How to Create a Culture of Video

For any strategy to truly stick at your organization, you need team-wide buy-in.

Without buy-in, you may not get the time, resources, or support needed to execute effectively, and this is even more essential for something like video marketing that needs the time and, frankly, faces of people on your team.

To get this buy-in, we’ve found you need to ingrain video into your culture. That means everyone at the organization sees the overarching goal of using video, how they can aid in creating it, and what they can do to support it.

Overall, it becomes a part of everything they do, where applicable. Everyone is comfortable on camera and makes time for doing so. They don’t deprioritize it for other things or refuse to take part.

So how do you create this culture?

Over the last five years, we’ve found the seven actions I share here are essential to creating a culture of video.

The interesting thing is these aren’t specific to just video. They can be applied to anything new you’re adopting in your company long-term.

Using these key strategies, if we change the way we look at initiatives and approach them as long-term results with long-term efforts rather than quick wins or hacks, then we can set ourselves up for success.

1. Show the value of video to each specific role

Just because you tell your staff that something is important doesn’t mean they’ll believe it.

If you want there to be buy-in for video, you have to show each person why it’s important for them specifically, not just the organization. You need to explain how it will end up benefiting them and ultimately helping them with their day-to-day job.

For example, if you’re introducing video to your sales team, be clear about exactly how incorporating video is going to help them with daily challenges, such as increasing email open rates, standing out from the competition, increasing the number of appointments booked, and cutting down on the time it takes to craft follow-up emails.

Ultimately you want to show the positive impact it’s going to have on them hitting their sales goals and how it can make their lives easier.

Do this with everyone on your team, and there will be no room for objections.

2. Hold a proper training

If you were to send your team out to use a new tool or tactic without training, what do you think would happen?

They probably wouldn’t do it, or they wouldn’t do it right.

In the case of video, we’re dealing with something that many people are already reluctant about.

Imagine asking your team to go out and start creating video with zero direction. Not only would they likely be uncomfortable on camera, but they might also be fearful of what they can and can’t say, not knowing what the company would approve of.

Proper training for video needs to take place and include:

• Expectations your company has for people on video.
• How and when video should be used.
• How to make people feel comfortable and confident on camera.
• Video best practices.
• Processes for making videos with marketing.

It also needs to include training around having the right tools and how to use them and incorporate them into the day-to-day operations of each team. Speaking of which…

3. Buy the right tools

The right tool for the job makes that job easier, more efficient, and more effective.

When it comes to video, you likely already have one of the right tools: a laptop or smartphone. For sales videos (which tend to be less produced, but more on that later), you don’t need much more. But when it comes to video marketing, you may also want to consider employing:

• A lighting kit
• A backdrop
• A microphone or recording device
• Editing software
• Software that allows you to create 1-1 videos
• A video host

While there are certainly low-cost ways to create great video, investing in equipment will help you create professional and high-quality videos for many different uses.

When it comes to video software, we are partnered with Vidyard and believe it encompasses everything you need in a tool for video, such as the ability to see who is watching your video and how much they’ve watched of it, as well as the ability to easily add video into your email outreach and add calls-to-action throughout your videos.

4. Put strategies in place

If you were to ask everyone at your organization what a great video strategy is, you likely would get very different answers.

The problem is if everyone has a different idea of what a great video strategy is, it’s difficult to see success.

The right video strategy is not self-promotional, but rather uses video as a way to answer all of your prospect's questions, creating transparency and trust.

People do business with organizations that they trust and like. And if you’re able to be there to answer all the questions they have in their buying process and beyond, you have a leg up.

We find that typically involves creating videos around what we call in They Ask, You Answer, The Big 5 (Cost and Pricing, Problems, Comparisons Best-of lists, and Reviews), and The Selling 7 (Landing Page videos, 80% videos, Employee Bio videos, Product/Service videos, Cost videos, Social Proof/Testimonial videos, and “Claims We Make” videos).

If you don’t have a mutual understanding of this strategy across your team,  you don’t stand a chance of having a good video culture.

We’re talking leadership, sales, marketing, and services. Anyone who is interacting with customers needs to understand The Selling 7 and The Big 5 and why they are important.

5. Set appropriate and measurable goals

How often do we run our businesses where we think about the outcomes and set our goals based on that?

As we mentioned earlier, you can’t judge new videos based on ROI over the first couple of months. You likely won’t have enough data, the right tracking systems, or be using video properly enough to see a return that quickly.

The things you should be looking at when it comes to video success for marketing are:

• how often people click on your videos.
• how much they watch.
• how much it has improved conversions.

This data will show you if people are consuming your video content, and if they are, whether or not it’s resonating and encouraging them to take action.

For sales, you might look at:

• how many people open your videos in your emails.
• how many actually watch them.
• how many objections and fears don’t come up as often when your prospects have watched the videos.

If you want to stoke the flames of your video culture, you also have to do a good job of communicating your progress with video to your organization. The more frequently you’re updating the staff, the more you’re able to show the importance of it.

This is especially great when you have competitive people on your team. You want to give your most ambitious employees an opportunity to excel and take their own journey with video rather than waiting for the organization to tell them what to do.

There is power in having others on the team share their stories and the efficiencies and success it brought to their job. It will only encourage others to want to be a part of it.

It also shows that it’s not a fad, but something the company takes seriously and is investing in.

When people are proud of the videos they are creating, and when people see the wins video is bringing in, they are more likely to want to be a part of it. This will help build a strong culture of video much faster by making others want to get involved and become a part of that culture.

6. Have an efficient review process

Imagine if every email you sent out had to be reviewed by more than one person.

How would it impact how quickly you could respond to someone or how often you were able to send emails out? It would be a nightmare. In fact, you’d probably look for opportunities to not send out emails.

This happens far too often with video as well.

If you are looking for a quick way to kill video culture, get multiple people involved with reviewing content before videos are used or sent out.

When organizations first get started with video, there tends to be too many layers of review. People want to audit every video for accuracy and brand reception.

If videos have to wait for multiple approvals, it can cause a major delay in getting things done, and it can also quash anything from even getting published or used.

It’s imperative that you have an efficient review process to keep things moving along.

This means making sure those involved in creating videos know what videos should look like and what the standards are ahead of time.

When employees know there aren’t too many hoops to jump through, it helps make the review process more efficient and empowers people to create videos.

7. Hire someone to own and champion it

In order to establish a true culture of video, you need to have someone who owns it in-house for you.

That doesn’t just mean having someone who helps with filming and editing the videos, but someone who is willing to own it completely — creating the videos, but also helping other people feel comfortable on camera and forming strategy.

We usually call this a videographer or video manager.

Ultimately, these aren’t responsibilities that should be put on someone on your team with an already full workload.

When this happens, there’s always the risk that other work they are responsible for is going to take precedence and video will quickly be pushed aside.

When you have someone whose sole responsibility is video, there are fewer distractions to keep things from getting done.

Think about what you could accomplish with video if someone had 40 hours a week to dedicate to it versus 10 hours. They would be able to create and publish more videos, as well as quickly shift strategy on videos, if needed.

In the next chapter, we’ll get into how to hire for this role.