Making Effective Video Using Your Smartphone

On 29 May 2020, ASAPS invited world-class videographer/conference speaker/ virtual presenter, Julian Mather to share his tips on how to make effective video content that aesthetic plastic surgeons can use on their websites and social platforms.

Julian is the author of ‘The Second Best Job In The World’ and started the Business Video Rebellion. He believes that you can win more business in the 2020s with just a smartphone and your smile. Good video can help you convert more inquiries into consults, help patients feel more comfortable during the journey process, improve your Google rankings and get found online. 

This information is correct as on 29 May 2020. It is important that you get specific professional advice in relation to your circumstances.  

There is a video wave coming – but how big is this video wave? According to the Wall Street Journal, there are currently one billion hours of YouTube viewed every day! We are a global society that is becoming addicted to the benefits of video. 

Most people see smartphones as a way to play Candy Crush or watch cat videos. Julian  sees it as a pocket-sized TV station; an anti-invisibility machine for your business; the Swiss army knife of business tools. 

One of Julian’s early career choices was being an army sniper where he learnt that simplicity leads to reliability which leads to a greater chance of success. This thinking has infused everything he’s done and has infused the way that he teaches video. He then went on to be a photojournalist, working for National Geographic, ABC TV and the BBC and Discovery. He went to some great places, but it was the people in front of the camera who influenced him with their thinking. His next career? Being a magician – which led him on to having a YouTube channel and that had 30 million views. Julian knows video intimately from both sides – behind the camera and presenting in front of the camera.

One of Julian’s childhood memories was of going to speech therapy lessons because he stuttered (yes, right into his 30s) until he decided that enough was enough. So, Julian understands every worry, every fear, every concern, every anxiety that you might be feeling. And he wants you to conquer this new skill of making compelling videos for your business.

The number of businesses that are using video is remarkably small. This is often because when we start making videos, we want to make the best videos right from the get-go. We want people to see our videos and say, “Whoa, look at your videos! They’re the best ones.” We get caught up in the video trends that keep changing – shoot horizontal; then vertical; now in square. Instead, Julian tells us to focus on who you are: what you think, what you believe, what you do. To use video effectively, you have to have a process of head, heart and hands. You have to clearly understand in your head the new video strategies because if you don’t you are going to miss out on what the market is asking for. You have to believe in your heart that you are the right person in the 2020s to sell your service or your product. Once you’ve got this, the video skills will become easier.

It takes 10 videos to learn how to make a good business video; if you stick at it and you make just 10 videos, the learning curve is very steep. Maybe this feels like an imposition to running your business, maybe you’re interested, maybe you’re in denial. Once you get to the acceptance phase that video is very much a part of the future of your business, things will move forward. 

Unlike in the 20th century, you no longer need to get people in to make your professional videos – it’s expensive and overproduced. Instead, you need a SMART strategy: Simple, Meaningful, Authentic, Relevant and Tight videos. This is what the marketplace is asking for. 

You have to understand that YouTube is now the world’s second biggest search engine. If you are not putting videos out there for your business, you’re risking the chance of becoming invisible because the algorithms are preferring video. Shoot and share are these new apps. They’re on your browser, they’re on your phone that enable you to send a video faster and easier than you can send an email. We can use these strategically within our business. Business grade video hosting is here.

One of the great things about video is the analytics. When you send a video, you can see how much of the video they’ve watched – three seconds or 99% of the video? This is great information to have and you can go further. You can see the bits they’ve skipped and you can see the bits they’ve re-watched over and over. That is powerful information for you to take into the next phase of your sales or engagement process.

The workforce is getting younger. In about five years time, 75% of the workforce is going to be millennials and Gen Z. They are bringing their habits with them. You ask any Gen Z what their number one choice is for communication is, it’s video. You’ve got to get onboard with this. Customer behaviour is changing; digital is now the new window-shopping. It’s the new sales clerk. It’s the new instruction manual. We are going to the self-serve, online mindset. If you want to buy something, you go online. You want to fix up your room and make it look good, you go online for early inspiration ideas and then you go and look at testimonials. We’re looking for genuine human-to-human communication.

We’re addicted to the convenience of smartphones. Smartphones are the future of photography and video, and it’s making it dummy-proof. The video age is here, and the longer that you resist getting into it, the longer you chance falling behind competitors.

How are you going to use this agile, inexpensive and authentic way of using video? Please understand you can’t win this new game if you play by the old rules of outsourcing the production of slow, expensive, overproduced videos. Customers are hungry for truth and authenticity. Big fancy cameras are not going to make you better videos. They are fine if you need a glossy homepage video, but four out of five times, you need an agile, inexpensive, authentic 21st century video, and you can do that on that wonderful tool you have called your smartphone. 

We buy from people that we know, like and trust and that is one of video’s greatest strengths: it puts us face-to-face. It shortens the sales cycle. Your brand awareness is going to jump as you become visible.

Nine Accelerators: 

These are nine things that are going to get video going in your business faster. They’re going to be a smart strategy. This is all based around your head: about leveraging your smartphone and your heart: about telling the truth and being authentic.

Moving from Tactile to Strategic: Five years ago if we were having a discussion about video, it would be, “I’m going to have a video on my homepage on my website.” And that would be that. Tick. It was tactile. You just had to do one thing. Now, it’s strategic – you’ve got to know how to use videos strategically within your business if you’re going to win at this game. 

Virtual is synchronous. It means you have to be here and I have to be here (everyone needs to be present) for this to work. Video is asynchronous. It can be consumed at a time that is convenient to your customer, to you, to me and that is the big value of video. So, how can we use these strategically? 

To make SMART videos, you need three things:

1. You need a smartphone, which all of us have.
2.  You need a free shoot and share app. Julian recommends Loom, but there’s others like Bonjoro, BombBomb, etc.  
3. You need video hosting. You can host them for free on YouTube but you need to be able to embed them on a page on your website. If you want something professional for a business, try Easy Web Video that offers good value. You are able to host your videos in an unbranded, secure way for $5.00 a month. 

Generally, when people are inquiring about your practice, the first thing you send them is some text. A simple way to improve this is through video. Introduce your business, who you are, your staff through short 60-second videos. Customers can see you and get the measure of you way more than you can with a lot of text. 

If someone makes an enquiry, simply use the Loom app on your desktop to record a friendly message and send it. Then, down below is a chat box where you can start a conversation below this video. In the paid version, you can do drawings and annotations to explain procedures, etc. You can reassure clients and save time once you get this process in place.

You need to shop around to find out what security apps like Loom offer. Some are configured to have the videos stored on your server; some can be stored on theirs. Shop around till you find something that suits your needs.  

On Loom, your videos are stored on a page which will have a library of all your videos. The free version gives you 25 videos; when you hit 26, it deletes the first one and so on. The paid version starts at $10.00 a month and gives you unlimited video storage and other features. Do you research on all these apps to see what suits your needs.

Most of us tell ourselves that we’re not good at video, and it stops us from making the video. We hate how we sound/look/move. It’s time to stop making decisions about how bad you are on video based upon a lot of incorrect assumptions.

What sort of microphone do I need? 

You don’t need a fancy microphone. You can start with a microphone in your desk or your webcam. You can start with your phone. Listen for background sound. If you’ve got a really noisy air conditioning duct, or if you’re sitting next to a busy main road where there’s accelerating traffic, getting rid of those things is  going to give you far greater returns in your audio quality than worrying about if you’ve got the right microphone. If you’re in an office with plain walls and hard desks, you need to soften it up a bit to improve the sound quality. Add a rug, soft furnishings or curtains on the back wall to break up the sound.

Julian’s recommendation is the Australian brand Rode – the microphone is called a Smart Lav (Lav is short for the French word for a clip-on microphone, and smart means it’s designed for a smartphone). You can clip it on, run the cable down your front and clip it straight into your phone. There are ones which you can plug straight into your USB on your computer. They cost $80 to $100.

What light do I need? 

Yes, you can get some lights but the easiest thing to start when you’re making videos is to look out a window. Let natural light come in. The second thing you do is you look up. Make sure that there’s no light above you, like a down light, because it just creates horrible dark shadows under the eyes. If you do need a light, put a desk lamp straight over the top of your camera, shining in your eyes. If you think it’s too bright, it means it’s working. That’s a small price to pay if we want to be on video. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.

Level, locate and lock

Get out of the idea that you need to handhold everything. There’s many easy ways that you can lock off your phone. Just rest it up against something or use your webcam.

Level your camera up to eye level, whether it’s a webcam, whether you’ve got a big fancy camera, it doesn’t matter. You get it up to eye level. You can’t expect your customers to connect with you if you’re not connecting with them. Many of us use the selfie camera to make a video since you can look at yourself on the screen and then hit ‘record’. The problem with that is that’s not where your lens is on the camera. Your lens is actually off to the side. 

So, you’ve got to locate your camera on a smartphone. To do this, put it in selfie mode, take your finger and keep poking around the holes  until you see a big finger come over the lens – that’s your camera. Mark it (a simple little wedge of tape that looks like an arrow will do) and now you know where to look and lock onto the lens.

Here’s another hack: Take a picture of someone that you’d like to speak to (e.g. Lady Gaga) Glue it to cardboard, and put a hole in the middle of her eyes. This goes over your phone. That hole sits over the lens or over your webcam and now if I’m looking at the cardboard cutout, you know that you’re connecting with your customer.

Another problem to fix is that even if we’ve locked on to the lens, next to it is our face on the screen looking back at us. When you’re communicating with a group of people and you see these eyes looking back at you just and all of a sudden you’re looking at someone/something in your peripheral vision and you’re looking shifty, which is even worse. All you’ve got to do is cover your screen. Put a Post-It note on it, fold a bit of paper or a hanky over it. Level, locate and lock will improve your videos tenfold. 

People do business with people they know, like and trust or KLT.  When we make videos, we often forget to do the one thing that builds KLT – smile. It gets results. As Dr Seuss said, “Smiling is infectious. You can catch it like the ‘flu. Someone smiled at me today, and I started smiling, too.”  

The next thing you want to do when you’re presenting on camera is to show something. Share your screen. Share a diagram,  utilise the power of video. Please keep the jargon out of your talk – get rid of that jargon monoxide poisoning.

Don’t forget to caption your videos. Captioning (a word-for-word translation) is now expected since a lot of people watch videos without the sound on. In places like the USA, there’s federal requirements about making sure that your captioning is correct. And now artificial intelligence (AI) is doing this. You can upload your video to a site and it costs you $.25 a minute for the transcription, which can be done in two minutes flat! 

Keep your audience’s age in mind so that you change your language accordingly. If younger audiences are on a platform like Instagram, and Instagram requires square videos, tailor your videos to suit this. You could shoot in widescreen but keep everything to the centre of the frame so that if it needs to be converted to a square video, it’s still got the main subject matter in the middle. 

When it comes to your background for your video, don’t stress too much about it. You don’t have to rearrange your whole office. Go for a plain white wall. Or you can simply get a coloured panel in the background. If you make the colour of the panel you put on your back wall the same as your logo colour, it will look amazing. 

If you’re still worried about making videos, get a smartphone teleprompter. You now have a voice-activated teleprompter – you can put this on your screen and, as you talk, the words follow you. The phone is listening to you speak and it advances the script so you can pause and relax, and the words are always there rather than it going at a constant speed that you have to keep up with.

Now that you’ve finally made your 10 videos, how regularly should you post them? This comes down to whether you have a social media strategy. Use video in your marketing and don’t forget to use videos in your sales. Make a list of questions your sales team keeps getting asked and make videos as answers to them. Post them on the FAQs section of your website and when someone makes an enquiry, send them to the page. 

These are small but significant things that you can do to use video to get the maximum leverage for your business. What are you waiting for?