How do you go about creating engaging video content aimed at candidates? How do you reach a large audience with your videos? How can you get viewers to apply for jobs?
To answer these questions I’ve had a chat with Aimee Bateman who is the founder of CareerCake. She’s a consultant, speaker and skills trainer, YouTube expert and she was a keynote speaker at #smlondon LIVE! 2014. She has no less than five million views across five YouTube channels to her name. You can listen to the audio podcast on iTunes and Soundcloud (embed below) or keep reading for a summary of our conversation. A longer version is available at Link Humans. Questions by me, answers by Aimee.
Why is video marketing important to recruiters?
I think firstly it goes straight back to Simon Sinek’s Ted talk, I think it’s the most viewed Ted talk on YouTube, which is that, people don’t just buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And if you want to really engage with your audience, you want to make them feel something. You know, people don’t always care what you do. There’s often lots and lots of people that do what you do and there’s always more to it than that in terms of sort of getting a customer, especially in a market place that’s so full of noise. I think Gary Vaynerchuk describes it as marketers ruin everything. And I just think that video is a great way for you to show people who you are. And people will fall in love with you whether you are a personal brand or a corporate brand. If you want people to fall in love with you, you have to show them who you are and video is a great way to do that.
And I think every brand has a story. I think everybody should humanise the brand because your customer is always going to be a human. I mean even when it comes to… You know, people talk about B2C advertising, and then they talk about B2B advertising. I think that with the revelation of social media, I think that B2B and B2C have become the same thing in my opinion and even when it’s B2B, you know, a logo is never going to buy your product. It’s still always going to be a person.
How do you create effective video content?
Yeah, I think the first thing to do is just break through the BS. And I think the first thing that people need to do is that, you know, understand that your consumer is intelligent. I think a lot of businesses, when they’re producing marketing content and video, they just forget that there’s a lot of variance in actual stuff out there and consumers are becoming more and more switched on. I think especially consumers can smell the BS a mile off now so I think it’s important that you keep it real. Keep it really, really real. But make sure that you’re adding value. If we just going to the internet to talk about your business and what you do, that’s great and you might get excited about that, but is anybody else? Well, I’m not so sure. People don’t always care about what you’re doing. It’s how what you’re doing is going to add value to me. So it’s always about adding real value.
And secondly, I think it’s really important when people are marketing their company to remember that they’re not always their customer and what might interest you and what you might think are your unique selling points aren’t always the things that your customers are going to want to know about. So asking questions… Remember, when I first started my YouTube channel about five years ago, before I created any content, I jumped onto social media platforms and started asking people what do you want to know? Like, how can I help you? And then I created my first 12 months of content that I created, was all based on what people had asked for. So I think that’s really, really important.
For example, in the recruitment space, that’s where I live, when you are promoting yourself, maybe as an employer of choice, it’s not just the case of this is what we’re doing, this is how big our business is, this is where our office is. It might be a case of well, let’s introduce some of the people that work for us. Let’s find out what they like about our business. Let’s take a video of them in the club next door cause this is where we go every Friday after work. And just keeping it really, really real but making sure you’re adding value.
What type of technical equipment do you need?
I still use the camera that I bought from eBay for 20 quid. It was a ZI Kodak camera, ZI8 it was, and I still use that. So it depends on your brand really, but I just bought it 20 quid, it was second hand on eBay and I started making YouTube videos in my living room. Yeah, I mean but that was fine for my brand. It depends on what … I suppose on how you want people to view you. But if you can afford, if you’ve got a budget just to bring in an external company or to… Even if you want to make your own, then that’s fine. I would say that the one thing that is really important is your audio. I think even if you’ve got quite a basic camera or you’re making videos on your phone or your iPad, you know, that might be alright for your brand, but never ever compromise on audio, always invest in a good camera and a good microphone.
What are your best tips and tricks for video marketing?
If I just focus on YouTube maybe, firstly, cause there’s little things that I think that there’s a lot of platforms you can use, but firstly with YouTube.
A lot of people ignore the description area but I always think it’s important to blog in my area because people do read that. So if you are going to make a really good video then you want to add keywords, obviously and a title, you want to make sure that the title is really good. So numbers work really well, so “Five steps to…” or “Three ideas for…” Q&A titles work really well. But also, yeah, blogging in your description area. So making sure that you’ve got a link on YouTube, maybe a link to your website or a link to a really funky lead page where you can capture somebody’s email address and obviously implement that into your email marketing campaign to then build relationships with people. Optimising tags, that’s quite an obvious one on YouTube.
I always talk about the 12 second rule. You know what it’s like when you meet somebody and you make your mind really, really quickly but it’s still like that in video, so you have to adopt the same stuff that you would if you were in a room with somebody. You know, if you want to ask some questions, engage with them or you still have to do that on video so I always think creating movements is really, really good with videos.
A call to action, I think a lot of people forget to do that. I definitely forgot to do that, I made lazy, lazy videos in the beginning when I was at 20,000 hits, but nobody was coming to my website and I was like, “Why not?!” But I wasn’t asking them to.
Another really wonderful thing to do, which I haven’t done but I am so going to do it, it’s on my to-do list, it’s creating a video advising people or suggesting why they should subscribe to your channel. And Gary Vaynerchuk has got an amazing on his one which is “Why you really need to subscribe to my channel”. It’s like, “Guys, seriously, if you are not subscribed to my channel, it hurts me. And it hurts my soul.” And he just talks about the value you’re going to get from subscribing to his channel. Because your subscribers are up, that’s basically people who are just out there waiting for you to upload new videos. That’s amazing. You don’t have to worry about being found. They’re going to get an email straight to their inbox when you do launch a new video, so that’s really, really good.
Encourage comments as well. I know a lot of people that produce videos for YouTube and they just think, “Oh, but I disabled the comments” And I get that, considering how many views I’ve got on YouTube, for every 30 beautiful ones for comments, I do get the odd ones somebody says that they hate my Welsh accent so much they want to punch me in the face until I bleed or, you know, something horrendous like that. I would always say that if you’re worried about comments damaging your brand, then you can always switch them to ‘Approved’. But encouraging comments, so actually saying to people, “If you’ve got any thoughts on this video, or you’ve got any questions, please…” And even point down, you know, “Please add something in the comments”.
How do you promote your videos once they are uploaded?
One of the things – obviously I would think most people listening to this will be totally familiar with – making sure that when you are producing this content, that you’re sharing them on your Google+, stick this on your Instagram, your Facebook, your Twitter. Once you get to a certain amount of hits on YouTube, that video will just promote itself. I think one of my videos, it got, it took about a year to get to 25,000 hits but then once I got to that, it’s getting about 20,000 hits every quarter now. So YouTube will do that.
You can also pay keyword advertising on Google for videos but I think it’s being really, really smart with how you’re doing it. So in terms of blogging and collaborations again. One other thing is interviews, if you’re interviewing somebody within your industry that has got quite a big social media platform, then obviously they’re going to share it with their markets and their network, and then they go back and they see your YouTube channel so they might look at your other videos. I always think that this is something that I am doing at the moment, is putting your YouTube channel or your Wistia channel in your email signature. I think that that’s a great way to get more of your videos views.
Using LinkedIn, actually embedding your videos into your profile on LinkedIn, I think a lot of people don’t tend to do that, they just use text but that’s a wonderful thing, you can add your videos in there. Allowing people to embed – not a lot of people put the embed section off, so I get people… I know for a fact that there are loads of videos, careers websites out there that have got every single one of my videos embedded into their websites. So then you think, from a commercial point of view, why would I allow that? Because there’s no reason for people ever to come into my website and buy my products. Because they can watch my stuff on other people’s websites and you know… But I do believe that allowing embeds will encourage other people to obviously share your content maybe on their blogs or their websites.
Playlists… if you can create playlists so that when one video finishes it doesn’t go to a video that YouTube have chosen, it goes to one of your videos. And making sure that you have really, really good titles as well. But I think a lot of it comes down to just finding influences within your industry that can share your content and people that are going to create real value and then using your marketing expertise and your marketing knowledge to build those relationships.
Find out more about Aimee at CareerCake.com and her main YouTube channel CareerCakeTV.
