Yesterday morning, we were live, ON AIR at Sales Engine Studios!

Mike Vannoy, COO of Sales Engine, adjusts the camera from a wide shot to a medium shot.

Okay, maybe not “live”, but we were shooting video for a client’s content marketing strategy. Video as a content medium is often overlooked or dismissed because some believe it takes time and special video production expertise to be used successfully. This is false. Armed with an off-the-shelf HD video recorder and a subject ready to talk, any company can reinvent their content marketing stagey with a little video twist.

The following are three best practices in video content marketing:

The Sales Engine team reviews the footage from the previous take ensuring no background noise leaked into the audio.

1. Video does NOT mean “sales pitch”. Rather than selling to your audience, think about how you can educate them through your video content. Use the video camera as a method to extract knowledge from inside the heads of people too busy or not practiced enough to produce heavy content. Executives, sales reps, product managers and customer support all have unique points of view and certain areas of expertise that can be turned into very effective content. All you need is an hour or two to absorb that knowledge and turn it into consumable content. Then, you can think about how to repurpose that video content into written articles, blogs, or whitepapers.
   

   After moving Rachelle's stance, Mike must adjust the microphone to center in order to avoid creating an echo.

2. Repurpose, repurpose, and repurpose. A successful video shoot can be a very time consuming project, so make the most out of the final product. The video you shoot can be repurposed and used to create a large variety of content in multiple formats. It can become a polished, developed video(duh!); the audio can be stripped and turned into a podcast; or transcripts can be created and re-written into an article or a downloadable PDF. From there, the text can be cut up, spliced, abbreviated or conjoined and used virtually anywhere – in an email campaign, on your website, posted to social media or for a banner ad.
   

   Mike Vannoy gives direction to Rachelle between script segments. Breaking your script into segments makes it easier for the talent and gives the director time to make adjustments.

3. Start with search in mind. Before shooting day arrives, identify your video topics based on keywords that you know your prospects are searching for online. You can prep your subject with questions and specific highlights you would like them to discuss. This not only guides the content in the direction you want, but will also put your subject at easy and allow shooting day to run quickly and smoothly. When you are ready to publish your final content, your landing pages should be optimized with those keywords to increase SEO. Then, syndicate the content to as many sites or social media platforms as possible.
   

   Sales Engine Studios is running full steam ahead creating tons of video content.

You can view our full photo album from this shooting day on our Facebook Page.

*Special thanks to Rachelle Grossman, our very professional and entertaining talent artist.