Welcome to episode Number 70 of The Growth Booth. Today, I'm talking about leveraging video power and how you can use it to streamline operations, create content and just run a more effective business. One thing that has been sure is that over the years, video has become more and more prevalent in every single area of my business, and not just my business, but the web in general. I'll share some statistics with you in a moment which are pretty mind-blowing.

If you're sitting there listening to this podcast episode, you might be thinking, “Okay, video is great, but how can that affect me?” How can that affect you in your business? There are two major ways that I think that every single person can use video in their business. One of them is on the internal side where you're using it to run and streamline your operations, and the other is the external where you're using it to get better performance, get more traffic, get more conversions and so on and so forth. I'll dive into both of those parts and then I will share some of the tools that I use to do videos in my business. 

The other thing I want you to know is that it is easier than ever to outsource videos right now, or not even to outsource, but to use tools to create videos for you. And we'll get into using AI to create videos in another podcast episode which is focused specifically on that because I think that's interesting enough to make a whole episode about just on its own. But I want you to know that if you're thinking “I'm not interested in making videos, I don't want to be the person on the video,” don't worry about that because you can leverage video without having to do any of the being on video yourself these days.

The power of video comes a lot from its stickiness. People like to consume videos. In fact, we've seen that 54% of consumers want to see more videos from the brands that they support, and we know that video accounts for around about 70% of internet traffic, so it is absolutely huge. We also know that viewers are able to retain about 95% of a video message versus just 10% of when reading with text. So from an effectiveness standpoint, video can be incredibly effective. 

Some of the internal benefits, some of the ways that I use videos every single day with my team for things like training and onboarding, improved internal communication. Sometimes I can capture or just show someone what I need or want to happen in a short video versus trying to explain it in words. It's just so much more effective. Streamlining of processes, and this is across the whole team. It's not just me using a video to explain something to someone else, it could be someone else on the team using a video to show something to someone else.

Its effectiveness in remote working scenarios is pretty much unbeatable and that continues through to video conferencing. We use Zoom a lot, we use Skype a lot, and having the video component has become something that's quite important in my opinion, because sometimes the audio doesn't capture the whole essence of the method, the message I should say. 

Now in terms of external benefits, this is where it gets really exciting. From a content creation standpoint, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, from any basic online business standpoint, and the types of benefits they were able to see – massively enhanced customer engagement, huge wins in the search engine optimization area – videos are very sticky. People come to a website and if it's got a good video answering a question, providing a solution, then someone's going to stick around and watch that video. It's a great way that you can extend the length of time that people will stay on your website. 

From a search engine optimization standpoint, it's really interesting as well because not only do YouTube videos appear at the top of Google, but YouTube in and of itself is a massive traffic opportunity. Furthermore, if you've got a video and you embed it on a web page, any kind of a web page, and that video provides a solution or information about what the visitor is interested in, then the visitor will stick around longer on that website, which is good for your search engine rankings as well. That sends a signal back to the search engines like Google that your website is delivering value, it's delivering what the person that was searching was originally after, and you can get a boost in search engines because of that. Improved search engine optimization rankings are a big benefit of using video. 

It also allows you to reach a wider audience. One of the reasons for this is because there are people out there that just don't want to consume a written blog content these days. They want to listen or watch a video instead. It's hard to capture people's attention with a blog post nowadays, but with a video, it's much, much easier. 

Also, one of the ways that I consume video content actually is not actually necessarily by watching it, but by listening to it. I can have a video playing and I can just be listening to the message, and I sometimes do that when I'm in the gym or going from one place to the other or driving in a car. Without actually watching the video, I can still consume the audio component, so using it more like an audiobook or a podcast versus the actual video. That allows me to reach a wider audience and also allows any content creator to be able to potentially reach a wider audience. 

There are many other ways that videos can do that. Higher retention and shareability, these are big points as well. Establishing authority and establishing yourself as a thought leader, giving you more credibility in a niche. Again, it doesn't have to be your face on camera, it could be someone that you've hired or it could be no face on camera whatsoever. Having video gives an extra level of authority in lots of different ways. 

Now, in terms of boosting content creation, obviously there's a lot that can be done with AI technology now, and again I'll do an episode specifically about this, but you can create a script using something like Chat GPT, you can use another tool to read out that script, turn that script into audio. Then you can use another tool to overlay images and videos and different bits and pieces on top of the audio. 

By the time you piece it all together, you've got a start to finish video which can be engaging right on the right message, right on the right tone, and perfect to accompany a blog post. And not just a blog post, but videos are also great on ecommerce websites as well, so you can have information about the product and then down below that you can have a supplementary complementary video of some description. 

Videos are huge on websites as a way of boosting the content that they've got on them. Again, it's not just blog posts, it's also product pages and social media as well. Social media, you would have noticed that Facebook or Instagram is packed with videos and that's for a reason. It's because this is what people consume. There's a lot of synergy that you can get using video because you could create one video which could be used in lots of different ways. You've got syndication working in your favor there. 

I can create one video as an example, and I can publish it on my Facebook page, I can publish on my Instagram profile, I can publish it on my website, and maybe the website has got a blog and a product page. I can publish it in multiple places, I can slice that video up and create short little videos which can be used in other ways as well, like YouTube shorts and much, much more. I could then transcribe the video and turn it into a written form as well, which could be turned into a downloadable PDF. There are so many ways that you can syndicate and reuse the content, and this is great for providing more value and capturing a wider audience. Again, you can outsource all of this once you understand the basic process. In fact, it's actually not that much to really understand, to be able to do this. 

What are some of the essential tools and resources that you could consider if you want to dive into leveraging video in a bigger way? Anytime I'm doing screen capture on my computer, I'm almost always using Camtasia or Loom. These are great tools. Camtasia is a bit more heavy-duty and you can do a lot more editing. Loom is a free app which you can install on the Chrome browser and just on your computer in general and will allow you to record yourself on the screen. It can just record the screen or it can record the screen and a face as well as a talking head. 

There are a couple of options for creating content. I think if I'm just doing a tutorial or a message for one of the team, I normally use Loom because it's just so quick and easy. There's no editing required, it's automatically uploaded online, and it's a free tool. Does have a paid version as well. Camtasia, if I'm doing a training video or a video that's going to require a bit more editing, then Camtasia is good. Again, this is assuming that we want to do screen capture. Now beyond that, if we're doing meetings and conferences, then Zoom and Skype are really my go-tos for that. 

For filming marketing videos or product-related videos, I like to use either DSLR camera wired up with a microphone and all the bits and pieces, or you can get an enormous, I think, bang-for-your-buck in terms of quality using a smartphone. The latest iPhones are absolutely amazing for video image capture, and some of our most important videos have been done using iPhones. 

The microphone is always an important part, but you can get a wired-in lav mic, which is amazing for $20 or $30. So iPhones, I think, are a great tool to use. And then in terms of editing, after you've got a video on iPhone, there's an app that I like called Splice. I think it's around about $5 a month. It's a paid app but it allows you to do all kinds of different editing. It's pretty cool and you can make very professional looking videos with that. 

Once you've got a video rendered and exported, where do you publish it? YouTube is a great place depending on what you're doing with the video. Obviously, if you're going to be trying to get the video ranked in YouTube and get some traffic, then it needs to be on YouTube. And if you're going to do that anyway, then you can embed the YouTube video on the blog or the product page, so you're getting multiple uses out of that one. 

Another option though is Wistia. Wistia is a great way that you can upload videos to the web and control how they are displayed. It allows you to choose what type of video controls you want to have available, and many, many other things if you want the video to be able to be downloadable.  It makes it a really nice viewing experience if you're creating something like a sales video and gives you really interesting statistics and bits and pieces that you can play around with to improve the performance. 

In addition to that, when you are creating the video, I typically do it two different ways, and again, it depends on the type of video that I'm doing. Let's say I'm creating a sales video. I'll typically have notes, and this is really old school, but it works well for me. I'll typically have notes, as in bullet points on a piece of paper which is up next to the lens of the camera, and then I use that to explain whatever it is that I'm explaining. I don't normally use a teleprompter, however, they do have a place and I think if you're filming a lot of ads as an example for a product, then a teleprompter is good. Even if you're creating content videos for a niche, a teleprompter can be quite good as well. 

Beyond the tools that I use, I know that some of my team like to use Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro to edit these tools that I've never delved into, but I know they're tools that a lot of the professionals use. Beyond all of these tools, you've got a whole assortment, a whole toolbox of AI tools that exist these days as well. What we'll do is we'll do another podcast episode, specifically on AI tools, where we can dive a little bit deeper into which ones they are and how they work together to create the kinds of videos that we're using on websites today. 

I think that it's important that you do have some good tools, but they only need to be good enough. I remember that when I was getting started with video ten or 15 years ago, the videos were terrible, but they still had interesting enough content on them to get a lot of views. Over time, your first video doesn't have to be perfect. Inevitably, it won't be, but over time you can start using better and better equipment. You can start understanding the things that really move the needle with regards to creating a good video. 

A lot of the time you'll find they're really, really simple things, like a simple microphone. You don't need an expensive microphone. You can have a $20, $30 lav mic that plugs into your iPhone, and you can use that to make incredible videos. You might want to also get things like a tripod that can obviously make things a lot easier and invest in some basic lighting, but even these things are things that you can sort of bootstrap when you're getting going. 

So finally, just to sum up here, I think the points that I've really wanted to get across to you in this podcast here today is that if you're not using video already in any way in your business, then it's a huge opportunity for you to jump on because it's got internal benefits with things like training a team or showing what kind of things you need to get done. You can do that for free using the likes of Loom, but then it's got huge external benefits as well. If you're using video as a way to create content, then we know that video is exploding and I can't see this changing by the way, it continues to be the leading type of content that people actually want to consume and the stickiest content out there. 

There are so many ways that you can streamline videos and video creation through either outsourcing it or using some of the tools that I've mentioned, or as I've mentioned as well, looking towards AI to create scripting for Videos, plug that scripting into different tools that can then turn it into audio and layering over imagery over the top of that as well. 

So as a content creator, I feel like videos should be a permanent part of your toolbox. As someone who wants to improve the operations of an online business, then I think video should also be part of your toolbox because sometimes you can explain something in a 30-second video which would take you ten minutes to write an email about. 

We're going to wrap this episode up here. A little bit shorter episode today, but again, I really wanted just to hammer home some of the benefits of streamlining operations and how you can use video to create content and boost the performance of your business. This is something that we'll dive into in a lot more detail in another episode in the future. 

Thanks for listening. This is episode number 70. As always, you can learn more about this and download show notes and different bits and pieces. I'll also have a list of all the tools that we use over on The Growth Booth. Just navigate to episode number 70 for all the information, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Growth Booth.