When it comes to building your company’s in-house video marketing team, optimization team and abilities, should you “build or buy?” Essentially, should you train your current team, or hire new staff, or partner with outside vendors? Or some hybrid of these solutions?
GUEST: Jeremy Vest of VidIQ [YouTube] and Video Marketing World [YouTube]
HOST: The Video Marketing Value Podcast is hosted by Dane Golden of VidiUp | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube
SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.
PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios
TRANSCRIPT
Dane Golden:
It’s time for HEY.com. This is the channel where we give you video content marketing tips to help you get your customers coming back to your videos again and again. My name is Dane Golden from HEY.com, and our guest today from vidIQ and Video Marketing World is Jeremy Vest.
Dane Golden:
Hi, Jeremy.
Jeremy Vest:
Hey, Dane. How is it going?
Dane Golden:
It’s going great. How are you?
Jeremy Vest:
It’s going well. Hey, that reminded me of something. I don’t know what that was really.
Dane Golden:
Exactly. I used to say that on the Tube Talk podcast. Today, Jeremy, I asked on to talk about the subject that some companies are going through as video marketing grows, and a lot of companies are taking parts of video marketing or all of video marketing in-house, and sometimes they’re working with teams to outsource, but they’re getting more involved in video marketing on many levels, but what they call the build-or-buy dilemma, how much should they bring in-house, how much should they learn, how much should they pay someone else to do, what types of tasks, from production to marketing videos, how do they split this up?
Dane Golden:
I thought you’re uniquely qualified as one of the top people in the industry to talk about how to decide what pieces of this they should bring in-house and what should they outsource. What do you think about that?
Jeremy Vest:
If you have a roomful of interns … No, I’m just kidding. Well, it depends. That’s my answer, Dane. That’s it.
Dane Golden:
Where should someone start? Should they start with the size of the company or the size of the video marketing effort? Is that where they should start, or should they start with thinking about what platforms they’re going to focus on?
Jeremy Vest:
I think, when you start thinking of marketing and video marketing in a bigger company or any company, the first thing that comes to mind that I see as a red flag for a lot of companies is what are their branding standards and what will they allow as far as video quality is concerned? Typically, in a bigger company, there is a production department, a video production department, but what is missing from almost every company that I’ve ever worked with is that bridge, the bridge between traditional old-school video production and social media and marketing.
Jeremy Vest:
You have marketing people, marketing staff. You have social media people talking and doing content marketing, and then you have the typical video production department doing various stuff, and what’s interesting and weird about YouTube and Facebook and Instagram videos is they are built for people to watch, not for people to buy from, so the problem is, their traditional video people, they may not be amazing at making social videos. The social team may not have any video experience and the marketers or traditional SEO people probably don’t know a lot about videos, so it’s this weird conundrum that-
Dane Golden:
There’s a gap? Are you saying that they’re talking in parallel, they’re not working together, there’s no place where somebody who understands how to do video production and someone who understands social interaction on social media, there’s no place they meet? Is that what you’re saying is the problem?
Jeremy Vest:
With a lot of the companies I’ve worked with, I’ve worked with over 25 big brands, a lot of the time, this is what I see. Now, obviously, we’re getting deeper into people understanding YouTube and Facebook and Instagram video, so things are changing.
Jeremy Vest:
A lot of these companies are getting help and going to conferences and learning, so these bridges are starting to shrink a little, but, in general, yes, this is what I see. I see people are really able to understand how to make a video that people actually want to watch from a brand that builds audiences and, possibly, gets people into sales funnels so that they can purchase.
Dane Golden:
Is it purely just doing sales videos? I mean, I know you’ve done all sort of videos.
Jeremy Vest:
Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s … It depends on-
Dane Golden:
Build or buy, it depends. Thank you very much, everyone.
Jeremy Vest:
Yes. Good night. Let’s say your goal was to socially sell or get people into a funnel, and we’re not talking about TV or radio ads, what you’ll probably want to do is build your Facebook and Instagram and YouTube presence and your traditional SEO presence.
Jeremy Vest:
What’s the most powerful medium online? Besides word of mouth and talking to your friend and shaking their hand, I think video is the most powerful marketing method because, if a picture is worth a thousand words, you could actually show emotion and just have a lot more engagement with a video, so I think it bridges all marketing gaps from selling to building an audience to getting people to trust you to social awareness and product awareness. I think it really does fill all the gaps, and I think video obviously is what in the next five of 10 years is supposed to be more than 80% of all Internet traffic in America.
Dane Golden:
What do you think about this as an approach for a company when they come and they say, “Build or buy?” What about both? What about, yes, you need to have these are core competencies, but as you get more sophisticated, you need to have the option of having an outside team that understands, let’s say, video marketing and engagement and really understands the platforms and the analytics, but you need them to not only do some things for you, but teach you so you can do a lot of these things internally over time as you get better? Is that an approach?
Jeremy Vest:
Yeah, definitely, and that’s honestly what I’ve done for the last four or five years really. The typical business, what happens is, like I said, they have a social media team. They typically have a Web design team and a couple of video guys, so what we would do for the last-
Dane Golden:
I’m sorry to interrupt you but what is a video guy? Could it be almost anything? Could it be a producer or someone who posts to YouTube? What is it?
Jeremy Vest:
Yeah, typically, it’s someone that’s a camera operator and an editor, not necessarily a producer, but, typically, in a lot of these companies, the production house, the internal production agency. They’re just dudes that wear a lot of hats and … or ladies, and they can just do a lot of stuff.
Dane Golden:
Okay, so they have those … that team, and you work with them, and what happens? Or you have worked with them, and what happens?
Jeremy Vest:
Yeah, so, typically, we develop a video marketing strategy that’s cohesive, and then we bring in all these departments and we train them specifically on the strategies that we’re trying to do, so, for example, we’ll say, “In the first zero to six seconds, this is what the video needs to do, and, you know, here is when the call to action happens.” We call this the show formula, so we teach the show formula and how to shoot to the production team and, the social media and marketing teams, we teach them meta information and how to achieve their goals.
Jeremy Vest:
To begin with though, we really understand what does success mean for your video, so most brands start off saying, “Hey, we just want to get views,” and their boss’ boss’ boss three years later is like, “Hey, why did we spend money again if we didn’t make any sales?” so we typically just really help nail down what a success means from a video perspective for a brand. Typically, we like to see sales or something tied to that and then, from there, we develop the strategy around the goals.
Dane Golden:
Okay, so starting from the strategy and the goals and then helping each member of the team understand what it is to meet those goals on more of a holistic sense from video production, analytics, engagement, social, having it all integrate together. Am I summarizing what you’re saying?
Jeremy Vest:
Yeah, absolutely. Another thing we do is we really help them develop strategies to report on a monthly basis so that we can really track the ROI of video across the entire platform. YouTube, Facebook, the website embedded video, everything needs to have a trackable ROI metrics, or you just really don’t know what you did, so that’s really important.
Jeremy Vest:
I think, in general, a lot of companies can start picking up the paces and hiring other people once they have these structures in place, but I really do think it’s critical for these brands to hire someone like Dane Golden, who’s a brilliant strategist, go to some of these conferences like VidSummit and Video Marketing World, shoutout, and really dive deeper into the strategy of video because just from what I’ve had heard-
Dane Golden:
Here’s a problem I see a lot of companies are having, and they don’t … they work with a video … let’s … We’ll use “video marketing” in quotes because it could be almost anything when you say “video marketing.” They work with a video marketing company before they spend a lot of money, had a big budget. The video looked really cool, and nothing happened, and how is a company to determine either who to work … who’s a good team to work with externally or what type of skills should they recruit internally and, I’m going to make this a three-part question, what types of tools should that person know? Should they be going to the Video Marketing World? Should they be using the vidIQ’s? How do you know when you’re working with someone who knows, who can move you forward is I guess what I’m asking overall?
Jeremy Vest:
I think the first goal a brand has to decide is, honestly, what does a successful video look like to you? Did you grow your YouTube channel-
Dane Golden:
I’ve got a million views. Is that a success?
Jeremy Vest:
No. Views don’t mean anything, but once you really figure that out, is it selling stuff, is it building your audience, is it getting people to download a free E-book so you have more people in your ecosphere, then what you need to do is start piece-mealing what you’re missing to achieve that from your current staff, staff you’re about to hire, and this strategy agency is … or consultancy is what I like to say. You just really need to find a consultancy that has a lot of track record.
Jeremy Vest:
We, as a company, before I moved to vidIQ, had billions of organic views for our customers. Dane kicks super butt. He’s worked with a lot of big, amazing companies and has a lot of success under his belt, so I would really narrow it down and really try to get a sense of what their past success is. Unfortunately, video strategy is like SEO or social media. Everyone’s brother, cousin and uncle is a supposed expert.
Dane Golden:
It sounds like going to Video Marketing World, which you’re hosting in Dallas in August and VidSummit, which is later in the year, those types of things are good ways that people who are trying to get educated can learn about what they need to learn about.
Jeremy Vest:
Yeah, that’s a very good point because there’s just so many. Social video is just such a big area. We’re literally speaking on 40 strategy sessions. We have LinkedIn video. We have advertising on Facebook and YouTube and remarketing. We have Instagram and Snapchat, and it just goes forever. I mean, literally, there’s just so much to think about from a video perspective online now that every session is a strategy session with takeaways, so you actually have a strategy workbook and you can start filling it out and, at the end of the day, you actually have everything you need to develop your 2019 video marketing strategy. I’m not trying to sell my conference, but the point is-
Dane Golden:
No, I want you to. I want you to.
Jeremy Vest:
The point is it’s kind of like a firehouse approach to getting brands to really understand what they don’t know, and there’s going to be 40 of the best strategists in the world, including Dane Golden, who’s speaking there and you can meet them in person and talk to them and get to know them personally. It’s going to be a great event.
Dane Golden:
What I hear you overall, and this is such a big conversation and it’s a lot to cover, but what I hear you saying is when it comes to build-or-buy for companies, what I most hear you saying is learn, learn, be skeptical and really understand what types of results you’re looking for and what people can provide and, if you’re sort of aligned with those goals, with whoever you work with or whoever you bring on. Is that a good summary?
Jeremy Vest:
It is, but, in retrospect, I think I would change that philosophy a little bit about … to more of about find out what your goals are and do as much as you can to start marking videos and start measuring results and seeing where you lie so you know what the deficiencies are.
Jeremy Vest:
Don’t get too caught up in making perfect videos. Having consistent videos out there every week is far more important than having perfect videos. Also, what does a perfect video mean? In my mind, a perfect video may not have the best audio quality or video quality, but people can find the video and then, when they find that video, they actually want to consume that video.
Jeremy Vest:
That’s what a successful video is in my mind, because if 10,000 people are consuming a video and liking the video, then the odds are that they’re going to go to the … another path. And X amount of those people will go to your website or they’ll do … They’ll watch the next video in the series, so just don’t worry about too much of the production and all the stuff. Just make content people want to consume and make sure it’s seen.
Dane Golden:
On that note, Jeremy, I really want to thank you for coming on the podcast today. Could you give us some URLs that people can go to to find out about what you’re talking about?
Jeremy Vest:
They can find me at vidIQ.com/jeremy. That’s V-I-D-I-Q.com/jeremy, and you can download the free Chrome extension that, when you’re on YouTube, we actually suggest great keywords people are searching for and all kinds of amazing tools to make better YouTube videos. You can also go to vidpow.com, that’s V-I-D-P-O-W.com, to learn about our conference.
Dane Golden:
That’s the Video Marketing World Conference. That’s August. What’s the dates on that?
Jeremy Vest:
August 29th through the 31st.
Dane Golden:
In Dallas. Excellent. Thank you, Jeremy.
Dane Golden:
My name is Dane Golden, and I want to thank you for listening today. HEY.com is about helping you get your customers coming back to your videos again and again. How do you do this? By sharing your expertise, because when you share your expertise in a way that helps your customers live their lives better or do their jobs better, you’ll earn their loyalty and their trust and their business.
Dane Golden:
Please subscribe to us on YouTube and wherever you watch social video and please friend me on LinkedIn or email me at help [at] vidiup.tv. Until next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.