Many of your radio stations will be promoting big events this fall. Whether it’s a concert, a fundraiser, or a festival, your performance will be measured by how many people show up. Your promotions staff has been hard at work putting together the event. The sales team has been busting it hump to get sponsors on board. Now, it’s your turn.
You need to sell tickets.
We understand. If, for no other reason, then because we’re in the same boat. Every year, we team up with Radio Ink to put together an awesome conference that brings together people from the automotive industry and the radio broadcasting industry: The DASH Conference, happening November 4th and 5th in Detroit. Despite the auto industry’s crucial role in radio’s success — it’s not only the top advertising category, but more radio listening happens in the car than anywhere else — no other event provides the opportunity for these two groups to connect.
So you’ve got your event and we’ve got ours. How are we going to get bodies in the room?
Of course, you’ve got your airwaves. But you also want to use the power of the web. How do we do that without breaking the bank?
One great tool is video. I’ve written quite a bit about how we can employ a Content Marketing strategy to promote our stations and our events on social media and search engines. (Watch this 4-minute video if you need a refresher.) Unfortunately, audio content is limited in a content marketing strategy. Audio is much less likely than video to go viral on social media, and search engines don’t index and return audio in their results the way they do video. So if we’ve got an event to promote, how can we use online videos as part of this strategy?
Fortunately, video editing technology is similar to audio editing technology, so your station’s production staff should be able to get the job done. Many moons ago, I was the Imaging Director at 105.7 The Point in St. Louis. My ProTools skills transfer pretty easily to iMovie. So finding your Adobe Audition expert and getting him or her set up on Final Cut Pro shouldn’t be a tough transition. It’s the same thing, just with pictures.
For the DASH Conference, I cut together these quick video teasers:
These took me about a day to produce. Here’s how I did it:
1. Write.
When you create a recorded promo for your station, you start with a script. Here, you want to start with a storyboard. Don’t complicate the process; a few sketches on the back of a napkin will do. The key is to keep your video short (less than 30 seconds if possible), and the best way to do that is to limit your videos to one concept each. If you have more than one concept to convey (“There’s lots of bands playing! Plus a local band competition! And we’re raffling off a trip to Hawaii!”), make more than one video. Never try to cram more than two ideas into a single video. Less is more.
For DASH, I had several concepts that we wanted to convey:
- Cars are really important to radio because most people listen there
- Cars are really important to radio because it is the top advertiser category
- This is an event where you can network with auto industry people
- Adam Carolla, a huge radio celebrity, will be speaking at the event
Ultimately, I drew up concepts for three videos:
- Pop Quiz (radio listening and top advertiser))
- Adam Carolla (Carolla speaking and top listening)
- Dashboard (networking)
2. Create an animated slideshow.
I’m a Mac user, so I use Keynote. If you’re a PC user, you can use Powerpoint. As you can see, the slides are very simple. I boil down the main point to the shortest possible sentence. Fortunately, years of talking over five-second intros to Sublime songs has streamlined my word economy.
I usually intersperse the words with some photos. Sometimes I include the photos in the slideshow program, sometimes I add them in my movie editing software. (For example, the Carolla photo uses iMovie’s “Ken Burns Effect,” that cool zoom-and-pan motion named for the documentary filmmaker. But the Pop Quiz video with the quick shots of all the cars was done entirely in Keynote.)
An important note: Make sure that you have the necessary legal permissions to use all of your photos. I used stock photos of cars from Pixabay.com as well as official publicity shots.
I automate the transitions in Keynote. A dissolve here, a typewriter effect there, and I’m good to go. Now I export the slideshow as a video file.
3. Add music and sound effects.
Open your video editing program. (I use iMovie on my Mac. Other people prefer Final Cut Pro.) Import the video that you just created in your slideshow program. We just need to add some music and sound effects in the right places. If you want, you can also add voiceover narration.
Now we’re on your production staff’s home turf. Your station probably already has a library of royalty-free music and sound effects (YouTube may remove your video if you use music without the proper rights). Just find the right music bed and drop the sound effects in the right place. Some typing noises, maybe a nice swoosh, and a pop or two. We may also need to do a little video editing just to tighten everything up.
4. Upload it to YouTube.
These days, many video editing programs like iMovie let you upload files to your social networks from within the program. If not, export a video file and upload it.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world behind Google, so be sure to include keywords when you write the title, description, and tags for the video. I always include a url at the beginning of the video description so people can easily navigate back to the website for more information. In this case, “https://dashconference.com.”
If you want, you can add a link to your website using an annotation or card. Here are instructions.
The videos always look better if you add a custom thumbnail. These instructions explain how.
You may also want to consider Wistia as a video hosting solution. There’s a small monthly fee, but it will allow you to do things like capture email addresses from viewers.
Where should you use this video? Here are 10 great places.
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