Loads of companies are starting to wonder: “How should I do online video?” It’s not enough to just say, “We’re going to go and do video,” because it begs the question, “What kind of content should we create?”

And so today I just want to talk through a number of the different kinds of styles of video that you should be making as a business and explain what kind of style that content looks like, where it should be hosted, and all that kind of thing.

So I want to start with things that you go and make in-house. If you can go and purchase a camera, a set of lights, and a microphone like this one here, then you can go and create all these different things, and it won’t cost you too much money. You just need a little bit of editing skill. If you need to hire in some freelance talent to do that, then that’s absolutely fine.

The first one of these is product videos. What I’m talking about here is really videos that are going to help improve conversions on a specific page. Videos designed to maybe help you take a customer from that point of initial interest saying, “Am I going to buy this product,” to definitely knowing that it’s the right thing that they want to buy and pressing the Add to Cart button.

So what do these look like? Well, I think they look a little bit like this.
“Have a look at this Roger Mozbot toy. It comes in a really, really nicely branded box. It has fully posable arms, and, actually, it will help find all the links on the Web so you can work out who’s linking to you.”

With product videos, it’s incredibly important to make sure that you host them securely on your own site and you do not put them on places like YouTube or Vimeo. That’s because they’re not really relevant for an audience on YouTube or Vimeo or any of those social platforms. They should be really secured to your page using a hosting solution like Wistia, for example, that Moz use, which you can make sure the video is only on your site. Then customers searching in the Google search results will find the version of the video on your site rather than the version on YouTube, where it’s very, very hard for them then to go back to your site and convert. So make sure you’re self-hosting those videos.

Then the next kind of content you can do is tutorials and how-tos. The value of these videos is that they can be incredibly useful to build up your brand with an audience on YouTube. So I’m going to explain exactly the kind of style that you should be creating, that’s not too heavily branded, very informational, and not focused on selling.

Like this. “To pretend to be Rand Fishkin, start with a plaid shirt, and then you need some glasses. After that, it’s about waving your arms around lots and just change your voice slightly, like this. ‘Howdy everybody! Welcome Moz fans. It’s great to be here.”

You can also do a lot of thought-leadership content. Thought-leadership content can get you links, it can get you great presence on YouTube, help you build your brand as well, and demonstrate that you’re really an expert in whatever field it is you work in.

What do thought leadership videos look like? Well, exactly like this kind of thing here, right, Whiteboard Friday.

“Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I’m wearing flannel, and I want to talk to you about one of my favorite inbound marketing strategies, and that is buying links.”

Then there are video news releases that you can do as well. A video news release is a video that you will send out with a normal press release, and the real value of these is that they will help you get to the top of an editor’s pile at a newspaper or a website, wherever, get to the top of the pile much, much better than just a normal, standard text release.

So how do you create those? Well, actually, they’re very similar in style to thought-leadership videos. It’s just that you need to be much more product-focused and concentrate on that hook and why the specific news in question is exciting. Like this. “Breaking news from Moz HQ. We’re rebranding Moz to Zow.”

If you work for a company with a bit more budget, then you can go and create content that’s on this list here. It’s normally best to go and hire a video production company to do this stuff, rather than doing it in-house, because the quality will really, really matter for the success of what this content looks like.

So the first one is creative stories, and really what I mean by creative stories is what’s often referred to as like viral video or stuff that you’re going to put on social platforms, like YouTube and Vimeo, to help build your brand and help more eyeballs understand you and get to know more about your business.

What do they look like? Well, it’s this kind of thing. [plays video]

You can also create link bait. Now, link bait is not really the same as this viral, created video, because it’s much more focused on providing a specific value to a group of people, a specific audience, who are then going to link back to you in a relevant niche. So I think this content normally looks a little bit more like this. [plays video]

And lastly, if you’ve got a good budget, I recommend everybody goes out and creates ads, but not ads like TV ads. Actually, ads that are going to be useful on YouTube, and really I think that those have to be ads advertising softer things, not just demanding sales. So what I really like to do is advertise content. If you’ve got a great blog or you’ve got a good email list, why not create an advert and target people on YouTube and tell them why they should come and explore your content and learn more about your business and start to engage with all those inbound marketing channels that you’re creating content for.

So what does this look like? Well, I think it’s this kind of thing. “Howdy everybody. Come and check out the Moz Blog. We have loads and loads of free content marketing and inbound stuff and real company shit, and oh, it’s amazing.”

And lastly, if you have absolutely no budget at all, then I recommend having a play with Vine. There’s going to be great rewards for the kind of companies that work out how to do something exciting with Vine and Instagram video. We don’t know which one’s going to be more dominant yet, so I recommend you have a play and do some really cool stuff and see what you can come up with. A bit like this. [plays video]

And you can also do Google+ Hangout on Air. All you need to do Google+
Hangout on Air is have a laptop with a webcam and a microphone. I’m sure everybody has one of these. This is a great way to actually build your brand through doing some nice thought leadership kind of content very, very, very cheaply.

Thank you very much. I hope you found that useful.