Video is the leader when it comes to marketing content designed to drive business, increase awareness, and maximize ROI. Companies today realize the necessity of incorporating multiple types of business video into their content strategy—as well as the need to create more unique assets in order to rise above competitors. As such, marketing departments are challenged to come up with greater quantities of video while at the same time making sure that the content maintains the desired level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Video should rank highly on your content marketing checklist, so let’s look into one of the strongest forms of business video, content-driven by subject matter experts (SMEs).
Executing the perfect SME video
Self-serving talking head videos are not engaging—and can be quite cliché. These types of videos have given the term “thought leadership” a bad name, and typically lack any real value for the viewer.
When creating SME videos, the focus should always be on your audience. How will they benefit from this knowledge? And how will this content help you establish their trust?
Overall, you should focus on these three primary goals:
- Create valuable, informative, and engaging content
- Make videos for each stage of the sales cycle (covered excellently in Brightcove’s Video Marketing Master Class)
- Develop content that can be easily scaled, repurposed, and remixed
[Image courtesy of Content Monsta]
“The Content Marketer’s Dilemma: Those that create content, don’t have the knowledge, those with the knowledge don’t create.” ~ A. Lee Judge
How do you get beyond the Content Marketer’s Knowledge Gap Dilemma?
In order to close the knowledge gap found when seeking to create quality video content, you must enlist both internal and external SMEs:
- Internal experts have unique knowledge that can only come from your company. These are your company leaders, product creators, service providers, and even sales team members. Sales leaders have rehearsed their pitch on your brand’s main differentiators. They’ve been reciting it over and over again, and are basically camera-ready.
- External experts lend authority and trustworthiness to your company. These are industry analysts, partners, and customers. Companies often throw big events where they invite customers, partners, and other industry experts, along with salespeople and high-level executives. These moments are perfect for a video shoot because all of the individuals listed can provide information that your competitors will not have.
Creating base content with video
The next step is determining the base content capture format. Video provides the most fruitful type of content because by nature it consists of both visuals and text. Hence, video is where your true repurposing power lies. You can break a larger video asset down to create various types of content, such as:
- Web page content
- Articles
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- FAQ videos
- Behind-the-scenes videos
- Shareable clips
How to get high-quality content from SMEs
At Content Monsta, an Atlanta-based marketing agency, our team has developed an offering that we simply call a Video Day. This is a video shoot in which we slot a time frame to interview multiple SMEs in a company within a given day. We’ve developed a strategy and structure that empowers us to generate a large amount of quality content beyond video. Some of the strategies we use to get the content we need include:
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Prepare open-ended questions
When you know that you are going to create written articles from an interview, you can ask questions that lend themselves to that type of content. For example, listicles are a successful article format, so instead of asking a thought leader about how great their product is, you would instead ask them to provide five reasons for why their product or service is better than their competitors.
If you’re interviewing salespeople, ask them to tell you about the most common objections they hear from customers. They will give you the information, but naturally, add a positive spin, in the end, to explain how they respond to these objections.
Ask questions with sound bites in mind
Imagine the best possible quote you could take from a company CEO to post on Twitter or Facebook. What would it sound like? Use that as a point of reference to reverse engineer the interview, and ask the SME questions in long-form video content that you know you are going to be able to chop up into quotes or one-minute snippets down the line. These sound bites will be excellent for social posts.
Ask different thought leaders the same question
If you’re in a position to interview several people in different roles, ask them all the same question. That way, you’ll get different quotes and multiple options to choose from when you’re editing your video. Also, when repurposing this video into text, you will gain alternative ways to state your point. This will provide you with synonyms to your content keywords. More, but different, keywords will assist in your SEO efforts.
Always interview with a purpose: By asking the right questions, you can lay down the necessary foundation to get insightful answers for your video content. So perhaps I should say, “interview with a re-purpose!”
Through a series of videos and content created from the video material, you can get subject matter experts to share valuable information and knowledge. The best thought leadership videos will deliver value to the target audience—while helping your company gain a competitive edge.