Video marketing doesn't need to be complicated - let templating help you out

We understand that creating professional-looking video content can be a costly and complicated process. For marketers on a tight budget, this is the channel that often gets overlooked.  But what if there was a way to make professional video ads and campaigns with minimum time and cost? In this episode, we welcome Kay-Anne Reed, Marketing Manager at Waymark, who offers professional video solutions for the modern marketer.

Kay-Anne's background lies in influencer marketing. After working in the Detroit startup scene, providing valuable insight into deals between influencers and brands, she is now the one-woman marketing machine at Waymark — the unique video templating platform. 

She manages all things content and advertising,  whilst looking after the website and keeping an eye on the latest video trends. So, with so many hats to wear, it's important to use the right platform to make her job easier.

Credits:

Interviewer: Vic Heyward https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaheyward/

Guest speaker: Kay-Anne Reed https://waymark.com/

Podcast produced by Let’s Talk Video Production: https://letstalkvideoproduction.com

Transcript

For marketers, creating professional-looking video content can be a costly and complicated process for many companies and if your marketing budget is small, it may well be the first channel to be overlooked. Well, what if there was a way to make professional video ads and campaigns with minimum time and cost? Today we're excited to welcome Kay-Anne Reed, Marketing Manager at waymark who offers professional video solutions for the modern marketer.

Kay-Anne's background lies in influencer marketing in the Detroit startup scene giving her valuable insight into deals between influencers, brands and what exactly makes the audience tick. Her current role at Waymark sees her as a one-woman marketing machine, managing the content, advertising and website, whilst keeping an eye on the latest video trends. So with so many hats to wear, it's important to use the right platform to make her job easier. So we've invited Kay-Anne onto the podcast to chat video templating, scrapping costs for COVID, and just how it feels to have your product offering go viral on social media.

Welcome, Kay-Anne. It's so lovely to see you. I really appreciate you coming on to talk to us today about Waymark and what you're doing. The best place to start is to talk about the woman behind the machine. Could you tell me a little bit about your career journey from influencer marketing, which I mentioned in the intro, to where you are now? And - this is a bit of a curveball - I'm going to ask you about your biggest influencer story. So we can cover that after. 

Yeah, absolutely. I got involved and plugged into the Detroit startup scene through an entrepreneurship fellowship called "Venture for America" and through them joined as you said, an influencer marketing startup called the "Out Loud Group". I helped them scale their business from five people to 25 people. And it was at this time when influencer marketing was sort of the Wild Wild West and went from being just absolutely bonkers to being a bit more formalised.

I love the Wild Wild West, so that sounds amazing.

It was just money flying from every direction, brands having no idea of really how to do it and all that sort of thing. So, from there I went to run marketing at Waymark where I work now.

So, with the influencer stuff - I mean, I always love a little bit of gossip - obviously, we're working in the wild, wild west. I've worked with influencers before in previous agencies, and we've been looking at partnerships here. Have you got anything that you can tell me about, maybe one of the biggest influencer demands that you've ever had? You probably can't name names, but have you had any amazing and weird experiences with influencers at all?
 
Yeah, definitely. There are some eccentric personalities out there. I was primarily doing work with YouTubers. So definitely some divas, especially people who have bigger audiences. They are basically just celebrities at this point who are asking for the glam squad and the limo to film the ad or sponsorship. I once was negotiating the creation of a Superbowl commercial with an influencer -  who shall not be named - which was one of the crazier experiences. They were navigating that transition from digital influencer to a full-on celebrity who might appear in a mainstream Superbowl commercial. The game changes at that level with the things that they're asking for. But we did a lot of fun stuff. One of my favourite ads that we worked on at the Out Loud Group was for a video game called the World of Tanks. We had an influencer called Demolition Ranch. He actually went out and rented some tanks and drove them around and ran over some cars in a junkyard and then at the end, you know, did this little ad for World of Tanks, and it was one of the most effective things that we'd ever done because obviously, the target audience ate that up.


I love all of that. I love the idea of influence marketing, the world of influencers.  There's some really crazy stuff that goes on. I mean, my experience with them was probably much less than that when I worked with a jewellery company. We were offering a piece to do with some collaborative work with an influencer where they would feature the jewellery and things on their YouTube channel. But their demands just got greater and greater. So from starting off with quite a simple piece of jewellery, which was quite a high-value item, suddenly they were adding diamonds to it. And then it was "actually no, I think I'd like two rings". The value of the prize just got bigger and bigger and bigger, which we just couldn't work with in the end. It was just mad. There's a TV show, which probably you won't get in the US, but it's on BBC Three, which is by Baby Cow productions, which is Steve Coogan's production company. They've done a series, which is called Please Like, and it's all about YouTube influences and the madness. It's a really, really good series. So if anybody's listening, I think it's on Iplayer. I think you can catch it on there at the moment. But yeah, really well worth seeing and very realistic I imagine.

Tell me a little bit about Waymark, and who you are. I know you've been around for a little bit, you're not that old to my knowledge. I think, 2016?

We did start in 2016. At the time, we were helping small businesses create Facebook still image ads, and then pivoted into video. We started out at that time primarily serving small businesses as sort of like a self-serve video creation platform for their advertising needs across all these different platforms including social media and wherever else. And then a couple of years ago, we made the transition to upstream to serve the enterprise market. Now we primarily help larger enterprise brands, and media companies and agencies create really high-quality videos at scale. We essentially allow them to make video quickly and affordably. And with a lot of brand control for all the different teams at their company. Their sales, marketing their clients, their franchisees in their local markets, or whoever else needs video, we empower them to create video for all those different teams. The core of how we do that is through really easy-to-use self-serve video creation tools, so anybody can use them, even if they have no production experience. It's up to our customers to decide what teams within their company are going to be using that. But no matter what, what's going to come out of there is a brand-safe, brand-level of quality, beautiful, powerful, video ad.

I imagine, particularly considernig the market at the moment and where we are in the current world situation, that this is an ideal tool for brands in general, for all of their teams to be able to self serve.

Yeah, it's been crazy. I think COVID and the pandemic has made the need for local level of personalization more important than ever before, because COVID is affecting each community completely differently. So you need to have personalised marketing for each different markets, because things are really different everywhere.
Yeah, no, it makes total sense.

I think it sounds like a brilliant tool. It's certainly something that we've struggled with in terms of video production over the past year as well. So it's always really good to know those sorts of tools are available. But one of the most interesting things I learned about you guys, and from our conversations before, was what actually happened during the past year and during the pandemic. And one thing that really stood out to me was that you'd actually made the decision to make your entire platform free, essentially, to small businesses. I just think it's such a bold move. It's such a positive move as well. And I'm just really interested in the strategy behind that, and what the outcome has been for your business. So can you tell me a little bit more about what the thought process was? And how you decided to make this happen?

Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, I think we saw the need coming from that small business background, even though we're primarily serving enterprise customers now. We saw that small businesses were really suffering and a lot of them probably weren't going to make it out the other side of this huge catastrophic event. And so we saw the potential for impact from really fast turnaround advertising that would help them get the word out about what was going on at their business right now. Whether they're closed indefinitely, promoting gift cards to help them get through this pandemic, doing takeout or, wearing a mask.. So we spun up a lot of prefilled messaging around those messages, made it free, as you said, and I think the strategy behind that was we saw the need. We knew that it would come at a low-to-zero cost to us, because we weren't really going after the small business market heavily at that time. We weren't really spending marketing dollars in that arena or servicing a lot of folks in that area at that time since we had shifted to enterprise.

 In addition, it helped drive a lot of traffic to our site, and we hoped that it would help us uncover leads in that way on the enterprise side, which is ultimately what ended up happening. It was really cool to see small businesses use that exactly as we had hoped and create that up-to-date COVID-related messaging or just really great branding videos to try to remind people in their community that they're there and they need support. But we also saw some really key leads come through in terms of gaining traction amongst local branches of bigger enterprises who we were interested in going after, and, at the same time, we saw adoption grow within some of our new markets of enterprise customers who we were already working with. One of our major enterprise customers also adopted this free video as a cornerstone of their COVID response.

Well, one of the other things as well that I do know about you is that as part of this, and  because of this great initiative that you put together, that this was picked up by US billionaire Mark Cuban, wasn't it? This guy's a billionaire, I think? He stars on Shark Tank in the US, which is, I would say, more of a hardcore version of Dragon's Den. I don't know if you've seen Dragon's Den here. It's pretty lame in comparison. I always think that Shark Tank's a lot harder and cutthroat and there's a lot faster turnaround. Whereas in Britain, it's exactly as you would imagine, it really just sort of so for middle-aged people looking a little bit sad, picking and choosing whether we want to invest or not. So he did he tweet about you guys. How did that come about? So I know that he promoted the tool, essentially?

 
Yeah, we have no idea how he found out about it. Obviously, he's an advocate for small businesses, and startups and stuff like that. And he tweeted about it, and posted us on LinkedIn, to the tune of I think almost 10,000 likes. So, that was a huge moment last summer.
sure.

I was gonna say that some pretty decent promotion where you haven't had to do very much for it. But that was pretty impressive. And yeah, I know that he's an entrepreneur himself and he's very much back small businesses, as you say. So that must have generated loads of traffic to your site and your social channels. And did you see quite an uptake at all when that happened?

Absolutely, for weeks after that. It was such a nice thing to wake up to, you know, as a marketing dream.

I long for it, honestly. Any celebrities that want to tweet about us, please do. I just found that really fascinating. And I just think it was a great initiative. It's something that, we as a business thought about doing but I don't think we were quick enough to act in that way. But it shows by thinking creatively, as you did, and thinking about what can we do, because as you pointed out, that you weren't going after that small business market so much. So what were you going to lose by doing that? And actually, now it's completely flipped on its head. So have you gone back now to a paid-for model for small businesses? And what impact has it had?

Yeah, we have. I do think there was a bit of saturation. After the first six months of the pandemic, a lot of people were doing similar things. And people had adjusted a bit more, so we weren't seeing sort of the same level of usage and impact by the time it got around to late fall. So kind of reinstating the prices, if anything was an effort to help us qualify some of those leads that we had gathered from that experience because it becomes very difficult to sell enterprise software if you're giving everything away for free.

Exactly. How do you then move back? That's quite a challenge. Once you've offered a  'freemium' model almost, then suddenly getting people to pay is quite a challenge. But you've been able to qualify those leads? That's quite interesting. And I'm just really pleased that it worked out so well.

Same here, same here. It's definitely a risk.

So going back to what you're saying, about the smaller brands that you're working with. I know that you work with larger brands, as well as media agencies and cable companies. You work with really big ones including Spectrum, which is one of the largest cable companies in the US. So, my understanding of what they do is they take videos and they sell them to small businesses, is that right?
 
Well, they actually use us as a creative sales enablement tool. They use our self-serve platform and put it in the hands of their sales team, and their sales team will take our video templates and personalise them for the small business that they're pitching to that day. They'll be able to make a free spec guide, take it to that meeting with that small business and for those who are unable to afford a $5,000 commercial created by a local production team, now is able to put that same money towards their ad campaign playing on TV with this very low-cost creative created on Waymark. And you know, it also takes away the element of the production timeline, because often small businesses are really moving at the last minute. Not to make them sound bad, but you know, your business has got a lot going on and you're probably not planning six months in advance for an ad campaign. And empowers these media companies to be a little bit more nimble and to compete with folks like Facebook for those lower dollar advertisers and introduce them to a new platform of TV or OTT streaming.

Is that the only cable company you work with, or are there others?

Yeah, they're definitely unique in that kind of sales team use case, I think most of the other media companies and streaming platforms, will use our tool to kind of supercharge their creative team. So, they'll have their creative team -  and spectrum does this as well- but they'll have their creative team make a really beautiful commercial or piece of creative and then use Waymark as a way to maximise their production capacity. So, it's still like a tool. Not to eliminate the need for the creative team, there's always going to be a need for a production team, but to maximise their capacity and enable them to move more quickly.

And one of the things I'm always really interested in is about localised marketing and how we can be a little bit more targeted with that sort of stuff. I wondered if you had any thoughts, tips or experience of working with brands that have had to do more localised video stuff? There are big brand videos, but actually, sometimes within markets, you do need stuff that can be much more targeted. And that could be for general brand marketing, it could be for employer brand, as well. So have you got any hints or tips about that, that you could pass on to us?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we do for larger brands is we'll take their national-level campaign creative, and we'll turn it into an easy-to-customise video template that they can then offer to their local marketers, or local channel partners, franchisees that type of thing. The vast majority of this a frozen in place, unchangeable, brand-safe ad. But then at key points, you can add your local offers, your logo, your name, your address, and that sort of thing, to kind of build that local connection. We've seen that be very effective for some of our clients, especially this year, just offering your local partners the chance to come alongside and support your national campaigns at a local level. And to do it with tools like ours that allow you to do that without concern because I think one of the biggest pain points for larger brands, national or global brands is you want that really effective last mile advertising in the local markets. But the things that your local marketers or franchisees are making are just totally off-brand and not at all what you're looking for.

It can be terrifying because it can feel like such a risk. And I think there's always a fear for anyone that's working in brand management as a brand owner or head of the brand or whatever, it could be quite alarming knowing that you do our partners or franchisees where you can give them guidelines, but sometimes you don't always know what they're gonna come up with. And it's so important to retain that brand equity to make sure that your stuff is on-brand. So what your offering is essential, you're saying that a lot of stuff is templated, so there's unlimited editability within the video. And, I imagine, that the video footage they're using would still be branded but it's purely the messaging and things they can lay on top.

We let brands add their brand kits of logos and different types of footage, brand colours, brand fonts and things like that, to make sure that amongst the world of options that the folks on your team who are personalising these videos are choosing from are all going to be on-brand. It just takes away that element of concern about brand safety when people are making their local creative.

Even within a small team - we don't have the hugest team here - we have to be able to proof things all the time, make sure things are right, that we're using the right colours, the right shapes. We don't use square corners, it's making sure that everything is correct without being restrictive. I suppose the larger brands, you will need to do that on a more of a global level, especially with franchisees. It sounds like a brilliant tool and incredibly helpful to be honest. So I feel like I'm going to be tapping you up after this.

There are a few things that have been going around my head and as a brand marketer and somebody that is often really focused on the creative, we look at a lot of video marketing things here. And it's an area that I know we've under-invested in. I just don't always have the time to do it. But I have brand messaging that I know will come across much better on video. I just wondered what the common challenges that your customers face when they talk to you about video marketing? Are these the same sort of things I'm talking about? 

Yeah, definitely. For our customers, it's the timeline, and often the cost. Generally, the brand safety element is a huge deal for our customers as well. It's basically quality control. So if they had unlimited resources to dedicate to making sure that what every one of their teams was creating was phenomenal, then that would be fine. But they obviously don't. So they have to turn towards tools like ours. But I would say you hit the nail on the head with timelines and affordability being the main two issues at hand.

Yeah, well, it's really good though, that tools like yours exist now to start breaking those barriers down. Because I think before video production felt like a real investment.It's the quality. Again, it's the turnaround times. There are campaigns that I'm thinking about at the moment that I'm working on with our team here. I've got the idea, but I need to get that done. But how can I get that done quickly before the idea goes, and we move on to something else? But one of the real concerns that I often have about video production, and particularly when I think about templating tools, and you might be able to alleviate this completely, is sometimes with templates it maybe waters down the creativity. What do you think about that? Do you have any tips for anyone that might be using a platform such as yours that can help them keep that creative edge?

We really try to partner closely with the creative teams at the different clients that we work with. We find that the brands and agencies know their own brand best or they know their client's brand best. So they are the most qualified to create their own templates. And so we actually empower folks to create their own templates with our Waymark After Effects studio extension. It enables you to pick what's gonna be locked, and what's not, but also to kind of regularly be creating new video creative, that is definitely going to be up to par because you made it and then you also get to decide what elements of it are personalizable and what's going to be locked and held in that brand-safe space.

That sounds great. That alleviates some of that stress. I'm familiar with a few of your competitors and when I use those tools as I have done in the past, I've used a free model. But obviously, there's a paid-for version as well. I think it always feels quite limiting in terms of my ability to edit. And there's quite an additional cost for anything to do with adding any of my branding stuff. It's quite a significant leap. I just often feel a bit restricted with those particular platforms. I'm assuming that if I'm working with you at an enterprise level, then you have that freedom to have more of that creativity. So for smaller businesses, obviously, that's not necessarily an option. They have more of a limited template option. But I've had a look at your site. And there's a huge variety of different templates that people can choose from. Is that a subscription model? Or are they paid for off the shelf, like pay as you go?

We have a set of templates created by our team that are publicly available, and you can buy individually off the shelf, or you can pay subscription monthly to get a certain number of credits that then roll over and you can redeem and that sort of thing. What I think sets us apart from a lot of the other video creation platforms is we really conceptualise our templates as professionally produced stories. We think of our user as the producer or director. There's a fully produced story and you are kind of putting your own spin on it and it's very simple and straightforward, plug and play as opposed to having to come up with this concept creatively with a beginning, middle and end on your own. We do that for you. And you're able to step in with your brand and make it your own.

Oh, that sounds great.  And it's not something I've necessarily experienced to date.
I feel like I'm putting a real sort of shameless question in here. You are a client of ours, and our podcasts are not meant to be horrendous sales pitches. But with the amount of large digital assets that you work with at the moment, I was wondering how you keep track of them? And I know that you use one of our products, which is our latest product called Dash. So yeah, how did you find out about us out of interest? I'm not even sure how that happened?

Well, I think actually what happened is we had a team member, sort of go full hog diving into asset management and doing a full review of this space.

Yeah, I know, right? What an afternoon.

But he really did a comprehensive review of the space and ultimately landed on Dash as the right solution for us. And, you know, obviously, we work with a bunch of different brands and creative teams. And so we use it to make sure that we have a really well organised set of our different customer's brand assets that we can use across our creative team and development team. This way we know that everybody is on the same page. And we also use it because one of the things that it's really helpful for is creating a lot of time-sensitive creative for different brands.  Let's say your spring ad campaign has a certain specific logo. We need to make sure that we're not using any kind of out-of-date assets. It's been really helpful in that realm.

Yes, it helps you keep track of that sort of stuff. It's quite a common thing that comes up in digital asset management. What were you using beforehand?

Just a mishmash of Google Drive, and all sorts of crazy things.

Yeah, it's so common. I mean, I'll be honest, even internally, even though I probably shouldn't admit this, there are occasions where I have some images and things flying around on my internal drives which I know should be in our staff Asset, Bank, or product. But no, that's really good to know. And obviously, we're delighted to be working with you. So thank you for choosing us in the first place.

So budgets have been a bit of an issue over the past year for some. Some people have gone crazy and have just kept spending and spending, others really have had their budgets cut. And, as marketers, we have to really think creativly, often on a daily basis, about how to deliver results.  So I was wondering if you could help our listeners with some practical advice. So for any marketers or brand managers or anyone working in creative services -  there are a lot of people that you work with - if they want to dip their toe into video marketing, what would you say is the best way to begin, and what are some top tips you could give us as a starting point?

I would say we typically recommend, for smaller brands, starting with one really, really fantastic overview, general branding video, and trying to slice that in all the different ways possible. Whether that's for use on your Facebook ad campaigns, I think that's probably the most important place to start with video ads, where video can really make a difference in your performances. Across social advertising or any other ad platforms, video is really the format that performs the best. So I would say start there if you have a minimal budget and upgrade your paid ads to video, but otherwise, I'd say invest in a really, really strong story-driven piece about your brand that can stand in any platform. and in any context. Maybe it's a two-minute piece that you cut down into 30 seconds and six seconds for a Facebook ad but that will take you far.

Great. That's really helpful. Yeah, I suppose when we create these big videos, we forget to cut them up and do other stuff with them.

I've been thinking about YouTube recently and about creating big YouTube ads and stuff. And I'm thinking, rather than going away and paying for something, we've already got some stuff here, which I'm sure we'd be able to do something with and we've got some really valuable content, so maybe we could cut that down because the ads aren't that big. So I think yeah, it's looking at what you already have. And we're having to do that quite a lot. Look at your own resources, look at your own content. Look at the digital assets. Look at the images that you have, the videos that are stored in the drives or hopefully not, and hopefully in a wonderful system, like one of ours, but have a look at that stuff and see what you can reuse or what might spark some ideas for a new campaign? We're always thinking about the next thing and buying more stuff. And actually, we probably don't need to do that. We probably just need to be a bit clever with the stuff that we already have. So I think it's a really, really helpful tip. Thank you.

So if anybody wants to get in touch with you guys, over at Waymark, I'm assuming they just go straight to your website, which is...?

Waymark.com

So, can they get a demo of your services?

Definitely feel free to reach out to team@waymark.com or just schedule a meeting straight through our website.

Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I think you've given us some really helpful tips. And it's been great to understand a little bit more about how your tool works compared to maybe some of your competitors and what your differentiator is because like I say, there are some competitors out there, and the same with all of us in this industry, we're all competitors against each other, not you and I obviously that. So it's good to know what that differentiator is, but it's not always so obvious. So yeah, thank you so much, and we really appreciate your time. Thanks for joining the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been lovely.

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