Why Video

There is a picture I use when I talk about this. An empty room. A nameplate on a desk. Nobody in the frame. Digitally, that is what your organization looks like to anyone who goes looking for you online and finds no video.

That is not a scare tactic. It is just what the medium has become. Video is how people decide whether to trust a business before they ever talk to anyone who works there.

Here is why it matters — and why it is worth doing properly.

The ten reasons

1. Video is a marketing multiplier. 95% of customers check out a product or a company online before they buy, whether they heard about you from a referral, a billboard, the radio or a TV spot. So the real question is not whether people are looking. It is what you have for them to find. Landing pages with video convert three times more visitors than pages without. The same marketing dollars, doing three times the work. Your return stops being a question of if.

2. Video lasts. A video you make this year can still be earning for you in five. Almost nothing else in marketing can say that. The money goes out once and the asset keeps paying.

3. Your hidden assets become promotional assets. Every business has things that took years of sweat and money to build and that only your existing customers ever see. The owner’s passion. The people you employ. The showroom. The way you actually work. Put those on camera and they stop being hidden. Use what you already built to bring new people in the door, not just to hold on to the ones you have.

4. Video establishes trust before the first meeting. The hardest part of selling is getting someone to trust you, and the coldest moment in any sales process is the first one. A video warms it. Our brains did not evolve with screens in them, so the primal part of us does not draw a hard line between meeting someone on video and meeting them in person. You can create real familiarity with a prospect before you have ever sat down with them. A cold meeting stops being cold.

5. Video creates efficiencies. If your staff answer the same questions all day, give them a video to send instead. If you have training requirements — health and safety, quality control, onboarding — video reinforces the process better than a document anybody skims. You are not just making more money. You are freeing up the people who were spending their day repeating themselves.

6. Video gives local business its advantage back. A small business cannot outspend a big box. It can out-connect one. The local tie-ins, the people, the places only people who live there know about — a good video is the best tool there is for turning that into customers who choose the local option on purpose.

7. Video puts a face on a big organization. Nobody deals with a corporation. They deal with the person at the counter or the person who comes to the door. Introduce your frontline people on camera and the brand stops being faceless. You already hired the personalities. Let them do some of the work.

8. Video tells a customer what to expect. The step between interest and signing is where people stall, because they do not know what they are getting into. A video that walks them through it — how long it takes, how much inconvenience there is, what they get at the end — takes the fear out of that step. The same video trains your salespeople or your installers.

9. One shoot, many tools. Video is not one thing. It is a set of tools for different points in the funnel: a short piece to bring people in, a longer one on the site to close. One for younger buyers, one for older ones. Plan them together, produce them at the same time, and the extra cost is small. Plan them separately and you pay full price twice.

10. Video feeds everything else you do. Social media, snippets released over weeks or months, crowdfunding campaigns, how-to content. A properly made video gives you material to run for years, and it makes the rest of your online spending work harder.

Why a phone will not do the job

Phones are good now. You can shoot and even edit on one. But the gap between a phone video and a professional one is not the camera. It is everything around it.

First impressions. The problem with amateur video is not that it is always bad — some of it is quite good. The problem is that it is almost never planned to do a job. Video is often your first contact with a prospect. It should represent your organization properly.

Planning. A professional producer plans a production so that it does what you need it to do. Who the audience is. What you need them to do. What can be shot at the same time so that one day of shooting yields several finished pieces. That planning is most of the value, and it is the part nobody sees.

Brand building. A consistent identity is how a business starts to look like a serious player in its industry. Video is where that consistency either shows or does not.

Differentiation. Every business needs to be different from its competition. A planned video does that better than anything else, because the difference is designed into it rather than hoped for. We do the research, ask the questions, and then show you how the approaches vary.

Quality. Lighting is the thing DIY video always skips, and it is what creates mood and the impression of quality. Audio matters more than picture — most people will sit through a soft image and almost nobody will sit through bad sound. And gear is more than a sensor: lenses, camera height and angles, teleprompter, dynamic range, light metering, wireless mics.

Editing. Pacing, transitions, colour correction, audio mix, graphics, titles, logos, brand colours. Most people who edit their own video have never been taught any of it, and the finished piece shows it.

Your competition already has. This is the plainest reason of all. Your competition most likely uses professional video, and they are one click away from your customer. Better to be the business that takes advantage of the quality bias people bring to video than the one that suffers from it.

Why Bizbio

This part is always the hardest for me to write. Canadian sensibilities do not sit well with self-promotion. But the honest answer to “why us” is worth setting down.

Bryan Bakker. Over thirty years writing original scripts and nearly twenty years producing films for the corporate sector. Before video he worked in farming, construction, manufacturing, as a service provider and as a union steward. Since then his films have screened at international film festivals; he has won video contests for clients, including one worth over ten thousand US dollars; produced two local Rogers TV shows; and worked on major international events for Tourism London, including directing and editing the 2013 International Figure Skating Championship legacy video. He has produced content for local media including “Elgin Update” for The Weekly News in St. Thomas, and ongoing client content for Municipal World. In 2003 he won the nomination to run as a candidate in the Ontario provincial election. In 2013 and 2014 he created and ran an internationally successful horror fantasy festival and remains board chair of the Tom Zombie Historical Society. He founded Bizbio in 2012 and has worked with corporate clients full time since.

Story. A video nobody watches is worth nothing. We use every tool storytelling gives us, because the only measure that matters is whether someone watches to the end and then shares it. Stories carry a viewer from one scene to the next, past their own cynicism. And just like a good website, the point is to get the phone to ring. That is where our focus stays.

Connections. We know the best people in the business — crews, post-production specialists, actors, voice talent. We can put together the right team for any size of job and any size of budget.

Research. We take the time to learn a client’s business properly so that the advice is worth having. We listen, and we build the idea around what you actually need.

Above and beyond. We like our clients and we like watching them succeed. Everything we make represents you and it represents us. We act accordingly.

Experience. Hundreds of videos, every industry, and a depth of knowledge about how businesses actually operate. That means we usually anticipate what you need before you say it, which means fewer revisions and less of your time spent managing us.

The part that is not an argument

One client got a phone call one day from somebody who talked to him like an old friend. He had never met the man. The prospect had simply watched a video we made for him, which one of his own clients had emailed him a link to.

Think about what that is worth. Every first encounter with a prospect arriving already warm — closer to a second or third meeting, where you are already shining in their eyes.

That is the whole case for video, really. It turns cold meetings into warm ones, and it keeps doing it long after the shoot is over.

If you have been meaning to add video to what you do and have not got round to it, this is the moment. Call or email and tell me what you have in mind. I would like to hear it.