222 Creating Impactful Visual Content - Jacob Bettis Jun 19 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today on the show, Jacob Bettis. Jacob is the co-founder and executive producer at Insignia Studios. Welcome, Jacob. Thanks for joining us today.

Jacob Bettis: Yeah, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, why don't we start off, Jacob, just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. Give us that quick overview.

Jacob Bettis: Sure, of course. Well, I'm obviously with Insignia Studios. We are a [00:01:00] video production and digital marketing agency that focuses on helping people design, develop, and most importantly, distribute awesome video content that actually gets results from their business. Been running this company for the last 5 years and prior to that, I did about a decade in the tech world.

I started pre-IPO at Trulia as one of the first 50 employees at their Denver office, and then from there helped them go through the IPO, led multiple different teams and products, ended up being acquired by Zillow, and then becoming Zillow Group. By the end of my time there, I was a senior manager overseeing operations for a 750-person organization that basically is the whole way that people connect with real estate agents through the website now.

So, that is where I kind of came from, and a lot of that scalability and outlook into how to make those things operate correctly is really how we provide a unique approach to the video production side of things.

Kevin Weitzel: Before we [00:02:00] geek out aperture and f-stops and all that kind of stuff, do me a favor and let our listeners learn something about you personally, that has nothing to do with work or the home building industry whatsoever.

Jacob Bettis: I love that. Thanks for letting me speak on that. Before I jump in, I will say, Hey, if you want to talk about f-stops and the nerdy photo stuff, I'm actually not your guy. As an executive producer and co-founder of this business, I'm much more focused on the business side of this agency.

I am a storyteller and a photographer at my heart, and it is a passion, a hobby that I have. But as a whole, my team is much better at that than I am, so they would be better at the creative questions there. But I still have a lot of like good video strategy and some tips that I think will be very helpful for everybody.

That being said, how I got into filmmaking in general is actually through a little sport I enjoyed as a child. It's called skateboarding. Made tons of homemade videos with my friends about skateboarding and it just always kind of stuck around as one of those hobbies that bled into everything that I did, whether it be utilizing it for school projects, or you know when you make it into [00:03:00] your professional career.

Training videos was really big, especially running a 750-person team across two different continents, four different time zones, supporting 101 hours of operation per week, getting messages out and doing it very clearly, and being able to tailor those things was really big. So yeah, skateboarding is really what brought me here, which is kind of a crazy connection, but it's also really cool.

Kevin Weitzel: Funny thing about that is we actually had somebody on recently, another Colorado person, but they were a transplant from either California or Hawaii, one of the two, and they had like 30 surfboards there in Colorado. So, if you have a neighbor with 30 surfboards, they've been on our podcast. So, quick, little rapid fire for you. What is your most memorable skateboard, your most memorable deck, and what is your favorite deck that you still have today?

Jacob Bettis: Great questions. My most memorable deck is I used to pretty much only skateboard a brand called Baker Skateboards and it's really classic design. It's just red block letters on a blackboard. It says Baker. [00:04:00] I think I bought that board from that company probably three, four times as a kid. So, that would probably be my most memorable. Nowadays, I actually skate a brand of skateboards called Colorado Skateboards.

Funny enough, the only reason that I skateboard on those is because I had an awesome midlife crisis and ran into a Goodwill that had 663 skateboards donated to them. So, I bought the whole inventory and I take them around to skate parks and donate them to kids, and make sure that everybody's rolling on good skateboards. So, that's all I skate right now but just because I own more than a skateboard company owns in their inventory.

Kevin Weitzel: That is super, super cool. Now, do you make the kids do an Ollie first before you give them a new deck, or what?

Jacob Bettis: Oh, you're funny. It's a noncommittal thing for sure. It's just more about like seeing the kids who maybe don't have a great one that they're rolling on and just offering. I remember what it would do for me as a kid to have an older person, like reach out and just like be really cool like that and [00:05:00] how it would have encouraged me. And so, I want to be that same person and kind of give back because skateboarding has taught me a lot about falling down and getting up.

Kevin Weitzel: That's cool.

Greg Bray: That's awesome. But here's my question. The day you pull in the driveway and you run inside and you tell your wife, guess what I found at Goodwill? And you start unloading 600 skateboards out of, I don't know, like a convoy of trucks. What was that moment? Like, you don't have to answer that.

Jacob Bettis: No, no. Hey, I think you all know how that went. Right? It was like, where is the space for this going to be? Like, what's the plan here? Like, I can't believe you did this. But honestly, my wife is incredible. We have two children together, two boys. One's four and one seven-month-old. The oldest loves to skateboard, so it's been a nice like join of the hobbies. And so, we do get a kick out of it for sure, and I definitely call it a midlife crisis moment because it seems pretty insane to do that. But it's been a cool intersection of like hobby and my child and, just getting to give back to our community here locally.

Greg Bray: No, that's [00:06:00] awesome. That's awesome. Well, Jacob, tell us a little bit more about Insignia Studios. You already mentioned video. We got that much, but a little bit more about the kind of video, the kind of folks you'd like to work with, and what you're doing with that.

Jacob Bettis: Totally. Thanks for asking. Yeah. Insignia Studios is a video production and digital marketing agency that focuses specifically on making content for people in the builder space. So, we work with all types of brands in that space, right? That's everything from wholesalers to suppliers, appliance companies, home builders themselves, land developers, all of these different pieces of our industry need different video solutions. So, we provide a full suite of creative services that assist those companies in sharing awesome video content that most importantly, actually gets results, doesn't just look pretty.

We're the preferred video vendor of choice for so many different brands in the industry, especially a lot of large production builders because of our approach and how to effectively and efficiently produce lots of video from our time on-site filming. We're [00:07:00] always backing it up with tangible results, being able to show our clients, Hey, these videos don't just look great, but here's actually the customers that are watching them, and here's how they're converting on your site.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, I've got to go deeper into that right now since you brought it up, a video that isn't just about looking pretty, but actually generates results. What is the difference between a video that just looks pretty and one that generates results? If you can boil that down into not three hours of details.

Jacob Bettis: Sure. Yeah. Of course, there's a lot that goes into that, but I think the easiest thing that I can say is I think it's the design that goes behind it, and what I mean by that is having a more robust video strategy. I think this is something that comes up on a lot of conversations that I have, but it's that you can make the best-looking video content in the world, but if nobody sees it, does it really even matter?

So, most of the time people's catalyst into the video world is they saw a competitor [00:08:00] or a video in a different niche that they really liked and they think will have a great impact on their business. And so they go, I want that. But then it's somewhat devoid of a plan for distribution and tracking and actually publishing it in a meaningful way.

So, I would say that that's probably the thing that we focus on the most is really connecting with different brands and companies, their marketing teams, and understanding what their initiatives and goals and objectives are for the year to find out what videos will be the best. Right? Because they might have come to us asking for, hey, we need an about us mission type of content video. But if they just put that on their website in one landing page, is it actually doing something for them? Maybe a little bit, but not as much as it should be.

And then on top of that, video production is a reductive process. We're going to be onsite filming for eight hours. Cameras probably roll for six out of the eight hours. And then out of those six hours, you're telling me you just want one video [00:09:00] that's two and a half minutes long. That's fine, but what happens to the other five hours and 48-plus minutes of content? You should be utilizing that too.

Greg Bray: Did you see how he did that math in his head, Kevin? That was pretty impressive.

Kevin Weitzel: He did.

Jacob Bettis: I think if you go back and check it, I think I got it wrong, so.

Greg Bray: Well, let's peel that back a little bit. It's not a trivial thing to have a video crew show up for an all-day thing. I'm just guessing. It takes some planning. You're trying to decide what you're going to do that day. It's not just, Oh, let's just have a normal day and have these cameras follow us around. And so, to only create one short video, even if it's amazing, does seem like a missed opportunity. What are some of the other opportunities out of that other five-plus hours of footage that you've seen people take advantage of?

Jacob Bettis: Oh, I mean, so many. The low-hanging fruit that's always really easy is, I shouldn't say easy, that's not the right word, but the easy call out here is video ads. You're going to capture B-roll for your project. [00:10:00] That B-roll is going to be some type of product, right? Whether that be a home, whether that be a community, whether that be an appliance, whatever it is in the space, you're going to have lots of the B-roll that helps tell the story in your main video.

You should be able to pull that out and make 10 to 15-second video ads, put text on top of them, partner those with some well-thought-through copy, and run video ads on either Meta or Google, or any of the other platforms that accept video ads, and those video ads are going to outperform basically any type of static photo ad that you would create yourself. And I'm sure we'll dive into more about that later, but that would be my low-hanging fruit there is yeah, you should for sure, at least have multiple different video ads that come out of your project in addition to the primary video.

Greg Bray: So, sometimes we see builders that are giving their sales agents the cell phones and saying, Hey, go shoot a little video tour of this house and kind of walk people through it. What do [00:11:00] you see as the pros and cons of that type of an approach towards video?

Jacob Bettis: Sure. My initial response is there's a time and a place for both. If the cell phone video is kind of a one-to-one type of engagement where that sales agent is sending it to individual prospects and they're having an opportunity to speak over the video and talk about the things that they're filming, that's an expected experience for people that are now searching for homes, especially when they're not able to come look, right?

Like, I've actually purchased a home and a property for myself when I moved to Seattle to work at Zillow headquarters. I bought a house site unseen and that was like an expected part of that experience for me as my real estate agent had to do those types of pieces of content for me personally.

Do I think that that is the way that large, national-sized production builder brands want their homes to be engaged with? Probably not, right? Most of the time they spend hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on brand kits on [00:12:00] providing guidance to vendors and contractors on how to best represent their brand.

So, just asking a sales agent to go out there with a cell phone who has very little experience in doing so is not going to get you a result that you want. I believe that video is a communication tool and the thing about tools is that they have to be easy to use, and they have to be applied to the right job, right? If you're using a hammer to try and screw in a screw, that's gonna be tough.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, it depends on how strong you are, you know?

Jacob Bettis: That's hilarious. I think it's really like informal versus formal communications is the best way to boil it down. For the less formal communications, I think cell phone videos, for the most part, are going to always be great, even when it comes to just organic posts on people's social media pages. That's, like, expected behavior.

But there's no way that a formal communication, like a home tour that lives on your website or a community tour that's supposed to be a sales tool, is going to be adequate for your brand if making video content is something that you've made a commitment to. Informal [00:13:00] versus formal communications is probably the easiest way I would break it down.

Greg Bray: So Jacob, you dropped some big numbers in there a minute ago about some costs, like people spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and things. And there's some people going, Oh, never mind, not for me. I don't have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, regardless of what I'm spending it on. So, what is a video-level budget for that builder who just doesn't have hundreds of thousands to invest in marketing from a video standpoint?

Jacob Bettis: That's a great question. And my answer is whatever budget you have is good enough, right? It's very similar to whatever camera that you have in your pocket, or the one that you're most comfortable using is the one that you should use most frequently because it actually makes things for you.

When it comes to a budget, what I can tell you is that for any type of high-end storyteller or like brand assets, I would say you should not be looking to spend less than probably three grand in any local market. And that's with somebody who is probably going to provide you multiple [00:14:00] different videos, they're going to help you craft your story, they're going to be customized in branded assets, stuff like that.

But of course, it just depends on your brand size and how many different assets you want. I do know that there are lots of really great creatives in every single market that can probably at least help you get off the ground with your brand and put in some quality on video for around that 3 to 5,000 range for like an initial engagement.

Greg Bray: Do you need to work with somebody who knows home builders, or can any video freelancer do a good job with homes? Is there something special about knowing what home builders are doing that can make a difference?

Jacob Bettis: Another great question, and I think that's the main reason that our company exists in this space and why so many different people across the country trust us with their video production and their budgets, regardless of whatever their size is, is because we're going to help them put together that strategic plan of what great video can do for their business, how it can help them grow. There are so many different ways that you can go about that, and a lot of different things that you can do to make sure that it goes well.

Greg Bray: [00:15:00] You mentioned the storytelling word a few times in our conversation so far. What does that part of the whole process look like? It's like, okay, we want a video. Jacob, what should the video be of? Or we want to talk about our company with one of these kinds of corporate overview type videos, or we want to talk about this home and make it really engaging, how do you even begin figuring out what that story is that you're trying to tell for the client?

Jacob Bettis: Another great question. Man, you guys are full of them today. I think that this correlates a lot with the last question about, you know, is it important to work with somebody in this niche or this space? The answer is there's a lot of really great storytellers out there but having a strong understanding of the things that matter to a homebuilder specifically can really speed up not only your overall production time, but it can also make your content more effective and efficient.

For that one day onsite, instead of just doing one video that takes your wife's [00:16:00] nephew or whatever that just graduated school that's got his video camera, it takes him all day to produce one thing because he's trying to figure out the intricacies and the terminologies and all of those things, you're going to get a lot more out of working with somebody that understands all the acronyms and the things that matter in that sales process for people. You're also going to be able to implement videos that matter in different parts of your process.

Most of the time people think about video content as a top-of-funnel marketing asset, really bolstering the awareness of whatever it is that they're trying to put out there, but it actually gets more and more powerful as you push it farther down the funnel and you are able to communicate more effectively with people that are farther through their intent from a purchase standpoint.

And then, even to the point where after they become homeowners, with your brand. We do lots of content that is like warranty-related or training-related to customers and [00:17:00] clients on how they can maintain that home, how they can engage in the warranty process that helps takes hands off from different parts of your business. So again, it's not always going to be a sales-related thing. And there are so many different pieces of our industry and pieces of people's businesses that they can apply video to that will make things easier, more scalable, and more effective.

Greg Bray: What would you say is the worst thing you've seen a builder do with video?

Jacob Bettis: Oh man, this is a great question. I won't throw any specifics out there. We've all seen some tough ones. The thing that I see most often is that they don't have much of a strategy. Their video tends to be pretty aimless. They do engage with somebody who isn't helping them put together a bigger plan for their business.

What people fail to realize is that once you make a commitment to putting your brand on video is there's a base layer, like brand video kind of package that most people will create for you, but then that's what people are going to expect from your brand going forward. Even if you have one good [00:18:00] video that's like a great brand story video and helps articulate the reasons why you're different than your competitors in your local market, all of that stuff is great, but that one video can only take you so far.

What you're actually doing is you're making a much larger commitment to your business of communicating with people in a different way. Which is really what video is. I said it earlier. It's a communication tool. It's the most potent form of communication. You get to evoke more emotion than any text on the screen or any photo because you have audio, you have title work on the screen. You can put humans speaking to other humans. You can show the actual process. Good videographers can actually even portray like textures of materials in different filming techniques. So, there's so many different things that you can do.

And I would say the thing that I see most builders do is they just point at somebody else. They say I like what they did. I want that for my brand. They go with a videographer in a box type of a solution and then they get something that looks just like everybody else [00:19:00] and they publish it and they go, well, I didn't really do anything for me. And I say, well, that's because you didn't have a plan for it.

Kevin Weitzel: So, let me ask you this, Jacob, for the DIYs out there, the builders that are like, I got a nephew that can come in here and shoot this thing. What language do we need to put it into where they will comprehend? Because I see it every single day on social media where they will actually invest in a lavalier or a wireless mic so you don't have to hear the person's echoey voice through an empty home yelling across the room to whoever's filming it on the cell phone. How do we get that message across to these builders to just quit doing that?

Jacob Bettis: How do we get a message across to the builders? Oh, man. That's a great question. If I would have solved that, I think my business would be even bigger than it is now. I'm going to spend some more quality time thinking about that now that you said it.

I think it hits most of them in the face after they publish their video content. They go through this whole process. They invest a lot of time, energy, and resources into making it happen. They have that moment where when I come to talk to them and I say, Hey, I've seen that you've done some video content before. Tell [00:20:00] me about what that did for you. And most of the time they go. Well, I don't really know. It lives there. I think it looks good. And so, there's so many little things that they should be doing to track the results and performance of these things and to have a more strategic plan on how to publish those.

So, it's one of those things where I think most of the time people feel it in hindsight. They go through the whole process, they think it's going to be great, and then it doesn't continue to contribute to their overall business operations and objectives. And therefore, they end up in a place where they feel like it wasn't that valuable, or they did something wrong. When in truth, a little bit more planning, a better guide, could have helped them a long way.

Maybe the best thing to help home builders specifically realize this is think about your own process. Think about what you articulate to a customer that makes them choose your homes versus others. And I mentioned this because there is so many different reasons why people would choose to work with you and most of the time you're having to articulate those [00:21:00] things to those individuals before they ever sign on that dotted line and move forward with building that home with you.

And so, it's going to be the same thing for a video production person. They are going to help guide you through that process. Just like how you guide these people on building their dream homes. Most of the time, they've never done it before, and even if they have done it before, they probably haven't done it your way.

I'm going to bring up something that you guys have probably talked about on this podcast many times before, but Donald Miller's Brand Story is a wonderful book for anybody who hasn't read it. Uh, it should be the first thing that you do after this. Don't look me up. Don't do any of that. Go to Donald Miller Brand Story and really start engaging with that because it helps you articulate some very key things that makes you communicate with your customers better.

Most importantly, as business owners and as service providers, a lot of the time we want to raise our hands and jump up and down and say, look at what I can do. Look at what I can do. I'm so great. I'm so great as a business because I do this. But in truth, that's not the reason that people engage with you. They engage with you because they want to [00:22:00] be the hero of their own story.

Somebody that's purchasing a new build from you is not going to say, like, Hey, this person solved all my problems, right? They're going through a very emotional decision and committing to a long process. And so, they are going to feel a certain type of way about that and they are going to put in a lot of work. So, from a marketing perspective, acknowledging that and realizing that we as service providers and business owners are guides to our customers and that they are the heroes of their own stories, is really going to change the way that you think about a lot of these things.

Greg Bray: I love that book. It's been one that I read a few years back. It's really made a difference in kind of how I approach messaging for sure. So, Jacob, you've mentioned a couple of times about tracking effectiveness. What are some of the ways that you recommend that someone track the effectiveness of some video effort that they've put in?

Jacob Bettis: I'm so glad that you asked because there are so many things that not enough people do. I'm going to do my best to keep it short here. This could probably be the bulk of everything. It's what I spend the majority of time training our partners [00:23:00] on and our clients on is really making sure that you have good data to make decisions for these things.

Eighty-five percent of customers on the most recent survey from HubSpot last year said that they want to see more video content from the brands that they enjoy, and 97 percent of people say that video helps them get a better understanding of your actual service that you provide. Customers are asking for it, people want to make it, but then they struggle to really put confines around what matters and what doesn't when it comes to viewership.

There's a lot of vanity metrics out there, whether it be number of plays or subscribers on your YouTube channel, things like that. But most importantly, if you have a well-thought-through strategic plan and an influence map of where your content is going to be published and where it's going to live, there are some very specific tools that you can use to help track performance.

The first one that I'm going to highly recommend to everybody is you should definitely have a [00:24:00] Meta Pixel installed on your website at a bare minimum. For anybody who hasn't heard about this, this is a tool that is used to basically track user activity on your site. For a lack of sounding a little bit like Big Brother here, you not only can track and then remarket to the people that just visit your website in general, but you can get so granular that you can track the buttons that they are clicking. You can remarket specific messaging to people that are clicking on, get a free quote, or schedule a tour or any of these buttons, even if they're falling out of your funnel there. So, having a pixel is going to be like kind of a base layer thing.

A little bit more advanced is if you've ever heard of UTM links. These are specific links that can be published on the backside of YouTube videos, Vimeo videos, videos that live on your website, really anywhere. And this will feed user information back to your database that will tell you how long these users watched your videos. This is one way that we help, especially our production builders, [00:25:00] see that our videos do better than others in the space.

We're able to go back to them on a monthly basis and say, Hey, not only is it this amount of people that are watching this, this long, but we can actually tie it back to the individual email addresses. And so, they can cross reference their buyer lists and say, Oh, wow, Sally Jo watched video content across our platforms. It doesn't matter where because we track it all. But we can say that this person engaged with 15 minutes of video before they made a purchase on our home. So, it's really easy to say at that point, based on the net profit that comes in off one home, that video is a worthwhile expenditure for these brands.

Greg Bray: It's great that you mentioned some of those common tracking opportunities that really you should be doing for all your digital marketing efforts and trying to connect with the way that people are engaging with your content, and this is just another piece of that content, really. It's a very powerful, engaging piece of that content. From a production standpoint, what's happening in the AI world around [00:26:00] video that's maybe helping improve some of the quality or speed up some of the production time? What are you seeing there that we should maybe be paying attention to?

Jacob Bettis: I mean, honestly, so much cool stuff. My team leverages it really heavily when it comes to getting like a base layer script written. We love to work from like script ideas so it can write really great scripts. Voiceover is getting pretty good through there, providing transcriptions of conversations to people to help with the editing process.

Recently, we've been able to basically transcribe what is like a raw edit that is not ready for somebody to be seen, but it has great audio that goes with it, but maybe it's not visually polished with the right B-roll and stuff like that. But we can have AI put out a transcription that is easy for them to go through and say, Hey, I really like what the video says here, but not here. So, especially in like a corporate collaboration environment, it's doing really cool things.

There is no doubt in my mind that here in the next five years, you'll be able [00:27:00] to produce a whole video just by working with AI to write the script, and then it'll pull from many different stock footage libraries, things like that, to provide a lower end video output for you pretty easily. So, it's doing incredible things and you definitely got to be watching it.

The only thing it can't do at this moment, or that I don't see it doing is really holding a camera. It's the strategy around it. It's not going to be able to tell you all the things around, not only how to properly set the camera up and get the visual aspect that you're looking for, but then on top of that, where do these ideas come from?

It's not as good at idea creation, other than just guiding you on that first part. You can definitely get some good prompts. You can get some good video ideas. And soon you'll be able to produce some pretty low-end videos that are from stock libraries and those stock libraries will continue to get better and better visually, but there is no way that it's going to provide customized video for the right brands in the [00:28:00] long run.

Greg Bray: Great insights. If somebody is doing a video on their own, two or three just quick tips to make it better, something they should be thinking about. Is it all about lighting? Is it all about planning? Is it all about just do portrait versus landscape on your phone? Three quick tips.

Jacob Bettis: Three quick tips for people that are producing video on their own. Spend some time engaging in some educational content on YouTube. There's so much really great information that already exists on how to get the best image from whatever camera you have accessible.

So I would encourage you to spend one hour of time before you actually film anything to just see like, what is the best light? Do I want to shoot in direct sunlight? Do I want to be in the shade? How to make it visually appealing the best that you can. Make sure you have good audio. The worst thing that gets videos turned off almost faster than anything else is when you hear wind coming through that cell phone that somebody didn't know was coming in there, but they feel like they got to [00:29:00] share it.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm out. If they can't invest in that little pom pom to go over a microphone, I'm out. It's 12 cents.

Jacob Bettis: Totally. So, think about your audio. Try and get some type of microphone situation going for yourself. Lastly, really think about your plan. It's not just about the day of when you're filming it and making sure that it gets done, but it's about making sure that it's a part of a bigger overall strategy for your company. The reason that you have this desire to pull out your phone and to start making content on your own is a good one, but it's bigger than just that one piece of video.

That one video is not going to solve your problems as a business owner or as a company. You are making a larger commitment to, again, communicating, utilizing the most potent form of communication that exists in today's world. So, think about how those all work together would be my third tip is like really spend some more time planning, not just that one video, but more importantly, where is it going to live. How is it going to be a part of a series or how is it going to actually benefit your business?

Greg Bray: Well, Jacob, appreciate your time today. If somebody wants to [00:30:00] connect with you and reach out, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Jacob Bettis: They can check out our website, insigniastudios.net. We have tons of examples of our content, information about our process, and we'd love to chat more about video and video production. That is what our team does for sure.

Greg Bray: Well, thanks again for spending time with us today, and thank you everybody for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin White. So with OutHouse, Thank you. [00:31:00]