The most efficient & easiest content marketing approach?

Video slideshows of phone photography with an embedded Zoom interview

Watch the video below

According to one study “the average viewer remembers 95% of a message when it is watched, whereas only 10% when read.”

And: “Users spend 88% more time on a website that has video.”

Finally: “Video generates 1200% more shares than both images and text.”

With that in mind, below is the most efficient video we’ve ever produced.

• Customer took pictures with their iPhone and sent them to me

  • Note: these were taken the middle of winter

• I used Adobe Lightroom to punch up the colors

• I conducted a Zoom interview with the owner of the company and captured a video backstory in less than 10 minutes

• I was able to build the video with these components in just over an hour

  • Edit Zoom interview down to a minute

  • Overlay Zoom interview over iPhone photos presented as a slideshow with “Ken Burn” style slow zooms and pans

Below: Watch Tom, the president of Metaledge tell me about this project after sending me pics he took with his iPhone. It’s a video that looks high quality and feels authentic and was easy to capture and produce.

Proposal

Create some simple guidelines for your folks in the field for capturing pictures with their iPhones or Samsung Galaxy phones. Turn your company into embedded photo journalists — it’s easier than ever.

Project owners give 10 minute or less recorded Zoom interviews where they have a conversation, telling someone (like me :) about the project or product. This also works well with customers providing the interview (i.e. my customer’s customer).

Edit the Zoom interview down to 60 seconds or less (easiest to share on all Social Media channels) and eliminate any talking by the interviewer. We only see and hear the interviewee having the conversation — our website or social media visitor becomes the person on the other side of the conversation.

Add a music bed to:

• Help hide the audio cuts and clean-ups

• Reinforce with audio, the movement seen in the zooms and pans of the static visuals to help create the sense of movement around the static shots

• Help enhance the messaging and story behind the project (audio branding)

Size down the video of the interviewee since the webcam video is typically lower quality — but we still want to see the person talking — see a real face. Most people are also happiest when their picture or video is not the center of attention.

Use Adobe Lightroom to punch up the colors of the phone photography along with other minor image enhancement and color correction patterns we establish for all slideshow videos.

Add short copy titles to support what we’re seeing.

Document and train marketing interns in performing the Zoom video edits, the static image post processing and final video assembly and then posting to social and email.