Why Your Marketing Video Needs a Script

Video plays a huge role in many brands' marketing strategies, and for good reason. Google owns YouTube, after all, so a viral video on that platform can do wonders for your online footprint. TikTok offers similar appeal in a shorter, more casual format. Unfortunately, too many business owners think that all they need to create the next great video marketing campaign is a decent camera. Even if you invest a considerable sum on professional videography, you can still end up with a meandering, ineffective final product. What's missing, you ask? The script, I answer. Here's why you need to add this crucial piece to your video marketing puzzle.

A Script Communicates Your Message

The last thing you want when making a marketing video is to neglect the actual marketing message you want to communicate. But that's what often happens when you try to improvise your way through the spoken narration. An experienced video copywriter knows how to craft narration that places the marketing message front and center. This specialist also understands how to call for specific visuals at the perfect moments so the words and pictures work together for the most powerful impressions possible.

A Script Provides Structure

What shape will your marketing video take? Without a written framework, you may have no clue until you view the final cut -- and the process of getting to that final cut will be a needlessly messy and frustrating one. When you write the script first, you've got a bird's-eye view of the entire video that lays everything out clearly for you, your marketing department, and your video team. Does the opening feel too wordy? Do the internal points need rearranging? Do you like the transition into the closing moments? When you have a script, you can make those adjustments on paper much more easily than once the cameras start rolling.

A Script Can Save You Money

I know your first reaction to this subheader is, "Wait, hiring a professional to write a script costs money." Maybe so, but I can all but guarantee that you'd lose more money through the cracks of a sloppy production that you'd spend on a scriptwriter's services. Time really is money in the video production world. You're paying your videographer, director, editor, and any necessary crew members some pretty substantial hourly or daily wages -- the more disorganized or difficult the shoot, the more billable hours those professionals will need to put in to create a presentable final result. When they're working from a script, they're all literally on the same page. That means less confusion, fewer between-takes discussions or arguments, and less chance that the team will miss some crucial shot or other and have to schedule an expensive reshoot. Spend a little more up front so you won't end up spending a lot more later.

Now that you see the value of a professional-quality script, you're probably wondering where to find  a professional-quality scriptwriter who also knows marketing inside out. Not to worry, because I've been writing video scripts for business for 25 years. Contact me today, and let's talk about your video venture!

4 Kinds of Content Marketing That Can Boost Your Business

The world of marketing seems to grow more complex every day. Like some many-headed mythical beast, a modern-day marketing campaign often makes use of multiple media channels and platforms, not to mention multiple kinds of content, to draw their target audience into their sales funnel. With so many kinds of content marketing to choose from, which ones are most likely to make a difference in your success? Let's look at four powerful traffic drivers worth considering.

1. Blog Posts

As I've pointed out in the past, your company blog can give you an online voice that constantly reinforces your online authority and relevance as a major player in your industry. Certain types of blog posts can prove especially effective in this regard. For instance, list posts have grown immensely popular for their ability to pack several compelling points into a shareable, easy-to-digest format. (Look no further than this very post for an example.) These points don't have to well up from the depths of your own imagination; you can collect compelling bits of data from all over the Internet, if need be. I've seen entire posts that consisted simply of inspiring quotes related to a particular topic. You can also interview celebrity guests or invite them to blog on your site.

2. Infographics

Infographics combine written content and visual design into a uniquely user-friendly package. How many times have you found yourself zeroing in on a helpful infographic embedded in a larger article or web page? Just as you don't necessarily have to write all your own blog content, you don't have to have graphic design skills to create infographics for your content marketing campaign. Your copywriter can work with the graphic designer of your choice to produce infographics that make a big splash with your potential buyers.

3. Long-Form Guides

Nothing demonstrates a business's expertise more thoroughly than a detailed, practical guide that helps people understand a concept or solve a problem. These guides often take the forms of eBooks, industry reports, white papers, quarterly newsletters, or plus-sized articles. You can make these pieces available in return for the interested party's contact information or subscription. This approach builds your prospect lists and helps pre-qualify leads, especially if you end up sending your subscribers a steady stream of helpful information.

4. Videos

Did you know that people spend one-third of their online time watching videos? This form of content marketing can entertain, enlighten, and compel sales just as effectively as others that rely on writing and graphic design. Just about anything you can convey through a blog post, infographic, or guide can prove equally effective in video format. Just don't make the mistake of assuming that you can simply take some video footage, slap a voice-over narration on it, and call it a day. Videos require careful organization and structure, with narration that really sells and graphic images that support the moving pictures and reinforce your brand identity.

There are plenty of other kinds of content marketing that I could (and very well may) write about in future posts. For now, however, these four key types of content marketing should keep you busy and boost your revenue. Contact me if you need help bringing your content to life!

Fear Factor: Using Halloween in Your Marketing Content

Boo!

Halloween will be here before you know it. Actually, that's not true. You'll know it well in advance; in fact, you're probably already seeing evidence of it everywhere, from storefront displays to all the costumes and masks peering out ominously from supermarket shelves. If you want to promote your products and services as immediately and arrestingly as possible, it wouldn't hurt to add a touch of Halloween chill to your marketing content. Let's look at a couple of ways you can do just that.

Make Your Pain Statement Extra Scary

Written marketing content typically includes three main elements: a pain statement, a relief statement, and a call to action. The pain statement presents an irritating, inconvenient, frightening or embarrassing problem, dropping the readers right into the situation they're desperately seeking to avoid. The relief statement then allows you to swoop in like the cavalry with your problem-solving product or service. Finally, a call to action directs the readers to stop, reverse or prevent that agonizing issue right now by contacting you or making a purchase.

Halloween represents a golden opportunity for you to spice up your pain statement with some tried-and-true imagery. For instance, are your customers suffering from power-wasting "energy vampires" in the form of inefficient old electronics that need replacing? Do your customers hear things that go bump in the night -- things that could be silenced by your expert plumbing or HVAC services? Are your pest-control customers constantly fight off multi-legged "zombies" that keep coming back from the dead? A bit of Halloween can make your pain statement not only more clever, but also much more vivid.

Goof on Famous Halloween-ish Moments

Do you remember Jack Nicholson battering down a door with an axe to murder his family, a possessed Linda Blair's head doing a 180, or Bela Lugosi hypnotizing his unwary prey before unleashing his fangs? Of course you do; we all do. These moments have taken root deep in our popular culture -- which makes them ideal fodder for your Halloween marketing campaigns. They're so well known, in fact, that they lend themselves to parody. Think about how some of your favorite moments, images, and quotes from various scary movies could be put to good use in humorous TV and radio spots, direct mail postcards, email ads or blog articles. It's an easy, powerful way to connect with your audience through a shared experience.

Not all memorable Halloween tropes are scary ones. We've all seen hordes of children stumbling along the streets in the dark, bags in their hands, dressed as everything from ballerinas to frogs in the hopes of terrifying the local townsfolk. We're all familiar with the haunted house that scares absolutely no one, or the comedy of errors that occurs when you mistake someone inside a mask for someone else entirely. We've encountered our share of egg-laden windows and toilet paper on shrubbery. These images can all make their way into your Halloween marketing, setting the stage for whatever story you wish to tell your target market.

Give some thought to how you can put the Halloween holiday to work for your marketing purposes -- or hire a freelance copywriter to help you brainstorm. But whatever you do, do it soon, before the 31st rolls around and the monsters come out!

Audio vs. Video Script Writing: Two Different Types of Marketing Content

So you want to explore the media or radio, TV and Internet audiovisual media to promote your products, services and brand. These tools can certainly hit home with your target market. But do you want to go with full-blown video commercial spots, or focus on radio spots instead? Can't you just write one script for both media? And if not, why not?

The writing techniques you use will vary depending on whether you're employing both sight and sound or sound alone to make your points. I've written both kinds of scripts, and with very few exceptions, I've found the need to employ a different approach to each, even when both scripts are selling the same product or service. Let's look at how these two types of media stack up.

From a purely presentational viewpoint, video has some obvious advantages over audio-only formats. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then moving pictures can deliver an epic amount of information in a surprisingly short amount of time. The highly compressed nature of visual storytelling makes it ideal for TV commercials, especially when you consider the costs of prime-time advertising. It also allows you to ram home your message quickly and efficiently on YouTube and other video sites in the attention-challenged world of the Internet. A copywriter drafting a video script will typically fill one side of the page with visual descriptions, sound effects and other technical information, with dialogue and/or voiceover text positioned to match on the other side. This format gives the director, actors, and editor an easy-to-follow breakdown of the whole piece, ensuring that no essential elements get left out.

The downside of video is the sheer financial and logistical complexity that required by that extra dimension. Cameras, lighting equipment (and the skilled personnel behind them), location and/or studio sound, costumes, makeup, video editing -- you can rack up a huge bill in a hurry. You'll want to do your homework to make sure that your video spot will tap your target market and deliver substantial ROI.

That leaves radio, podcasts, "commercials on hold," and other audio-driven projects. While audio-only scripts might seem like poorer cousins compared to their sight-and-sound counterparts, the truth is that this format is both more limited and less limited than video when you know how to use it to its full potential. Sure, you can't show things over a radio speaker -- but you can suggest them. And whatever you can suggest, you can afford. You want to have Godzilla destroy the city in your radio ad? Fine. Mix together sound effects of Godzilla's distinctive roar, crowds of people screaming and muttering, and some guy yelling, "Godzilla's destroying the city!" Congratulations -- you've just achieved an effect that would cost zillions of dollars to present on the screen.

On the other hand, the need to describe things for the reader's imagination can eat up precious time, and it can sound pretty stilted as well. I once heard a radio adaptation of the film Forbidden Planet which, while generally well acted, was overstuffed with description: "Hey, what's that?" "Looks like a robot." "Interesting how he has four limbs just like we do." Et cetera. And even though radio spots cost less to run than video spots, you still have to plot your marketing strategy wisely so that the right prospects are hearing your ads at the right times.

Anyway, audio and video can both serve as powerful tools for capturing new customers and retaining old ones -- a long as each type of script is written to play to the medium's respective strengths while downplaying its weaknesses. An experienced, creative copywriter can ask for compelling visual images that won't break the budget, or suggest limitless vistas over the radio waves with a few well-chosen words. Just remember, all scripts are not created equal -- and that's how it should be!

Are You Getting the Most Value From Your Marketing Content?

For the past few Novembers, the kindly folks at Healthcare.gov have sent me friendly reminders that the window for renewing my ACA health insurance policy is now open, urging me to revisit my options for coverage. If you receive these notices too, you may have seen warnings that the premium on your current policy is expected to change, or that your current coverage levels and limits may no longer line up with new circumstances. The message? Go to the marketplace, compare the available policies and providers, and shop around to see if you can do better.

This strategy always makes good sense, not just for health insurance, but also for auto insurance, mortgage rates, apartment rental rates and terms, cable packages, and any other services or programs that might vary in their relative attractiveness to you over time. It's not about whether you're getting the lowest price; it's about whether you have the right features, arranged in the right way, to do you the most good. In short, it's about value. So maybe, while you're busy comparing the relative value of various other options, you should take another look at how well your current marketing content strategies are working. Ask yourself questions such as:

• What's the marketing ROI? What clear profit has my marketing content helped to generate in terms of direct sales, qualified leads etc? What about clear but less tangible benefits such as brand awareness, reputation management, and customer retention?
• What are my online marketing metrics telling me about response rates, bounce rates, amount of time spent on which web pages, and exactly where my target audience is dropping out of the sales funnel? Which specific chunks of content are failing to shepherd the lead generation and sales processes along?
• Am I really saving money by writing my own marketing content, or am I tying up valuable billable time and shooting my productivity in the foot?
• Which social media channels are delivering the greatest value for the time, effort, and content I pump into them -- and which ones are just sapping that energy for no return?
• Which of my marketing content activities might be better off outsourced to a third-party agency or other professional, instead of occupying a sizable percentage of my key staff on a daily basis?
• Are my marketing videos delivering their intended message with the right combination of professionalism, relevance, authority and excitement -- or am I simply throwing stuff onto YouTube in the hopes of winning the "viral lottery?"
• Is my marketing agency working from a detailed, well-crafted long-term plan, or do we seem to be spending all our time putting out fires and reversing the previous month's missteps?

Lots of time and money spent on marketing doesn't necessarily add up to marketing success. Stop and look at the strong points and weak links in your marketing setup. Maybe it's time to switch your current plan for one that will do you more good in the coming year!

Copywriting for Your Video: The Secret's in the Script

Video is the way to go. You’ll hear that from an increasing number of web developers and social media consultants these days. Uploading your marketing or informational videos to your website, YouTube and other channels can boost your online presence and create excitement about your company. And these days it’s easier than ever. I was in video production back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and creating even a short clip required a roomful of expensive editing facilities. Today you just point your iPhone in front of your face, talk/record, and post the result. Voila! Instant marketing — for better and for worse.

Video hasn’t killed the copywriting star. Why? Because more often than not, the effectiveness of a marketing video hinges on the words coming out of the presenter’s mouth. Some business owners with the gift of gab might have a magical ability to say all the perfect things in the right order in exactly X number of seconds. The rest of you, however, will find yourselves uhh-ing and umm-ing your way through multiple frustrating takes — including, in the worst case scenario, the final one. Posting such a video can do more harm than good.

So what’s the answer? Most video producers will tell you that it’s a script — a prepared marketing statement spoken directly to the camera and/or recorded as voice-over narrative. Video scriptwriters typically handle this task by creating a two-column document, with a list of shots on one side and the corresponding spoken text on the other. This not only keeps you from sounding like a doofus when you address your audience, but it also gives the director and editor a clear written blueprint for the entire video, saving time (and therefore money) in post-production.

Do you want to appear on camera or not? The great advantage of the voice-over narrative is that it allows you to record the whole thing at your leisure without having a camera pointed at your face; the editor will simply insert the completed audio wherever it needs to go in the finished product. And since you’re not on camera while you’re delivering your spiel, you don’t have to memorize anything. This is a big deal, believe me, unless you have a TelePrompter or cue cards standing by (and even then, your eyes may betray the fact that you’re reading). 

In some cases it may be worth it to hire a professional actor to serve as the face of your company, at least on video. On the other hand, if you are already known as that face, you’ll need to find a way to deliver the text yourself. A skilled copywriter will often help an on-camera novice by scripting a series of shorter speeches taken as multiple shots, as opposed to long monologues. Believe me, I’ve seen a LOT of time and money wasted because some poor non-actor was forced to nail a demanding speech in a single take.

So while it’s fantastic that video technology is cheaper and easier to work with than ever before, remember that to some extent, you still get what you pay for. And paying for a professionally-written script can make all the difference between a glorified home video and a genuinely effective marketing presentation.

Words and Pictures: Combining Copywriting with Visual Media

We live in a very visual world. Even experiencing written text is a visual process (unless of course you're reading this in Braille or listening to it through your computer's voice). Marketing has always combined words and pictures to hit prospective customers from two different directions in a coordinated attack. So let's look at how a copywriter works alongside various visual artists as part of an organization's potent creative team.

Print Design

Copywriting and graphic design have always gone hand in hand in the creation of print marketing collateral such as brochures, onesheets and media kits. But how do these two forces collaborate smoothly? In my experience, that all starts with you -- or at least with your business's marketing coordinator. You must have a clear vision of the piece's objectives (brand reinforcement, promotion of a specific service), target audience, and call to action.

Once you've got that settled, it's time to call in the troops. There are times when the visual elements of a piece are intended to dominate everything else in the message, and on those occasions it will be natural for the graphic designer to take the lead, providing the writer with a concept to draw inspiration from. Other pieces may be largely driven by the text, which means that the writer takes the lead and the designer designs around the marketing copy. Plan your production and communication pipelines accordingly to ensure an efficient, non-confusing workflow.

Web Design

The relationship between copywriting and web design can prove somewhat tricker than that between writer and graphic designer. Proper website design must accommodate all sorts of variables, from the visual elements of your brand (logo, color scheme etc.) to text layout that creates maximum impact and directs the reader to click through to the next stop along your online sales funnel. This is complicated by the fact that today's commercial websites really need to be responsive in design, scaling up or down not only in size but also in the amount of content displayed on different types of screens. The copywriter must be able to provide text that can selectively "drop ballast" from one screen resolution to the next while still providing all the key points.

The balance between copy and layout is also crucial for landing pages -- those deep product or service pages where you really drive home the sales pitch. Landing pages are always text driven, but the way that text is arranged on the page can make a huge difference. You'll want to make sure that your designer has placed the text front and center, in an ultra-legible font and surrounded by plenty of white space for easy reading. The copywriter should break his content into lots of short-ish paragraphs, punctuated by dramatic headings that the designer can present in a bold, sensationalistic manner.

Video

How does your copywriter collaborate with your video production team? First and foremost, there's the script. Even a marketing video with no dialogue or dramatic scenes needs a narrative spine, from a shot list that tells the director and videographer what to shoot to a voice-over script that makes sense of what the viewer sees. You'll want to bring your copywriter into the video production process right from the very beginning, because it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to revise a script draft, which is essentially just a blueprint for later collaborative action, than to rearrange an entire production schedule.

Once you've made your video, you still need to promote it, and here's where copywriting plays yet another essential role. If you plan on posting your video on YouTube, Kickstarter or some other online platform, your copywriter can create descriptive text to go with it on the appropriate page. This can range from a cute or exciting introductory blurb to a full page of product description and promotion. 

Anyway, you get the idea. Words and pictures go together like peanut butter and jelly in practically any marketing strategy. So assemble your go-to creative team, give them the right guidance to get them started, and then watch them deliver the total experience you need to sell your stuff!