This episode features Interact Customer Success Manager, Damaris Pacheco, Growth Manager, Jackie Aguglia, and Social Content Manager Jesy Nelson.
Join the Grow Podcast crew as they share their must-have tools for video marketing and their recommendations on how to find the right tools for your business when getting started!
Our Must-have Tools for Video Marketing
Hi everyone and welcome back to Interact’s Grow podcast. I’m Jesy and I am subbing in as the host today because our usual host, Jessmyn, is out right now. And I’m here with Jackie and Damaris. So welcome everyone. Thank you for hopping on. Today, I think the topic that we’re going to be jumping into, and this kind of stems from a bunch of video content that we’ve been working on, we thought it would be cool to cover our three or four must have video marketing tools that we like to use in order to publish YouTube videos create like help article videos and everything else.
Sounds good for everyone. Awesome. Perfect. I think we could jump in and start with what it all starts with, all videos stem from Jackie and Tella. If you want to hop in and tell us a little about Tella, what we were using before, and how you use it for our videos. Yeah, so if y’all have been listening in you’ve probably heard that our video started out on zoom and they were literally just recordings to people’s questions.
So customers would reach out either through the community or through chat. They would have a question and it became. I guess we realized it was way easier to answer these questions via video, usually because they require some type of screen recording. So, because we already had Zoom for video conferencing, our team meetings, I just would hop on Zoom, record the answer to the question, put it in a help doc, add it to a blog, put it on YouTube, send it to a customer directly.
But as we started doing that more and more and more, and And saw our YouTube analytics sort of growing from just putting the, the link, the videos on YouTube as a way to house store the videos for free. We were like, wow, we should actually make better quality videos, right? Not just like house them there, but actually try to grow this channel.
So with that, we started using tele because the quality of the recording was way, way better than zoom just in terms of the resolution. But also with Tella, I guess, back up, when you were, when I was using Zoom, I would have to record the video, export it, upload it to iMovie, edit anything that I wanted or send it to Jesse to have it edited, and then we would be able to upload it.
With Tella, you can edit everything within the software and you’re also able to record your face and your screen at the same time. But then within the editing, change out when you want to show your face, when you want to show your screen, when you want to show both. So the engagement of our videos, I think, went up quite a bit once we started doing that, because the videos just became way more fun to watch.
They weren’t just me talking all the time. It was like zooming into the screen and pointing through this. And you can really tell the difference in quality. If you go to look at the YouTube videos that we originally posted to what’s getting shared out right now. Yeah, I would say that I’ve seen a huge difference between the videos that you were making with Zoom versus with Tella.
And like you said, they feel way more engaging. And when you screen share, you know, on Zoom, how it’s like kind of clunky sometimes. It’s hard to like see what you’re talking about because you don’t have that ability to zoom in. And also like the pretty background it makes, all those little details make a huge difference on the videos.
Totally. And I just want to say my favorite little part when you can change between the screen and your video is sometimes like when I’m doing the screen recording, right? Like, I’m looking at my screen. So it looks very awkward on zoom when people were just like waiting for my screen to load. And, you know, I’m staring at the thing and you’re looking at me.
And so with Tella, you remove that because if I just want you to focus on the screen, I can take my face out so easily. Whereas in zoom, that would have to be something that was cropped and edited and all of that. Yeah, so true. Oh, the classic zoom, like, all right, I’m going to share my screen. Can everybody see it?
Yeah. Is it working? It’s working. It’s so true. And I will say, like, when I, when you started using tell on, you’re like, okay, you can grab the videos from here. Now there’s always like, when you’re Adding a new, like, software or tool into your tech stack, there’s always a learning curve, right? Like, I’m sure, Jackie, do you want to tell us a little bit about, like, what did you do to, like, get a better idea of how to use Tella and, like, you know, efficiently and make it worth it for you?
Because I’m sure at first when you hopped in, you were like, this is… Way more complicated than using Zoom. I would compare Tella to Interact in terms of intuitiveness, if that’s a word. But the software itself is pretty easy to navigate. I dabbled in Loom a little bit between using Zoom and Tella, but Loom doesn’t have the editing features that Tella has.
So honestly, it was pretty easy to get. To get, like, going with it, but of course, I just made, like, a video of myself talking to myself before I actually tried to record anything, just to make sure I knew what I was doing. When I hit record, it was recording myself and the screen so for sure, give yourself some time to play around with it without trying to actually record something, because otherwise, that’s just very stressful.
Yeah, yeah, no, that totally makes sense. When I hopped in that first, I was like, Oh my God, what is Jackie doing in here? Like, how does she know what videos exactly? I’m like, how is she jumping between screens and everything in her face? And she’s not like stunned and like what’s going on? And that’s actually what I, I think that’s what cuts down the editing time when you use tell of the most is that you can record in clips.
So, like, you record a little clip and you can stop it, regain your thoughts and be sure, like, change your screen up, whatever you need to do, then hit record again. So, when you record the little clips. You can go in and edit each individual clip and there’s like a, you can see the sound graph. What do you call that?
The little audio mark at the bottom. And so I can see like where I stopped, where I fumbled maybe or where I can listen back to note where I know I want to condense it down to. So our video length got a lot shorter because you didn’t hear me taking extra breaths or waiting for a screen to load or saying or whatever that, that, you know, like those little delays are.
If there’s noises in the background, you can cut those things out. Yeah. And I mean, that’s huge. Back when we were using Zoom, there were times where I think even you felt the stress like, Oh my God, this is a lot of content to cover in one video without me taking a pause or thinking. And like, I know Josh, sometimes he was able to talk for six minutes about a topic and not fumble once.
And I’m like, that is a skill. That is impressive. Like, I would need a few takes or a few different cuts in there. And I mean, the learning curve, that’s going to happen with any type of tech stack that you have, right? Like, let’s talk about our next one, Riverside, for example, which is what we’re currently recording this podcast episode on and Riverside is something we recently switched to from zoom and pretty much we decided to make the switch because.
The sound quality and the video quality is better and it has a lot more features that I think we’re still learning to use. Like Riverside can also do transcripts and everything so you’re not having to go somewhere else for your podcast transcript. I think you can do different like animated backgrounds.
I think Jessmyn even says that you can like make noises, right? Like I wanted to clap right now or something or like horns I can, but we’re still dabbling around with it. What are your guys thoughts so far about Riverside? The newest sort of like person that’s dabbling into this video marketing world. Jumping on the podcast with you guys and sort of becoming part of this process.
And for all of those people listening and out there, I had no idea that I needed, like, specific lighting for my face and I didn’t really know that I needed, like. Specific Mike, in order to sound a certain way without my voice, like. Rolling along or slurring, you know, so all of these have been things that I’ve had to learn as we’ve, you know, moved on from zoom to Riverside and like.
Now, I have like this little setup. I even have a light here on the side that’s giving me all this bright light, but I don’t think you can see that on the screen for all of you guys listening out there. You probably can’t, but it’s been it’s been interesting to learn the process and I give you guys seriously so much kudos because you guys are so good at this stuff.
But I think that’s key, right? Tamaris, like we started pretty basic and even though we started basic, there was a learning curve. Like we all had to get on zoom and learn new zoom features and downloads and iMovie and all this. Right. But then we upgraded and so we got more comfortable with it and then we were able to, to upgrade and like, same thing.
So we’re doing like little changes at a time. Cause. The other thing that happened when we switched to tell a not to go back, but I got new equipment. So before I was recording on my laptop camera, but then with the, with the tele change, we were like, okay, let’s also get a higher quality camera to really boost the resolution of these videos.
But it didn’t happen all at once. It was in stages because we had to like, make sure the videos were working, right? Like, do people really want to watch these before we completely invest in them? And the answer was absolutely yes, they want the videos. So that’s why we started. Increasing the quality slowly.
Yeah, I think that’s like a huge point is that you have to confirm that something’s working or what you’re doing is like worth the investment in something, and then you decide to add it to your tech stack 100%. And I also just found all the little audios. Should we throw on a little cheering? Let’s see.
Yes.
Yay! Little fun things like that. Yeah, now tell us where that button is so I can do that all episode. It sounds so simple, but like really when we started adding b roll and these little like elements of noise into our videos, you can see the average view time increasing so So like people stick around longer, the retention increases because it just makes the video more fun.
Nobody wants to watch like a boring video, but when there’s a drum roll for something really exciting or a big cheering announcement because quizzes convert at 40 percent or whatever it is that we’re saying, it just makes the video so much more fun. Yeah, and I mean, at the end of the day, it’s about making it more engaging, right?
So you get more views, more watch, higher watch times, everything else. So I would say Riverside is also a must have in your tech stack. If you’ve got a podcast or if anything for that. Or even that, I think you guys add that. Interact our logo like at the beginning of every video, which I think it’s like super cool I’m like, oh my god, we’re so official.
We have like the little interact with a little button on the top. It’s Yeah It always shocks me when I see it. I’m like, okay, this is great and that too, I mean back in the day we didn’t have like An intro graphic or like, you know, an ending graphic or music or any of that. We decided like, okay, like we’re making all these videos now.
How can we kind of up the quality or like things like that? And that was something we invested in someone to make us that intro graphic. And then, you know, picking the audio to go with it and everything else. And I guess we can kind of jump into editing software for Video marketing and I personally, so I currently edit our videos and I’m a big fan of premier pro.
For many reasons, you can create templates where if you’re making the same type of videos, like, for our podcast, I can just plug and play our podcast in there with. The intro slides and the ending slides and then for Jackie’s YouTube videos, I can also do the same thing. And there’ll be times where we want to do different types of call outs during her videos.
And all of this stuff is super easy to use in Premiere Pro. If you’re on a budget and Premiere Pro is not something you can invest in at the time, I would recommend using iMovie. And I’m not sure, Jackie, did you ever use iMovie a little bit or play around with it? Yeah, I have. So actually, Little pro tip.
Maybe if you’re using zoom, what I learned was I would always record to my cloud and one it you if you’re making a lot of videos that really eats up your cloud space. But to when you record to the cloud, that’s the thing that ruins or I guess takes down the resolutions of your video. So if you are, if you have to use zoom, make sure you’re recording to your computer directly and not to the cloud.
A better free solution, if it’s already on your computer, I got my MacBook and QuickTime. Is it just QuickTime? A real QuickTime player? Something like that? Something like that. I think it’s called QuickTime. That’s, that was a free tool on my computer. And so if you record using QuickTime, again, it’s going to save to your computer, but the quality will be better than Zoom.
Zoom. So when I started playing with QuickTime, that’s when I would edit in iMovie because there’s no editing features within QuickTime. It’s just the raw video. The other problem with QuickTime is that when you’re recording your screen, I had to do it separately. So I would like record an audio. Actually, no, sorry.
You can record your screen and your audio at the same time, but you can’t record your screen and your face at the same time, which I like to go back and forth. So anyways, all of that editing has to happen in iMovie. So you’re literally like watching the clip, the whole video that you’ve recorded, cutting it down into clips, and then taking audio off to put in B roll or cutting your, you know, like all the different recordings and pasting them together.
So it’s that I think was a learning curve. It took me a minute to get used to iMovie. And also I slowly learned the features. So like the first time I think it was just editing and cropping, and then it was adding in different noises, Canva graphics, things like that slides, maybe. But it’s not. It’s a free tool.
So again, like, like we were saying earlier, if you haven’t gotten started yet, if you’re not making movies right now, use what’s available to you, see what you like about it, see what you like about the videos that you create with it, and then you can find the right tool for you based on what it is that you actually need.
For me, it was a lot of the editing features that are available in Tella. Yeah, yeah. And I also think just like, you know, said, like, see if it works for you. It is a free tool. And like, for us, we’re always thinking of, okay, we’re doing videos often, you know, like, at least 3 times a week. And from the editing side, I’m like, what’s going to make me most efficient, you know, like, You can even edit videos in Canva, I believe.
Like, you know, and add transitions and cut videos and do whatever. But it’s gonna be way more time consuming. So if you’re doing it constantly, you need to find an editing tool that’s gonna save you time that, like in Premiere Pro, I can pop in any type of transition I want at any time. I can add text to any screen.
I can add an overlay, no problem. It might take more time to do this in, like, iMovie, or in Canva, or whatever else you’re using. So the more you do it, the more I think you’ll see, like, what do I need to save time on? Like, what is taking up, like, the most time in this process? Is it recording? Is Zoom the problem?
Is it the editing? Or something else? And kind of go from there to see what you can improve on. Yeah, totally. I’m curious to know, like, how do you guys determine which software to use? Like, when you went through for, for You know, from zoom to then getting teller or Riverside, like what, what made you guys be like, okay, this is the system that we’re going to actually try.
Was it like word of mouth? Was it like just doing your research? Because somebody that’s brand new and like video marketing, I, I’ve never even heard of these systems. Like, how does one get started to even start doing the research? You know, Yeah another shameless plug for Dan’s video community, because that’s where I learned about Tella.
It’s actually where I, because I was already recording on Zoom, and then I was like, okay, Josh, we need to make better videos. Like, we all knew that we needed to make higher quality videos, because they were living on YouTube, representing our brand. So Dan came out with this video for video pros cohort that I was in.
So I went into it using the free tools that I was on. I had my laptop camera. I used zoom, all of that. And we would literally in the cohort, I think it was four or five weeks long. Every week we’d record new videos. We would share them with that. With the cohort, with the community to get feedback on them, things like that.
And that’s where I started noticing like your videos look way better than mine. Like, what are you all using? And so Dan recommended Tella to us. And that’s when I was like, well, I think there was a 14 day free trial. So I started on the free trial, made a couple of videos on that using my laptop. screen, we publish those.
And then from the quality, because we like the tool, that’s when we were like, okay, let’s try it out for, I don’t know, a month or so. And we’ve been on it ever since because it saved us so much time. The video quality is awesome and it just works really well for us. Yeah, I would say word of mouth and also, like, I had not heard of Riverside until we started using it and I’m pretty sure we just started doing research on it.
Just like you would do anything else, like top podcast recording softwares, you know, then you start going through the list. Like, some of them are way pricier and have a lot of features that, you know, we don’t need at this time. Like, we’re not there yet. And then you just process of elimination, like, what gets us what we want.
We want better quality content, Quality video and audio and Riverside ticked both those boxes and it was affordable. And now I think what been two months on it almost, I think we did the free trial or something, and now we’ve been on it two months and so far we’re loving it. So I think it’s just trial and error.
Totally. And the other thing I’ll say is when you do your research and you’re just Googling like video softwares that I can use or whatever maybe you’re Googling certain features is. A lot of times the tool will have a free trial, so just get in there and try it yourself. But a few of the tools that I’ve played around with also offer a demo.
And so you can actually get on a call with, a couple times it was with their CEO. Sometimes it’s with customer success. Just like with Interact, when we did the demo requests, or like we do them now. But you can really get a sense of like, is this the right tool for me? Because you’re able to talk to somebody.
So when you’re doing your research, don’t be shy to sign up for a free trial. Even if you don’t think you’re going to use the tool, just because when you do, you’re going to start getting marketing emails from the company and you might be offered a free strategy, call a demo request, something like that.
You definitely have to be proactive. Like, don’t just sign up for a pre trial and then let those two weeks or whatever the time period is pass. Use it. Yes, use it. I think that’s always huge. And I’m guilty of doing that too for a lot of things. I’m like, yeah, let me sign up for this. And then I’m like, oh, shoot, I have two days left and I like forgot to jump in there.
So I think it always happens. Unfortunately. All right, so we’ve been over Tella, Riverside, Editing, Premiere Pro, and last but not least, we were debating if this like counts as like a software tool, but we said YouTube. YouTube for us is where we share all of our videos. I think you’ve heard, if you’ve listened to previous episodes, you’ve heard us talk about YouTube a lot.
And not only is it a place for us to share our videos, it’s also kind of been a place for us to host our videos. We can download them directly from YouTube, which is huge because we have so many video files, and if you have limited storage on your computer or Google Drive, once you upload that video to YouTube, you can remove it from your computer or Google Drive because it’s going to live on YouTube and you can download it from there.
And I also think YouTube is like the place to share videos. I’m actually not sure, like, where else if you are making videos for your business, right? Or correct me if I’m wrong, anyone. I can’t think. Yeah, so we were storing them in, was it Wistia? Before we really started going gung ho YouTube. But Wistia got really, really expensive.
So even though we were, we started uploading new content to YouTube because we wanted to try to grow the channel and see how it went. We decided let’s just move everything that was housed in Wistia over to YouTube because it’s free and because people can find it. Like if they’re searching for something, let them find it.
Right? I think it’s given us so much more exposure. And since I don’t, we should have maybe like put a timeline on this, but since we started this YouTube, like constantly posting to YouTube, we’ve grown our subscriber count, not views, subscriber count by over 600 at this point. And it’s probably been what, like, Since the beginning of this year that we really seriously started focusing on YouTube and Josh, just the other day in our Slack posted, I’m bad at math.
How many hours of like, YouTube tells you that you’ve had this many hours of views, which Josh calculated equal 208 days, 208 full days of people just watching our videos over time, which is awesome. It’s like, that goes to show how helpful these videos are, which reminds us how worthwhile it is to invest in better quality videos for our customers.
Yeah, and I also think like how you mentioned the watch time hours, YouTube is great because all your video, like every single video is going to like get aggregate like data on it, you know, like, even if you aren’t sharing videos on YouTube, like for marketing material, but you’re sharing it with your audience or privately in a Facebook group or anything like that, you can still get so much information on if people are watching those videos, how long they’re watching them for, are they dropping off?
And things like that. And still people can comment on it. And I think it’s been a huge way that people have discovered interact to whether it’s like talking about quizzes or something else, like the review videos you’ve done, Jackie, I think YouTube has been huge for that. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Even if you’re like a business starting off, just like.
Answering people’s questions like Jackie was saying, you know, for customer success reasons or whatever. I use them all the time. There’s times where I’m like, oh, let me just go to our YouTube channel and just try to find this. Video that I know Jackie did, because it just triggers my memory and I use them all the time and they’re super helpful.
I think a lot of people now. Prefer video over reading a help doc, or it just depends how you learn, but. Sometimes even strategy or different things that they just want to. Sort of learn and talk about, or, you know, it’s just, it’s interesting to see how we’ve evolved in just a short time. Yeah, the other thing that’s awesome about the analytics is Jesse, a few times you’ve gone in and looked at them and showed us like, oh, these, these videos or podcast episodes got the most hits or engagement.
So let’s do a let’s do our next. Or if certain follow up questions come in through the comments, we know, okay, this video didn’t address the next step, or where should we be linking them to next to get the next answer? So you can really keep things separate of like, if Damaris is answering a question, someone’s question via a video, we don’t want the video to be super long answering all these other questions that they don’t have.
We want it to be really specific, but then.
So if they need it, it’s there. But if they don’t, they can leave. We’re not bothering them with extra information. Yeah. Yeah. I think using YouTube to create more video content, more blog content, more anything else like it’s a social media platform as well, you know, so it makes it the perfect place for all of it.
Yeah. The other thing I want to say that we’ve really changed up in as we’ve been playing around with YouTube is our thumbnails. And so I don’t know if that includes Canva into this tech stack or maybe there’s something in Premiere Pro that you can use to make thumbnails. Yeah. But really playing around with different types of thumbnails, putting people on the thumbnail as opposed to just text we’ve seen a difference in the way that people engage with the videos because they’re, they look more fun to watch because of the new thumbnails we’ve been creating.
Yeah, that’s super true. We should have included Canva in here because that’s like the last kind of piece for us to finalize all our videos is Canva and even if like Do you, Jesy, do you make thumbnails at all in Premiere Pro? It always comes from Canva. Always comes from Canva because Canva just seems like the easiest place to like host templates, you know, and all of our brand colors and like your guys’s headshots or different pictures with the background removed already.
And it’s Just kind of plug and play. Like I have the picture there, the font size, everything. Whereas in Premiere Pro, you can do the exact same thing. But if I want to switch it up, it’s easier to do it in Canva versus Premiere Pro. So I recommend Canva for that stuff. And even if like B rolls or like you want to put in a graphic in the middle of your video, I think Canva is like the easiest way to do it.
Yeah, all of those business owners that think, oh, my God, I just like, I’m not good at video or I just don’t want to do videos because I’m not good at talking to people or whatever the case is. I think none of us feel that way. I don’t think any of us ever start off thinking, oh, my God, I’m so great at, like, talking to myself through video.
It’s just really like, just do it. Just start doing it. Just start throwing yourself out there. I still look at our YouTube page and I’m like, wow, am I pictures on this YouTube channel? I don’t know how that happened, but here I am, you know, so just do it.
I’ll say to Jesse, how many times have we slacked back and forth when I send you a video? And I’m like, Oh my God, why did I say that thing at the end? But then Jesse’s like, no, it was so fun when you wave or like give a peace sign. Cause I can tell it right. We opened it for the first time and every thumbnail was Jackie, like growing up a peace sign.
I was like, Jesse, Oh my God. I need to. Stop doing that. She’s like, no, every time you do it, I wave back to you from the other side. And I was like, okay, that’s fine. That’s just me coming through camera. But it just happened because Josh was like, Hey, you want to start making YouTube videos? That was not what I was hired for.
So yeah, like Damaris was saying, I did not feel confident or. Good at this. It’s just that we started out so small, I guess, answering customers questions, which was things I do do all the time, but when it came time to actually recording these, scripting these videos and recording them for YouTube, it was just felt so much more natural, even though it can be really awkward to talk to yourself.
Yeah, I, I love it when you do it like Jackie likes to start every episode with like a, Hey, it’s Jackie or something like that. And I love it because I feel like she is talking to me and it’s like personable, you know, it’s like humanizing it. Like, even in a video, if I’m watching like some tutorial and this person has a big channel, I’m watching along and then randomly he And he’s like, Oh, excuse me.
I’m like, Oh, like you’re human too. Like you’re sneezing. Like, that’s okay. The video isn’t perfect. Like we move along and that’s it. It kind of adds like the little fun aspect into it. I feel like so. Yeah. I agree with the mayor at the start and see where it goes. Yeah, I was even like, sometimes that happens to me where I’ll do like weird things or I trip up or I stutter.
I had like a laughing attack at one point and I just saved that those clips. I was like, here you go, Jesse. If you ever want some bloopers or like funny things to add into videos, like here’s a little folder of crazy things I’ve done on camera. I mean, nothing too crazy, but you know, like coughing, sneezing, laughing, whatever.
They got like mixed up. Because they can be really fun. I remember when I was in Dan’s video community, he sent me a video, a YouTube video link of this lady who was reviewing the new camera that I got. So it was literally a video going through, like, these are all the settings that you want to set up on the camera before you start recording.
And in that video where she’s supposed to be like the best professional to teaching me how to use this camera. Right. In the middle of the video, her phone started ringing like on the other side of the room. So then she like was able to edit the video in a fun way where it was like. Pro tip, make sure your phone is off before you start recording, blah, blah, blah.
And then she like turned it off. So you can make videos really fun because. And first of all, editing is so powerful, but second of all, like just be yourself on camera and then use editing to your advantage to make it look like what you want it to look like. Yeah. All right. I think we are ready to wrap it up.
So for anyone starting out or even looking to level up their video marketing game, our three recommendations to start with are Tella. YouTube, Riverside, and an editing software like Premiere Pro or iMovie. And I think that covered, oh, and Canva, since we threw that in last minute. Right. But start small. It could just be Zoom and YouTube to start, right?
That’s all. And then it can be Tele, Canva, and YouTube. Then it can be Tele, Canva, Premiere Pro, and YouTube. All right. Well, thank you guys. And we will see you all next week. I think Jessmyn will be back. So bye for now. Bye everyone.