Video Transcript

Hey, Chad here with Arcane Marketing once again. This is a quick little video that’s going to explain what you as a client can help your marketing agency do to help your campaign become more successful. And it really boils down to providing your marketing agency the tools they need to do their jobs better. And when they do their jobs better, your business improves online, you get more leads, more conversions and more sales.

So, I’ll just get right into it. Ask any marketing agency or social media marketing agency what they want more from their clients. And a lot of times it’s going to be images. We want pictures – pictures of what you do. What’s going on in your business, what’s going on in your clinic? We love that stuff because we can use it in your website, we can use it in your social media marketing, we can use it on your Instagram, email marketing or whatever. Images are always great, especially with Google My Business and Google Image search, image SEO is a very underrated, but very powerful tool in an SEO’s toolbox. So, a couple guidelines you need to realize in dealing with images or sending images to your marketers.

• Number 1: Take horizontal shots, take your phone or your iPad or whatever else, and turn it sideways and take the picture. With images like that, we can make them work in youtube videos better, they format better for cover images and profile images for blog posts and stuff like that. Vertical images work great with social media if you’re sharing with your friends and stuff, but they just don’t look good when you’re using them in videos especially. You get those black blocks on both sides. So, always take your images and videos horizontally.
• Second: Shoot in the highest resolution you can. Remember, a high resolution or large image can be shrunk down and it’s still going to look good. But if you take an image that’s small, with low resolution, and you try to blow it up, it’ll get all pixelated and look blurry. So, let’s keep your images high resolution.
• Finally: When it comes to images, be mindful of your subject orientation. The subject that you are shooting, being a person, a product or an item or something, let’s keep that right in the middle of the shot with enough area around it so that if we need to crop those images down, we’re not cropping into the product or the person themselves (we are not getting half headshots or anything like that). And so, there are going to be times we want close up detailed shots, but those are going to be specialty shots. But for the stuff we are looking for, for Google My Business or product landing pages or blog posts, be mindful of the subject. If we have to crop an image, we don’t want to cut your image up or cut important things out of the image. So, be mindful of your subject orientation.

Next is video. Video is great! We love video. There’s is a lot of cool things we can do with video. You can upload videos to Google Maps so that people or customers can come to Google Maps and take a look at what your business looks like. You can say “hi,” you can give little messages, it’s great. Video is fantastic, obviously, for YouTube as well.

• So, same as images, shoot your videos horizontally, don’t do it vertically. Horizontally gives us a lot more room to work with and just looks better for uploading into YouTube. Next, try to shoot your videos in 720p or higher. 1080 is great. 4k is even better. But let’s not shoot lower than 720p. When we do that, we look like we have videos back from, like, the late 90s. We are in 2019 now. So make sure you shoot in 720 or higher.
• Next, keep your videos at least 30 seconds in length. Longer videos are great, but videos shorter than 30 seconds, you just can’t get a lot of your message out. We can do stuff with them, but 30 seconds is a good amount of video. We want a little bit higher if we can depending on if the subject or the topic mandates that. But at least 30 seconds and you’re not going to lose people’s attention. 15-second videos, 10-second videos, stay away from that. Let’s keep them at 30 seconds or longer.
• Finally, use a microphone. I’m using a microphone for this video. The microphone I’m using is just a little wired lapel microphone. This costs me $20 at BestBuy. And the reason why you want to use this is that the microphone in your smartphone or your iPad just is not a high quality microphone, because it doesn’t need to be. Talking on the phone doesn’t require high fidelity sound. In fact, this is what the video sounds like when I’m not using mic. This is what it sounds like when we are using just the microphone in a phone. (This is without the microphone plugged into my smartphone. So, right now you are hearing my voice come through the microphone on the iphone. It doesn’t sound as great, you have a lot of echoing. So that’s why you want to invest in a good mic). See, notice a difference there? It sounds much, much better when you are using a microphone. You don’t even have to spend a whole heck of a lot of money on one that will work just fine.

Finally, content. Written content. This is the stuff your marketers can analyze and research and build out some really good blog content and social media content for you.

• You may subscribe to newsletters in a particular industry that get emailed to you. Forward those emails or newsletters right to your marketers. We can use that information for blog posts and we can use it for social media posts. It just helps us to know what’s going on in your industry. And a lot of times we may not have enough time to research that stuff for you. So, you can help us out by forwarding them to us when you get them. We can use that information!
• Industry Media: If you happen to be running a franchise and you have an umbrella company that is branded and running everything, a lot of times umbrella companies, the parent companies, will have media folders and media elements and files that you can use for your franchise or for your business. Things like logos, graphics, and a bunch of other things, we can use those things when we’re building YouTube videos or putting your logo on images that you send us. So, if you have access to your parent company industry media folders, please let us have access to that.
• Finally, we need to know what’s going on with you personally in your business. If you happen to be sponsoring a 5k or a 10k or you’re donating money to charity and things like that, we need to know about that stuff because your audience and your readers and your visitors to your website also want to know about that stuff. So, here at Arcane Marketing, we have a monthly questionnaire that we send out to our clients and ask them things like: What do you have going on in the next 30 days? What do you have going on in the next 60 days? 90 days? What’s the biggest success that your business had recently? What is something you can improve on? Things like that. That kind of information just really lets us get a better understanding of what’s going on with you and your company. Sometimes our clients are out of state and we can’t visit them on a regular basis, so we rely on them to let us know what’s going on in their business, what’s going on with them personally there. We can really develop content that’s richer than just writing keyword stuff content for our clients. So, monthly questionnaires, if your marketing agency doesn’t send you those, write them up yourself. Once a month just send your marketer information (i.e. Hey, here is just a quick update about our company, this is what we are doing, just want to let you know if you can use that stuff in any of your marketing). It goes a long way.

So yeah, images, video, content. If we were to get a lot more of that from each one of our clients on a monthly basis, our clients would see that the needle will move a bit faster, they’d see more engagement with their websites. I mean, you have to think of it like this – If you are a client, you’ve got a box full of tools that you’re not sharing with your marketer, well, then, your marketer is just limited to the tools they have. And sometimes those tools may just not be enough to get you the results you are looking for. So share your tools, your images, your content. We’ll take as much as we can get. Anyways, thanks a lot for watching. We appreciate it.