TETRA Media Group

So you’ve just finished production on a great new marketing video, uploaded it to your Youtube channel, your website and various other social media outlets.  Then you ask yourself the question, “Is anybody really watching?”  Well the short of it is YES and data from comScore certainly supports this conclusion. There are 182 million internet users in the U.S. and in September we spent an average of 19.5 hours watching online video and engaged in 39.8 billion video views.  So I would say that 39.8 billion is a fair number to conclude that people are watching.

Now how do you get them to watch your marketing video.  That’s the question you ask before you produce.  You can’t just throw something together and expect people to watch.  After all, you are competing with millions of other viewing options.  Good marketing videos have compelling content, they demonstrate a difference between your product/service  and that of  your competition, they speak the viewer’s language and the message they provide is meaningful enough to elicit a response from the viewer.

With the advent of online video as a marketing tool and the ever increasing viewership among internet users, it makes sense that your message is on target and memorable.  Tell a good story and you will have more customers to show for it.

Well Pete Townshend and the Who must have had a premonition into where our culture was moving when they released Going Mobile on the album Who’s Next in 1971.  Long before the days of cell phones, the internet and Hi-Def, the makings of a society constantly on the move was in the works.  Today’s version of Going Mobile may not be exactly what the Rock and Roll crew from England had envisioned, but they were on the right track.

Mobility today is defined not only by how we get around, but how we receive and act on information.  Smart Phone devices and all the applications that go with them have given us the ability to access information just about wherever and whenever we want.  It’s estimated that there are 1.2 billion smart phone devices  being used world wide.  That’s nearly 20% of the world’s population. And Smart Phone users are much more likely to act with immediacy on information that they are accessing.  Marketing execs and retailers know this; that’s why you see an abundance of applications being developed that are geared specifically to influence the consumer’s immediate buying decisions.

We are Tetra Media Group, a video production company in Dallas and this is a very exciting trend for our industry. Smart phone devices do a great job playing video. By video I mean Windows Media, QuickTime, MP4, the type of video you see on YouTube.  People confuse Flash with Video.  Flash will not play on Smart Phone devices.  Video will.  That’s why we encourage our customers to go with a video file that their mobile customers can actually view.

And the future looks even brighter in this arena.  A report by Cisco estimates that by 2013,  just two years from now, 64% of the traffic on mobile devices will be video.  That’s a lot of customers watching video looking to make a purchase decision right now.  Ideally, they’ll be watching your video and not your competitors. If that’s the case, you can sing that tune along with Pete Townshend and the Who all the way to the bank.

You’ve probably heard the statistics but may not remember them.  After three days people retain just 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they see but 65% of what the hear and see.  If you understand that people have short memories and attention spans, you can develop you message in a way that helps them remember.

Video can be a great tool for delivering your message because in engages multiple senses.  For years, businesses have used video as a training tool because they can control the accuracy and consistency of the content and know that the viewer is more likely to remember. Marketing is no different.  The goal of any marketing is to keep your product or service top of mind in the buyer.  Video, whether it’s used in broadcast or social media has the ability to do that.  And when you talk about video and social media, it starts with Youtube. Youtube has been a boon for small businesses because it can get them huge exposure that previously was reserved for the big boys.

At Tetra Media Group what we have found is that businesses of all sizes are benefiting from the creative and effective uses of video.  They have learned that 65% sure sounds better than 10 or 20 and that their training and marketing efforts work much better when people remember the message.

Mark Liberio

Remember when you were a child and your Mom or Dad read you bedtime stories. Then, when you became a parent, you passed along that same practice to your children.  Our kids would always clamor for more until we ran out of storybooks and made up our own.  That was probably good for both of us. It forced us to be a little more creative and the kids actually like those stories better.

Fast forward to now.  You attend conferences, training seminars and presentations and you realize that good storytellers make terrific speakers.  The best at giving political speeches are also the best storytellers;  Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were both excellent at this skill.

The video world is no different.  Video is much more that an HD function on your Smart Phone. You may be able to capture pretty pictures, but that’s really as far as it goes. The camera doesn’t tell the story, the person or persons behind the camera does.  People are attracted to you when they make an emotional connection.  And if you can’t tell a story that creates an emotional connection, no amount of pretty pictures is going to help you.

Video is a great tool for communicating your message if you have great story behind it and you’re making an emotional connection. Make sure those are all part of the equation and you’re on your way to making video work for you.

So I have a video on my website, why do I want to put it on Youtube?  Isn’t that for kids?

Not exactly.

It’s great that you have a video on your website.  It can give viewers a unique perspective of your business and give you an edge over any competitor who doesn’t. But they have to get to your website first in order to view it.  Hosting it on Youtube gives you a ton of advantages.

First of all, Youtube is a search engine, just like Google.  As a matter of fact, it’s the number two search engine behind Google, ahead of Bing and Yahoo Search.  That means folks are going to Youtube, not only to watch funny videos, but to search for products and services like yours.  And like Google, if your video appears on that first page, chances are much greater that people will view it.  If it’s professionally done with good content, then the chances of them becoming a prospect-customer increase dramatically.

But how do I get my video on that very valuable first page?  Youtube can’t read the content in the video; you can’t hide text and think that’s going to work.  And subliminal messages don’t work either.  That’s a myth by the way. But there are things Youtube can read that help boost the video’s ranking. You can optimize a video just like a website and we’ve had great success with this.

For example, if you type in AUTO REPAIR MCKINNEY in the Youtube search bar, our client’s video comes up #1.  Same with SWIM LESSONS PLANO and PHOTOGRAPHER ALLEN TX.  All #1. These businesses now get high visibility outside their website and attract more viewers to their site because the Youtube video and the website are linked.

No, Youtube is not just for kids anymore.  Your prospects are on there searching for things they need.  Can they find you?

Shishir Mehrota, from YouTube, has posted an intriguing blog entry over on ClickZ….

Video is big just about any way you look at it. Over 4 billion people have a TV set and the average American is in front of it for over five hours a day. Video is expected to generate between $425 billion to $450 billion including ad supported, box office, pay per view, and subscription revenues, making it by far the largest media market on the planet, according to PWC media research.

Check out the full post here

Here is a link to an article by J.R. Atkins that gives you a concise and clearly written checklist to help you determine what events you should attend.

What events will lead you to more business?

Definitely worth a look!

The video production business offers some great opportunities to make a difference in people’s lives.  We can easily get caught up in the gimmicky stuff that populates YouTube: the cat that plays Mozart on the piano or the couch potato/beer slugging Lady GaGa wanabees belting out “Bad Romance”.  But come on,  don’t we all want to create something that has some lasting value?  I would hope so.  Tetra Media Group has been fortunate to work with businesses that take this forward thinking approach to their work, two of which focus specifically on health and wellness.  The first, Aqua-Fit Swim and Wellness Center,  and more recently, Victory of Life.

Both companies, in different ways, focus on fitness training for everything from cardiac and cancer patients to women who are pregnant, to the elderly, to those recovering from an injury.

In the the Victory of Life project, we shot for three days in both an in-home setting and in a fitness facility.  The in-home setting was designed for people who are homebound, possibly recovering from an illness or injury.  The

fitness facility setting was for those who have progressed and are ready for a more rigorous program.

Using three cameras shooting simultaneously, we shot 27 hours of footage that we will sync and edit into two DVD packages, one focusing on helping people that have had a cardiac event and the other, people who have had cancer.

Bobby Whisnand, the personal trainer who designed the entire program, was the instructor and trainer.  Bobby has an outstanding presence on camera and has an amazing level of passion and enthusiasm.  There were six fitness participants, including cancer survivors. They worked in teams of two or three, depending on the location.  Our in-home shoot took place at the home of one of the company owners and of course offered the challenges of creating and lighting a set, shooting in tight quarters and maintaining audio free from extraneous noise in an environment that’s not designed for it.  But we were able to overcome those issues.

We had greater flexibility shooting at the fitness facility because we had more control over lighting and sound and a larger area in which to work.  Additionally, three cameras can give you a lot more options when it comes to editing.  Although it’s more footage to review, it’s worth the effort because the final product will be a much higher quality program.

We’re now in the editing stage of this project which will take several weeks.  When it’s finished, doctors will be able to offer their cardiac and cancer patients a better alternative to becoming independent, healthy and fit. That’s what making a difference is all about and we are very proud to b a part of it.