Efrat Fenigson Co-Founder at G-CMO

We put together that community for about 80 people at the moment to collaborate and share professionally. I'm also a consultant to a few tech startups, have experience of about 15 years in marketing and tech. I was CMO of Aerobotics, a drone company until not long ago and some other companies before that and I also host a video cast, a video program which I host at Google every three weeks in Israel filmed with a partner and so I do a lot of video marketing. So video marketing for me has been in the last I think six years or so one of the major strategies for my marketing in B2B tech which is the world I come from. Many times you have to convey very technical messages and sometimes they're complex, sometimes they may not be the most sexy or it could be a little bit boring and video when you can capture people or illustrations or things that are related to the technology in a much more visual way engaging sometimes humoristic or with an edge then it's definitely a better way of conveying that message and getting people engaged from my experience content that we have delivered in video throughout the years has always been working better than textual content. Textual content always has its place because of SEO and the new rules of this digital world and some people read, imagine, but I think people like consuming video content, it's easier, it's more fun and it saves time. For me as someone who is doing marketing for years I love public speaking and I love communicating and talking however writing is not my strongest side so for me conveying messages verbally is easier than writing so I always prefer doing video over writing and that's probably why I also started the video cast program that I do with my partner so video for me has always been a very powerful tool I think if you put your goals depending if it's just raising awareness or if you want to generate leads and traction from prospects you have different means of conveying different messages but you can always reach those goals faster with video. Right so I think what I'm doing is one of those trends I mean podcasting is a big big trend but what we're doing is a podcast in a video format so I think less people are doing video casts more people are doing podcasts and it's much easier to be in your pajamas and hide behind a microphone at home in your blanket but when you actually have to sit there and look presentable and speak and know how to carry yourself also in front of a camera then that's a little bit more challenging and that's why less people do it and that's why it can be a differentiator if you have a video show rather than just a podcast so I think that's a trend that we're going to see more of like real programs that are coming out with good content and I think that there is room for longer form videos and not just you know those handheld selfie like video on mobiles on your Instagram and Facebook but you can actually invest a little bit more and try to create your own program with your own niche I'd say in terms of the content so what we do at Market Shift which is my program we focus on strategy and marketing topics we do it in Hebrew so it's even more niche because it's only for the Israeli audience or Israelis living overseas and and we focus on those topics that are really important for marketeers today and so we really found that niche I don't think there are any others that are doing something similar to that today in Israel and so I think we're gonna see more and more marketeers using that kind of marketing channel I think it's a great channel for your personal brand and also if you work for an organization obviously if you're an independent then it's a very very powerful tool to show your expertise through if you can sit there for 15 20 or 30 minutes and talk about a topic and really give examples and bring case studies and debate with someone else or even interview someone else then you really show your expertise in that subject matter so I think video casting is going to be a good trend next year and longer form videos when you're talking about videos for companies more promotional videos and ad like videos I think that we're going to see more and more creativity being put into the content itself and rather than just you know this is what we do and this is how we do it companies like SodaStream for example it's an Israeli company marketing being ran out of Israel was acquired by Pepsi not long ago and SodaStream has an amazing lineup of videos and creative teams working on these things so if you look at how they work for example they are competing against some of the world's largest companies like Coca-Cola and others before they were Pepsi right even today they're still an independent entity and they have much smaller budgets so with much smaller money they have to still be shown in the market and do something very different in order to find their position in the market so they have decided they're going to put all of their efforts in creativity and create amazing videos and amazing campaigns that will then generate PR for them the campaigns themselves generate PR and so they're very well known in the marketing space because of the creative work that they do with very little budget so I think that kind of trend we're going to see more of that companies that really want to differentiate and shine are going to invest in creative I think not long ago Wix another Israeli company had opened a whole creative department by acquiring another creative digital agency so they acquired the agency and now they have a creative team in-house right and so and they invest a lot in marketing and advertising and in video so I think we're going to see more and more of those things happening where companies are understanding the importance of video and creativity and bringing more of that because it's I mean this the markets are so saturated and you need to find the way to differentiate so I mean fiber is also doing a good job in that there are a lot of examples from Israel which I know but I think you need to look at video as a tool in every step of the customer journey and plan your content strategy or your content calendar in such a way that you have enough video content for top of the funnel and then the right videos that are normally vertical based or customer type based in the middle of the funnel and then those types of videos for support training on boarding and tutorials when you're already in you know deep with the customer into the journey because they need to then retain and succeed in in working with your platformers or tech whatever it is that that you're doing and so I think it's very important that when you strategize and plan your content calendar you have to think video and not just PR or text for your website or articles or whatever it is whenever you think of the next topic that is going to be the big thing on that specific month try to strategize or brainstorm on what kind of videos you should create that correlate well with that type of content so whenever I used to have my strategy lined up for the next three months and I would know what kind of announcements for example the company is going to make I would look at that announcement and how it impacts people in various stages of the funnel and create different types of video content related to that announcement in different ways for different types of funnel and then for example for people who are already customers I may use email marketing and I used Hubswap for example so I may use that in my nurturing with some video that will showcase the new features of the product release for example and for the top of the funnel I will add I will I may change my very basic video on the website for new people that are coming in to include what I have just released in the in the product launch or whatever it was so I would have to make adaptions in any step of the funnel when I look forward and I would always plan two to three months ahead so you can't really just think of what's happening now and then like create a video just to cover what's happening now but you have to think a bit further than that one of the things that I did when I had my team at aerobotics I had a team of eight people I had a graphic designer almost from day one and then later on I hired a video at a video producer let's say to be part of my team so we were eight people in the team two of them were doing only visual work graphics and video and so my video producer was busy every day with productions whenever we didn't have any more planning for him and he didn't know what he's going to film we would sit down and come up with creative ideas so for me the the evolution of that format of having in-house create in-house video people or graphical people almost forced me to bring that creativity from within me or the team and so I think the evolution of that is to bring creative directors into the team if I had grown that team more I would like the next role I would hire would be a creative director to come and work with those people so that they can sit all day and come up with crazy ideas for what's the next best thing we can do and so I think that that move that I gave as an example before with weeks bringing a whole agency team into their in-house operation is something that every company even smaller startups like I was at the past can start doing by bringing their video producer and later a creative person and maybe if it's a small team the marketing manager can also have some creative skills so if you're looking to hire your next person he can have a background of creativity as well as operational so I think that building a team that will have people who can conceptualize visual visualize concepts and and create that video content as well as people that can come up with ideas and maybe work on the scripts and the language and the storyboards is very very essential one of the other things I wanted my graphic designer to do is take an after effect course because that would elevate the level of my videos to a whole other level so there's a lot you can do with developing video content in-house and I think that yeah adding on creative roles to just the video roles is something that we're going to see more of going forward so for companies that had no previous experience with video and they really want to add video to what they're doing because they understand the importance of it I would recommend to start with putting some budget aside to create a really good quality video as your first one so don't go stingy on your first one don't go iPhone selfie two minutes unprofessional video for your first one that you can do later on your social media channels or ongoingly as a strategy but for your really first video invest those tens of thousands of dollars or euros or whatever it is that you need to invest in order to have a kick-ass first video and then once you have that plan your next video content items that you want to create and see how you can creatively bring the budget down if your budget conscience right how can you bring the budget down but maybe creating some of those videos as illustrations or animated rather than live if you don't need a big production or if you can I don't know use some freelancers for various types of videos in tools like fiber or others I mean there are ways that you can bring the costs of production down but when you start start off investing the budget to make a really good one and I'd recommend to take production teams even if you integrate everything but take production teams who are very experienced that you can see other work that they have done that you can relate to like for example if you go to aerobotics website you'll see the first videos that we put up there they're amazing they're drone videos so you know we used a lot of great equipment and we put the money for it because you know it was worth it the traction we got after launching the company with these type of videos was unbelievable so that would be my my recommendation