Video marketing that earns sales, not just views

Video is the format clients most often want and most often do badly. The pattern is a large one-off spend on a polished brand film nobody watches, followed by nothing for two years.

Here is the version that works at ordinary budgets.

The four videos worth making

The explainer on the decision page. Ninety seconds to two minutes, on the service or product page, answering: what is this, who is it for, what does it cost, what happens next. This is the highest-return video for most businesses and usually the last one they make. On the client pages where we have added one, time on page and enquiry rate both rose measurably.

The proof video. A finished project, a before and after, a client saying in their own words what changed. Ninety seconds. Handheld is fine. Authenticity beats polish by a wide margin here, because an over-produced testimonial reads as an advertisement, which is exactly what it is.

The answer video. One common question, answered in sixty to ninety seconds by whoever actually answers it. Cheap to make in batches: book two hours, record eight. They work on the website, in email replies and as social posts.

The process video. How the work gets done. Useful in categories where the customer is nervous about what they are buying: building, medical, anything involving their home or their data.

Notice what is not on the list. The brand film. We are not against them. They are spending that should come after the four above, not before.

Make it without a production budget

A phone from the last three years shoots better video than most cameras from 2016. The variables that matter are, in order: sound, light, framing, and everything else a long way behind.

Buy a lapel microphone. Record near a window with the light on the face rather than behind it. Put the phone on something stable at eye height. Record in short takes, because editing is where amateur video dies.

That kit costs less than an hour of a production company's time and it covers everything except the brand film.

The first three seconds

On any feed-based platform the opening decides everything. Start with the claim or the question, not a logo animation, not "hi guys". If the video answers how much does a Shopify migration cost, the first frame should say so.

On a landing page, where the viewer has already chosen to be there, this matters less. Starting with the point still helps.

Captions, always

Most social video is watched without sound. Captions are the difference between a video being consumed and being scrolled past, and they make the content usable by people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Auto-generated captions need correcting. They mangle product names, place names and technical terms. Budget five minutes per video for the correction pass, and read them on a phone, not on the desktop editor where everything looks fine.

Where to host and how to embed

Host on a platform rather than serving files yourself. You get adaptive bitrates, a global CDN and a player that works everywhere.

Embedding, though, is a performance problem. A standard embed can pull several hundred kilobytes of JavaScript before anyone presses play. Use a facade: a static thumbnail with a play button that loads the real player only on click. On the client pages where we have made that change it has been worth around a second of Largest Contentful Paint on mobile, which is the same performance work we do everywhere else.

Add VideoObject schema with a name, description, thumbnail and upload date so the video can appear in search results.

Measure the action, not the view

A view counts after a few seconds on most platforms, which makes it close to meaningless. Track watch-through at 25%, 50% and 75%, the action taken after watching on your own site, and enquiries from pages with video against comparable pages without.

For the landing-page explainer the comparison that matters is the enquiry rate of that page before and after. Run it a month either side and change nothing else in the window.

Repurpose deliberately

One recording session should produce several assets: the full answer video for the site, a vertical cut for social, an audio-only version if you have a feed for it, and the transcript as the basis of a written article. The transcript is the underrated one. Spoken explanations are usually clearer than written first drafts, because you were talking to a person.

What we would not spend on

Animated explainers with stock characters, which look like every other animated explainer. Drone footage, unless the thing you sell is the building. Long-form brand documentaries before the four videos above exist. And paid view campaigns, which buy views rather than customers: boost a video only when it has already earned organic attention.

Where to start, and when to call someone

Start with the answer videos, because a two-hour batch produces eight assets and teaches you what you are like on camera before anything important depends on it. Do the decision-page explainer second, once you know the script works, and expect to reshoot it once.

Get help when the video has a job that costs money if it fails, a homepage explainer, a product launch, anything a client will judge you by. That is what our video marketing work covers: script, shoot, cut and an embed that does not cost you a second of load time. If the videos are mainly going to feeds, plan them alongside the weekly social routine rather than as a separate project.