Brainstorm: one split second
Write script: 15 minutes
Shoot video: 30 minutes of ghastliness, 20 minutes of hiccups, 15 minutes of giggles, 15 minutes of magic and two stars are born
Edit video: 4 hours
Result: Priceless
Brainstorm: one split second
Write script: 15 minutes
Shoot video: 30 minutes of ghastliness, 20 minutes of hiccups, 15 minutes of giggles, 15 minutes of magic and two stars are born
Edit video: 4 hours
Result: Priceless
I generally don’t seek to put down competition, but this is more a matter of warning consumers and alerting video producers.
A local marketing director recently invited me in to discuss a video for her business. Afterwards she sent me an email received from a Yell.com salesman trying to sell her their video production service for listing on their site. Two videos links were provided as samples along with a list of the benefits of having video content. The information was accurate and up-to-date –the very sort of things I tell business owners.
Yell.com is a UK on-line business directory and is a way to find local businesses as it is organized by business category rather than alphabetically. There are similar services in most countries around the world and they are all, of course, on-line versions of phone books, yellow pages traditionally being for business listings, white pages for non-business listings.
But buyer, beware the video pitch. Following is my response and critique of the Yell.com video service to the Marketing Director. I’ve updated it after some more research:
I looked at the video samples–and they are not bad, but not worth the price. Small print: “from £3750…” yet the brochure lists out added costs including “additional locations”. Both those videos had multiple locations.
But more importantly, (and my internet connection is pretty good), they take a while to load before they play, which is off-putting.
They say they upload them to YouTube, BUT they don’t put any info in the YouTube listing, nor any key words or key word titles. And they don’t link back to your site. They link back to Yell. And people don’t like going in circles trying to get to a site they’re looking for!
Worse yet, those two videos had 2 and 22 views respectively in the last year. And the only way I found them was typing in the company name in YouTube. (If you know the company name, you just go to their site, don’t you).
If you scan down the feed on their YouTube site (yell.com youtube) you will see dozens and dozens of videos that have been uploaded in the last two weeks alone. Most have had no views or one view in that time. One could say it’s too soon to tell, but couple that with the cherry-picked videos sent by the salesman to the marketing director (which got 24 views between them in one year) and I find it a bit heart-breaking.
Further, their YouTube site shows 885,000 views (rounded up) in just over 8 years. That would be about 2100/weeek, 300/day. Yet the salesman told the Marketing Director they’ve done over 10,000 videos. You can do the math.
For a comparison, 3 videos I did for an industrial client in a niche market (industrial conveyors) have gotten 6500 views in the last year on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/CILogistics?feature=watch) without any particular marketing effort (no pay-per-click ads, etc.). And the cost of the videos to the client for each video was far less than the “starting at £3750” Yell videos.
If you then google some questions like “how many people use Yell?” (400,000/day vs google’s 700,000/minute) and then look at reviews of Yell…Well, it’s not very pretty.
I think it’s an old business model trying its best to survive and frankly hard-selling people on expensive video as a way of staying afloat–video that helps them more than it does their clients.
I recently had the opportunity to do a complete series of short, simple web videos for two different companies; one Telecom company and one Furniture-making company. Coincidentally, both companies required 18 different videos. One took a day to shoot, the other (slightly more involved) took two. And since I charge by a day rate, neither were expensive.
In both cases, each company set themselves apart from the competition by introducing a friendly, helpful, personal presence to their respective sites.
Beyond that, the videos, placed on various pages throughout the sites, helped customers understand the various specific unique products and services, and also (in both cases) helped the customers through the shopping cart. Now that last may not be something that everyone needs (and there’s an option to play the video or not), but in certain cases where customers, particularly older generations, may feel skittish about “identity theft” and are not really familiar with how safe purchasing can be on bonafide websites, the support was right there explaining each step and what was going to happen next.
The telecoms company took it a step further. They sent out an email promoting one of their most popular services (“Call Whisper”) with an HTML link in the email that said “Watch Video”. That link took you to the video right on the site page on that particular service.
Result? 40% sales increase in the first 30 days of the email campaign for that service.