This month, YouTuber, photographer and HoneyBook member John Branch is answering your most pressing video marketing questions in our new Ask An Expert series. Have a question? Ask John here.
Your Video Marketing Questions Answered
What’s up? This is John from John Branch IV Photography, back again to answer your questions about video marketing. If you didn’t catch the last video, make sure to check it out right here on HoneyBook’s IGTV. You could find a little introduction from myself and get to know me a little bit better, but for now, let’s go ahead and jump right into your questions.
What are your app recommendations for solopreneurs to edit their own videos?
There’s a bunch of different routes you can take with this. Let’s start out with the stuff that would be most simple and most flexible, to your more advanced and more professional stuff.
- One of the most simple apps, and it’s also mobile, would be my favorite, Adobe Rush. Now, this app is very, very bare bones, but one cool thing that it has going for it is that it’s mobile, it can work on your iPad and your iPhone. You also can edit in landscape or portrait mode, so this will make it easy to make videos really quick, on the go. Maybe you recorded some stuff with your phone, like we were talking about in the last video, and then you want to edit it up real quick. Adobe Rush will give you the ability to make cuts, and add text and even music to your video on the fly, on your phone. Definitely check it out. I believe it’s only $9.99 a month with an Adobe plan, or if you have the old Creative Cloud, you probably already have it, so definitely check it out.
- If you still want to go mobile, and you want something more effective, there’s LumaFusion. This app costs $20, but it can do way, way more. This is more of just an iPad only app, but with the iOS ecosystem, if you record it on your iPhone, it goes to your iPad automatically, and then from there you can use it in LumaFusion, and edit it, and put it up from there.
- And then last, but not least, you have your advanced options, which would be Final Cut Pro and Abode Premiere Pro. These are going to give you everything you absolutely need to use. I personally use Final Cut Pro for my videos on YouTube, and it’s actually not so hard to learn them. I’m pretty new to Final Cut Pro myself, and I’ve only been using it for maybe half a year now, and I already have some of the key commands under my finger, and I’m starting to really get used to it.
Those are a couple of recommendations from my end. Definitely check out Adobe Rush. Not a lot of people like it, but I think it’s very effective, especially if you want to get something out, quick and easy.
Is it better to shoot vertically for IGTV or landscape for YouTube?
So this is actually a funny little question because there’s a lot of variables to this. I don’t think there’s really one single answer, but let me tell you some of my thoughts on it.
As you know, IGTV is a little bit newer, and when Instagram started that, they wanted everything to be vertical. Vertical video was unheard of because all of our TVs are horizontal. It was kind of rough, and I remember when I started using it, I was like, “I don’t really want to record everything vertically, but I’ll give it a try.”
Recently, IGTV just kind of gave up on their vertical video, and now you actually can upload horizontal videos and then turn your phone to the side to watch it. I actually feel like that was kind of a loss for them, because they were trying to carve out a niche aside from YouTube. Now you have a platform where people might just upload stuff to both YouTube and IGTV, which kind of loses what IGTV was going for.
So technically, the answer right now is you can record for both, but I do think it’s probably better to record vertically, like I am now, for IGTV, as it’ll fit better, it’ll get more of a resolution out of it, versus having to flip your phone onto its side.
I feel like all the videos I want to make are already out there. How can I be unique with my information?
This, in my opinion, is probably the biggest kind of comment that holds back anyone from making videos. Even myself, before I started making videos, it was the exact same thing. I’m a photographer, I’m a wedding photographer, I want to make videos on stuff like that, but a lot of people do that already. Like, who am I? I’m just going to be saying the same thing.
So for this, basically what I say is to find your niche, and to find an area that you can carve out, that personally speaks to you. One way I did this for myself is that I’m very tech heavy. I used to work at Apple, and I really love Apple products, and how I can use tech to work with my business, so some of the videos I made that kind of carved out a niche was how I can use technology with my photography business.
For example, one of my videos that did really well was how you could use Adobe Lightroom on your iPad Pro. This is something that not a lot of people will talk about. Most professionals are like, “Whoa, you can’t use an iPad for serious work,” whereas I am so passionate about it, I figured there actually is a way for me to use my iPad seriously, and by carving out that niche of technology and wedding photography, that no one else is really talking about, now I have a voice in a very saturated market.
So that’s what I would suggest to you all. Find something that you’re very passionate about and something that most people don’t talk about. It can still be in the same industry. You could still talk about wedding photography, or flower arranging, but find the one thing that you’re super passionate about, that’s a little uncommon. It may be a small niche, but you’d be surprised at how many people actually want to hear about it and just never have heard anyone talk about it, so they feel like the odd person out.
Also, another way to be unique with your information is just being yourself. You have a perspective that’s different from anyone else’s perspective. The way you communicate it and the way that you see things is going to be very different from anyone else. Don’t look at what others are doing and then try and replicate it. Come up with how you want to do things.
Obviously, stuff will be slightly the same, and you may even talk about some of the same subjects that other people talk about, but find your unique niche within that subject, and that will fully set you apart. You, yourself, because again, you are enough, and then your unique take on things that are already out there, that would be my biggest suggestion to stand out in markets that are already saturated with information.
Lightning Round Recap
So don’t forget:
- Check out Adobe Rush on your iPad or iPhone. It’s definitely great for video editing.
- Shoot your video for whatever platform you’re going to be on: vertical for IGTV, horizontal for YouTube. Or you could use horizontal for both.
- Find your niche. Don’t be afraid to go into a market that’s already saturated with information. You will stand out for being yourself and finding what you’re uniquely into.
Have a question?
Don’t forget to drop some more questions here, so that I can answer them in the next video.
Thanks, John!
Additional Video Marketing Resources
For more answers to your most pressing video marketing questions, check out other posts from our Ask John Branch series.
Want to learn more about getting started with video marketing and transforming your business leads? Get our Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing here.
