This episode is taken from an interview I did with Gillian Whitney, Video Coach, over on LinkedIn Live. We talked about how videos grab people’s attention and how they’re super efficient for getting your message across. She shares some cool tips on where to use videos to boost your visibility online. Plus, she shares tool recommendations easy video editing.
Key Takeaways
- Videos stand out in crowded social media feeds, providing a quick and engaging way to convey messages and connect your audience.
- Repurpose longer videos into shorter snippets tailored for different social media platforms.
- Create videos that address frequently asked questions and incorporate relevant keywords to improve search engine visibility.
Resources
Connect with Gillian on LinkedIn.
Listen In
Watch the Podcast
tbdRaw Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct and conversational.
And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
Welcome back to another bonus episode. This one is an interview that I did with Jillian Whitney over on a LinkedIn live. Jillian is a video marketing coach.
I worked with her last year and she is incredibly knowledgeable. I was able to get started with my video marketing with a lot less challenges than if I had continued on by myself. Let’s listen in.
I am talking with Jillian Whitney, a video marketing coach, and we’re going to talk about how to use video marketing to boost your business and get more quality clients and boost your leads. Hey Jillian. Hey, hey, thank you for having me today and I’m excited to be here.
Yeah, thank you so much for joining me. I’m very excited to get some information about how to use video marketing for photographers. I’m going to pick up some pointers myself.
So, I will let you just give a little bit of a background of yourself and then we’ll, we’ll hop into it. Sure. Okay.
Well, again, thank you for having me here today, excited. And if anybody has any questions, pop them in the chat and we will do our best to get them answered. So, I am a LinkedIn video marketing coach, but I know a lot about video on all platforms, so I can pretty much handle any question you can throw at me.
And I have been doing marketing for several years now, online marketing, and I’ve done the gamut of SEO blogging, everything in between. But I discovered that video marketing was kind of the secret sauce to get yourself to leapfrog to the top of the Google search results. And once I fell in love with video marketing, that was it.
I just was all in. So, I’m here today to give everybody some tips and tactics. So, let’s get stuck in.
That is awesome. I know I’ve learned a lot from you. We met a few times and it’s made it so much easier after talking with you about how the workflow goes and like where to use it in my marketing, that kind of thing.
So, pretty excited to share this with everybody. Maybe we can start with maybe why is it so popular? Why is video marketing so popular to use as a marketing strategy? That’s a great question. So, if you think about ourselves, we are now sort of living in this instant world of internet-based everything and we are busy.
And so, if you think about, if you go on social media, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you’re looking at, there’s a lot of noise and you’re scrolling through the newsfeed and it’s like text posts, graphic posts, but you see a video, videos stand out. They’re a great bait. They catch our attention.
And at the end of the day, we would much rather consume a quick video to figure out how to do something, to learn something about somebody than reading. We’re getting lazy these days. So, video is the way that you can quickly get your message across.
And people at the end of the day, we want to do business with people that you know, like, and trust. And video allows people to get a flavor of who you are and how you speak and your mannerisms and everything about you much more quickly than if they read a long blog post or if they sat and went through your entire, like if you’re a job hunter and you went through your entire resume, seeing somebody on video, it’s just a quick consumption. So, I think that’s why it’s so popular.
Yeah, that makes sense. So, let’s start with also, yeah, it’s definitely been a lot more like that. And I think just even as a user like myself, maybe not specifically for photography, but in using videos, if I’m looking for something, I definitely want to like see what’s happening or see like the behind the scenes, like with photographers, that might be a good way to show how somebody works in terms of like their style or like how they interact with somebody.
So, that’s useful. So, is there anything in particular, like how they would go about using it maybe to increase their organic traffic? Is there a certain place or like kind of how does that work? Okay, so you can use video a lot of different places. So, number one, you can, of course, use video on your website.
And the reason why video is so great for your website is it increases dwell time. And we all know from an SEO perspective, the longer that people can stay on your website, the less likely they are to bounce. And people who bounce from your website are giving Google clues that this is not a good place.
I did not get anything out of here and you get too many of those and you’re kind of going to get pushed down on the Google search results. So, also Google search results. At the end of the day, we want to be findable and video is a way that we can be found.
If you go to Google right now and don’t go because we want you to stay on this live. But if you go to Google right now and you search for anything, so say you’re a photographer and you’re searching for maybe you want a different light to use or you know something along that lines. Maybe you want like a tripod.
Well, if you go to Google, there’s actually a tab for videos. You think about that. Google’s telling us video is very important.
And Google owns YouTube and Google of course is the biggest search engine in the world. The second one is YouTube. Maybe TikTok’s trying to give them a little bit of fight.
But as far as I know, YouTube is still the number two place. And Google owns YouTube. So, if you’re doing videos and you put them on your YouTube channel, they now are going to be found in Google.
So, if you can take those same videos and embed them on your website from YouTube into your blog post, that could be a way to direct traffic from YouTube. It’s a way to get people to stay on your blog post, read your blog post and a way to be in the Google search results. So, you kind of think of it’s like it’s serving many things.
It’s bait. It helps with your SEO. There’s so many different things that video can do.
It’s just, if you don’t do it, you’re missing out, especially because if you’re not doing it, your competitors are. Right. Yeah, exactly.
And you mentioned something about Google listing and videos. I know Google listing is a super, super high priority technique tactic that I push a lot to photographers, especially the ones that are in location, where they maybe don’t do travel photography, but they’re in their city. It’s such an important tool just because of the maps and being that it is low.
Even if you don’t have a studio, if you’re just in that city, it’s very important. How does video on the Google listing help with SEO? Oh, well, it just gets you more on the map. It’s just like, if we’re talking about a Google My Business, and I hope I’m not jumping ahead, but Google My Business allows you to, that’s what gets you on the, I forget the term, but the map of when you’re looking for a particular location and you see all the little places on the map.
Is it like the pack 10 or something? Yeah, something like that. I’m thinking snack pack. I don’t know.
That’s like Colonel Sanders. I don’t know where that brain’s coming from. But when you actually do your Google My Business listing, the things that are going to be key are like your reviews and the tab back to your website, your services and products and stuff like that.
But you can also have pictures and you can also have videos. Again, if somebody goes to your Google My Business listing and they see that more information, again, it’s that know, like, and trust factor again. It can help because I think that if one is approved, if you do a video and it’s kind of got to go within like the guidelines and there are specific guidelines for Google My Business, it has to be like, you know, under 30 seconds, there’s all these different things to have a video on your Google My Business.
So this is not where you’re going to put a two hour webinar, you want short little verse. But if your video is approved, and it meets with Google My Business guidelines, then that video gets approved by Google, and then goes on the map as live so that people know that there’s more information about you. So it just makes for a richer search result.
And you’re probably going to be just ahead of the others in the pack on the maps. So it’s really, really a great tip. Yeah, that’s cool.
Um, I think that would be excellent. I think I’ve had a couple of troubles with that. And it’s Google, I guess Google Business Profile, right? I keep catching myself too.
It’s not Google My Business anymore. They changed it. Oh, they changed it.
See? Yeah. Okay. No, that’s keep up with the Google.
It is. I just call it Google listing now. So I don’t have to worry about calling it anything but that.
That’s good. That’s good. Yeah.
Um, what are some photographers aren’t necessarily then going to be great videographers, right? Like they have a keen eye, they probably have the creative eye piece of it. But maybe they don’t use the video side. Is there any tools that you would recommend for photographers to get started with using video in their marketing? Absolutely.
I have tons of tools. But before I even go into that, I would like to just also give some credit to the fact that a photographer is used to being behind the lens. And that is probably the first shift they have to make is how do I get from behind the lens to in front of the lens.
And you know, in reality, just know that they don’t always have to be talking videos, talking head videos. And I think that’s a really good thing for people to end up, you know, understand up front of you can a video can be many different things. And I think we all immediately think, oh, it’s got to be me in front of the camera.
That’s stressful. Just know that there are different forms of video content for your brand story. You can use stock video, you can do also you can do video yourself just walking around, you know, videotaping your office, your business, people in your office, so many different things.
So I just wanted to kind of get that across because sometimes people walls go up, and they’re like, I don’t even want to do video because I wouldn’t be comfortable in front of the camera. That’s okay. There’s baby steps to get you in front of the camera.
So I just wanted to clarify that. Yeah, it’s it’s just, you know, there’s just so much and, and even to down the road, think about maybe you want to explain what you do to your clients. So you might want to have a video on your website that’s like top five tips for working with me.
When I come to do your photo shoot, we’re going to do this. So get this ready, get that ready. And it helps alleviate people or even telling people, here’s how I work with you, we’re going to set up an appointment, we’re going to do this, I’m going to come here, we’re going to grab that.
It helps, you know, thinking of all those frequently asked questions, make those into videos. And that kind of seems a little bit easier than Oh, my gosh, I’m going to have to make this major motion picture. We don’t have to do that short snippet, helpful video.
So that’s good. So what are my tools? Well, as photographers, even if you’re not used to working with video technology, you do have that creative eye. So you might often want to do what’s called making a video, but adding stock video, that kind of it’s, it’s called B roll, where you might be talking, but now all of a sudden, we’re going to have an image.
So I might be talking about, okay, when we come to your house, and I do a photo shoot, I want to invite your pets in and your dogs and your cats. Well, maybe we want to have a picture of dogs and cats running and you know, dancing about and stuff like that. That’s what’s called stock video.
So you want to have a video editor that will allow you to insert that. So I’m going to just assume that you’re working from a desktop perspective. And one of my favorite tools is a program called clip champ.
Now clip champ on the desktop. That’s the tool we’re talking about. There is also an app for iPhone called clip champ, but it’s a different beast.
So let’s just assume we’re talking about working video editing on the desktop. The reason why I like this tool is you can edit your video, any video that you take, you can add in the B roll to sit on top of your video. And you can do all sorts of great things with color, you can resize the canvas.
So you can have vertical videos, you can have square videos, you can have rectangle videos, you can do so much, so many different things on screen, text, whatever. And here’s the beauty. If you have a YouTube channel, you can publish your videos and push them straight out to YouTube, which saves you a lot of time to do that.
So really, really crisp, clean 1080 P exports for free for free. So you can start using this program. And it doesn’t matter if you’re on a Mac computer, or if you’re on a Windows computer, because it’s online browser based.
So you just have to go in. And it’s credible. It’s by Microsoft.
So you know that this is a quality program, they’re not going to just be disappearing tomorrow. So that is the one that I would recommend people use. And I know that you use it, Barb, and you are awesome with it.
Yeah, I love it. I think I can’t even believe that that was out there all this time. And then you told me about it.
And I hadn’t heard of it. Because I was just like, I’ve been missing this for so long. It’s so easy.
Yeah, and the free the free version has a ton of like, capabilities just by itself. I think the paid version, there’s a paid version, too. But like, I was using that one for so many things, it was so easy to actually add on like an end screen, like they have toolkits for that in the free version.
So it’s super easy just to put my logo at the bottom at the end, and how people could contact me. And just adding like a little bit of color to it, that kind of thing. I mean, it was, I mean, compared to I know, we were talking one time about iMovie, night and day difference.
I can’t, iMovie seems so difficult. And this was just like, that was a breeze. Easy peasy, easy peasy.
And even having transitions, you know, between, you know, maybe you want to have something fancy, like you go from this part of the video to that part of the video, you want it to slide in or fan out or do something interesting like that you want text to be, you know, type written and appearing on the screen, so many different things. And like you said, you can start with a free version, and you can actually be on the free version forever. If you decide to upgrade down the road, one of the advantages of upgrading and I’m still on the free version, by the way, so you know, you can stay on the free version forever.
But in terms of photographers, what you’ll enjoy is they have so much stock video that you can use within the program. So again, if you’re talking about you’re doing that video that I talked about, you want cats and dogs running across, you know, maybe running through the fields, some cute little dachshund or something like that. They have it, you just do a search of their stock video.
And you would know that their video, their stock video, it’s commercial free and royalty free. So you don’t have to have like any kind of little, you know, credentials on it, or you know, anything like that. It’s free to use if you have that upgrade.
So that’s kind of a, that’s a nice thing to have. Yeah. And the backgrounds, too.
I mean, they can be like nondescript or like, they’re there, there’s nothing like recognizable about it. So if you just want to do like moving shapes or something, and just keep with the brand, it can do that easily, too. Yep.
Yep. And no watermark. So you’re not going to have anything that kind of says, oh, it made by clip champ in the corner or anything like that.
It’s like your branding, your colors, your fonts, you get to choose it all. So it really is a wonderful program to use. Yeah.
That’s awesome. So do you, would you say probably out of the two, if you were to say, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to sit here and do a video about the frequently asked question that I get from my photography clients, would you say to upload that to Google or put that in a blog post? What do you think has more impact or, or not for both? Okay. I would suggest that you always upload it to a video hosting program.
So YouTube of course is the ultimate video host. And of course it’s free because we can upload as many videos as we want to, to, to, to YouTube. And that’s now a door that people can find you through because that’s, that’s what at the end of the day, that’s what marketing is about.
We want to be visible and we want to be found. So I love uploading stuff to video, sorry to you. And I never would suggest uploading to a website because you have to think about how people are accessing your website.
And so for instance, I’m huge working with WordPress, but even working with other websites, they can’t take the video. The video needs to sit somewhere else and be basically put out on the page from the other place. So if you’re not uploading to YouTube, then you want to go to other, uh, Vimeo is a great web hosting site.
Uh, Wistia is a great web hosting site. So it, and then what you’re doing, what’s called embedding your video onto your website. So that’s, that’s what I highly recommend.
Never upload to your web host, put it somewhere else and then have it embedded. So with that said, what I would suggest is if you’re writing a blog post and you want to have a video to go with the blog post, I would upload my blog post to YouTube. And then in the description on YouTube, I would want to direct people to go, you know, go for more information, go check out my blog posts where I have a giveaway or a PDF where you just would have more detail.
So that’s one form of a door directing people to your website, but then take that video and embed it in your blog posts so that people come to your blog posts. They might read it longer than on social media. You might want to have a snippet of that video and say, Oh, go watch the whole video on YouTube.
Now you’re directing them to YouTube or go read my blog post and get more information on my website. Plus also too, I’m huge on LinkedIn, but of course, you know, social media, there’s so many different channels now, but LinkedIn allows you to do articles and you can embed a YouTube video within your article. So that’s another bonus.
It’s like, if you’ve written a blog post for your website, take that same article and repurpose it on LinkedIn and then put the video in there as well at the YouTube video. So a lot of different ways you can take one form of content and keep mixing it up. Yeah.
I like the bit about the doing that and doing it in different places. So like you can take a piece of it and put that on social, for example, and bring that back. And then if you’re just doing a piece, I mean, if you have a 30 minute video, imagine how many pieces you have that you can share and repurpose and redistribute over time.
Like it’s super easy then. You don’t have to do new ones all the time. Exactly.
And a lot of people do that as a strategy where, for instance, with a LinkedIn live, what we’re doing today, which is LinkedIn live, YouTube live, Facebook live, we’re going out on many different programs and platforms today. But at the end of this, Barb is going to have a 30 minute video. She can take that 30 minute video.
She can chop it up into little sound bites, you know, little one minute segments that she puts in all the different social platforms. But also to you could have this transcribed and this could be a blog post with some of those snippets or the full snippet at the very end. So again, you can see how you can get so much bang for your buck down the road.
You might say, I think I’ll take the audio from that LinkedIn live and make it a podcast. So there is another form of content that you can do. And then you can make an audiogram, which is a totally different kind of video to advertise a podcast.
So you kind of see how it can be all very, very interconnected. Yeah, that is super helpful. I have so many takeaways now for today for my one live.
I know, here’s your, here’s your first, here’s your first live. And I’m already getting you thinking about a podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m definitely not going down that route right now.
But that is a really interesting thought about how easy that makes it and you get it all from the one thing that you you produce the one piece of content. So yep, super helpful. Okay, so I think, you know, we’re getting a little bit closer.
And I wanted to maybe ask what would be I said, where to put like, the first thing, should it be the Google listing or the blog post? And I’m wondering, then, if somebody wanted to get started with video marketing, maybe what’s the first like, couple steps or what should they they first start thinking about? Okay, so I think the first step is make sure you’re very clear on who is your who is your target market, who’s your audience, and you want to be making relevant videos for your target market for your for your audience. But also think about where are they? And where are you comfortable? So for instance, with me, I’m very, very comfortable on LinkedIn. So I don’t do I don’t do anything on Facebook.
And everybody is going to be different. So figure out what are your social channels, and maybe kind of dedicate your video to go with like, just one or two in the beginning, just so you don’t get yourself in overwhelm. Get a strategy, get a workflow, get a process.
So for instance, I would suggest, if you’re going to do a video, shoot it out to YouTube first, that would be my first thing. And YouTube likes long video content. So that’s an and social media like short video content.
So that’s where you would say, Okay, maybe I make a 10 minute video that goes out as a 10 minute video to YouTube, but I would not want to upload a 10 minute video to LinkedIn, I would chop that up. Same with Facebook, I would probably chop that up into like, you know, a two minute video or a one and a half or one minute video, something along that lines. And so start off with your big piece, but then chop it up, and then send it out to your different platform based on how that platform likes the content.
So you know, if you’re on Instagram, you want to have a square video, if you’re on LinkedIn, you probably want to have a square video. Or maybe you want to have vertical video, you know, every different platforms different tick tock, tick tock is going to be the narrow vertical videos. So you have to say, Oh, how would I resize this, which you can do with Clipchamp.
So that’s nice to know that you can resize your canvas. So that that’s an added benefit. And then also, always keep in mind accessibility of your videos.
So you want to have captions. And YouTube is amazing because YouTube will caption your videos for you. And that’s great.
It does closed captions, which is another SEO boost, because it’s a text file. And that makes your videos more findable. And that’s why you want what’s called closed captions on YouTube.
And it does it for you automatically, you just have to kind of go in and tidy them up and make sure you know, you want to make sure your name of your business is spelled right, your own personal name is spelled right, those type of things. And then when you’re on other platforms, like Instagram, or LinkedIn, or whatever, figure out how you want to do the captioning, you could take that same SRT file, which is your captioning file from YouTube, you can upload that to LinkedIn, or if now LinkedIn is doing auto captions. So you upload your video and boom, it puts the captions on, you can clean them up and change them.
So that that would be my tip, start with the big video, chop it up, figure out what platforms you want it to go to, and then make your process. Okay, I’m going to do three snippets to LinkedIn. And those three other snippets still go to Instagram, but and make them look a little bit different.
That’s not too confusing. No, that was super helpful. I think that’s a great place to start.
So do you have any final words of advice for photographers with video marketing? I think that was a great starting piece for them. And if there’s anything, maybe the biggest takeaway, I think the biggest takeaway is think about how video can save you time. So go through and look at your notes, look at your emails, look at the FAQ on your website, what are the things that people are asking you over and over again, use tools like answer the public.com. That’s a fabulous tool that you can go to on and I think it’s English based, like it’s based in the UK, the free version, but you can go in there and you can type in, you could type in photographers, and you would find out what are the questions people are asking, even just going through working with you, Barb, and figuring out the SEO keywords for, for, you know, what do you want to be found for? Think about how you could position yourself in video to be that number one search.
And that’s by having the best answer. Because that’s at the end of the day, that’s what Google’s going to do. It’s going to serve up the best answer to the questions.
So you just have to step backwards and say, what are the questions that I feel I could answer? And that really should be your video content doing that, how can you be helpful, and create those videos, and always have a plan, don’t just wing it, you don’t want to turn on a camera and just, well, here I am sitting here, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, you don’t want to do that. You always have to have a hook at the beginning of a video where you kind of get in, this is what I’m going to be talking about, like capture their attention right away. And then you want to have a call to action.
And sometimes the call to action could just be, if you can relate to this, pop in a comment below. If it’s on YouTube, you want to say subscribe to my channel, give it a like, those type of things. Because people need to be told what to do.
If you just go, thanks, they don’t do anything. That’s true. That’s very true.
All right. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Jillian. I very, very much appreciate this was super, super helpful.
If anybody wanted to work with you and get started with their photography business, their photography marketing using video inside of it, how can they reach out to you? Okay, so I’m the video easy peasy gal. So that’s my website, video easy peasy.com. So you can go there. I have a YouTube channel, same name.
And I have lots and lots of content that people can just go through and, you know, learn. I’m on LinkedIn, all in on LinkedIn. If you go look for me on Twitter, it just says go to LinkedIn.
That’s where I am. And I do offer a discovery call. So if you want to just kind of meet with me and say, here’s my goals.
We’ll just see if we can work together. If we can’t, I’ll at least give you some recommendations of where to go. Yeah, that’s awesome.
Great. And I do encourage everybody who’s thinking about it to take advantage of that discovery call was super helpful, but helpful for me to do that and then actually end up working with you because it was just so great. Lots of information.
So everybody go check her out. And yeah, she does a lot of great interviews with people in all kinds of industries. And I’ve been all over her video channel, just getting all kinds of soaking up all the information.
So lots of good stuff out there. Yay. Thank you.
Thanks again. And I hope those of you watching learned some amazing things today. And until next time, cheers.
Cheers. Bye. Thank you for sticking around.
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