

Then out of that, when you have those three things, it needs to lead to something the audience can act on.

If you just deliver an insight, but no one can actually reach it, ultimately no one is really going to share it.

They are not going to find as much value in it because they don’t know how to achieve the vision you want.

Matt Mroczek: How do you create content with that engagement from the user side in mind?

Matt Lo: The engagement part is a little tricky because if you put too much emphasis on action, it looks like you are trying to sell something.

Even if you’re not trying to make them buy a product…if it’s anything like “Please Share This! Please Share This!” you know “Please Like This!”…it’s going to disincentivize the user or the person reading or watching your content.

So you have to be placing your call-to-actions right after you’re revealing your secrets or right at the end of the conclusion.

Matt Mroczek: Does all video content need to cost a lot of money, take a lot of time, hiring an outside agency to do it?

Matt Lo: I think we prove that it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money.

Now granted, you do have some insider connections so we were able to sorta position things a little better than maybe what another business owner could do.

But, I think we’ve proved that you could do the same kinda quality we do today with an iPhone…two iPhone X’s or even just two smartphones.

Pick up a Yeti mic and be in a nice room…few hundred bucks…you can get the same quality we have today.

Matt Mroczek: Do you think the production quality of your content builds into the users’ mindset in terms of the quality that you’re delivering for the content as well?

Matt Lo: Yes because as I’ve mentioned, your content is a product.

So there is a user experience component to it.

If the audio isn’t very clear, the video a little blurry, or there is an audio or video mismatch in sync…then that’s a terrible user experience.

They’re going to tune out or not going to appreciate the value you are about to deliver.

So you have to ensure that there’s a minimum for all of these.

I think when we did our first video, it was literally the product-market fit version of content.

Matt Mroczek: How do you know the best form factor for your content is? Social, email, blog, video…you know…there is podcast…youtube…

Matt Lo: In marketing, you’re shipping it to all channels…as many channels as you can.

One of the advantages of doing videos and transcribing it later…we can attack podcasts, we can attack videos, and we can attack written content.

You know, usually when you are blogging it’s only written content.

If you’re only doing audio, it’s only for podcasts, maybe if you transcribe it you can do written content too.

With videos, we get all three factors.

Matt Mroczek: And speaking engagements.

Matt Lo: Does video content mean you’ll get more engagement?

Matt Mroczek: I think it’s gonna give you more data around it.

Say for example video content naturally gets more engagement across any channel.

Look at Facebook…look at Linkedin.

You’re gonna get more views automatically because the algorithms are pushing video content, live content…whatever it can be.

But the other hidden metric is…how long people are watching and what parts they are watching for as well.

For a lot of our content and long-form content in general past say two…three…four minutes you can time stamp it and then in your YouTube metrics then people can click onto different areas and then you in return can say…Ooo!…this one’s hitting a high engagement. *this would be a cool blog topic*

For example, on our A.I and machine learning one…the marketing piece towards the end got a ton more engagement and we didn’t ship different content to different places. We were sending the whole video the whole time.

So that’s the users looking in and finding the content they want and then that’s telling us where should guide our content of the future.

Say you want to create your own video content. You’re confident to do it yourself. But you’re not sure what to talk about…how do you figure that out?

Matt Lo: That’s an interesting question. It’s the same process you implement in blogging.

Often times, I have no idea what I’m going to write.

So you sorta have to refine…we have a content framework…we know which topics our audience likes so we brainstorm around those topics.

I think if you’re a person doing this for the first time you sorta need to figure out what the high-level topics that your audience cares about, and then formulate ideas from there.

That’s the first step, there’s a lot of subsequent steps you can sorta Google on your own, but you have to start there. Then everyone else diverges after that.

Some people, for example…us…we’ll mix and match these categories and then come up with a topic.

But for others, they might say hmmm…we’ll look at cold leads and sales…and then we’ll refine to say automation… and then they’ll refine it to say automation with a SaaS product.

Right, that’s one process…we don’t do that…but that is one process that does work.

Matt Mroczek: Do you think it’s good to go in scripted with 10 videos that you want to produce or just do it ad-hoc, one at a time…what’s the right way to do it?

Matt Lo: I think they’re all right, and that’s what I mean where there’s no wrong answer with creating an idea.

Matt Mroczek: When I hear storytelling, I kind of roll my eyes now. It’s the most overused term, but it is important, right? You need a narrative or something, right?

What is storytelling in video content?

Matt Lo: Well first I don’t think it’s overused, I think it’s underappreciated.

The first thing that comes into mind when someone says create content, is what value you are creating.

I don’t really think about the story, most of the time I underestimate it. You really can’t because again you have to form a narrative to guide the audience to A to B to C, so eventually they can see the value.

If you’re just going to A to C…all the way to Z…they are going to forget why and what you’re saying is important.

They are going to be like “Ohh…this is what you are trying to sell me.”

Matt Mroczek: They’re just gonna see the B.S

Matt Lo: Right! Exactly!

Well it’s not B.S…the person in the video or the person writing the blog could genuinely deliver great value but they couldn’t articulate it well so it’s perceived as B.S then.

So we have…I have two customers who’ve asked me a little bit about live streaming, and they asked me because we have all these other videos that they were seeing…they were asking if we were going to do it.

I was saying like we have a lot of interest in it, but we are still testing if video works in the first place.

So I want to ask you, is live streaming good for businesses?

Matt Mroczek: Absolutely.

I mean think about the number one goal of any business, no matter what size, small business or anything larger than that. It’s attention…and what are the algorithms of these social networks doing?

They are naturally lifting live steam to the very top.

So if you’re looking to get attention and you’re getting the number one of the yellow pages, Google Ads, or whatever it may be…they’re pushing you to the top…why not take advantage of it right?

What’s one thing about producing video that you’ve found to be much more easier than you expected or less intimidating now that you’ve gone through it many many times with me in this other chair?

Matt Lo: I was surprised that we can actually figure out how to create value through this.

I don’t think that we’ll always be able to create the same level of value for each video, but I can say that we have a repeatable process that we can execute very very quickly.

You mentioned a little bit about the speed but that was a big surprise because I was measuring it from our results from blogging.

Every time we did an article, it was several hours of research, several hours of editing, we talked about that. Video is such a big surprise!

We spend 30 minutes maybe 40 minutes if we felt like the questions weren’t that good. Then there’s a few hours in production time, then we ship it!

That’s one day’s worth of work, half a days worth of work to get this video out.

Matt Mroczek: When do you think ChipBot makes the jump to go live steam, live video?

Matt Lo: We could go live right now! I have no problem going live.