Tag: Manufacturing

How to Make a Recruitment Video in 8 Easy Steps

Contributed by BTW Videography

Hiring is the process of selling your company to ideal candidates.

When these candidates come across your job posting, why should they want to learn more about your company, culture, and benefits? What should they know about your history, and why should they want to be part of your future?

You’ll be hooking the right people if you can confidently answer these questions. Telling a visually interesting story is the best way to capture attention and allow you to make the case that you’re the best company to work for.

That’s why we recommend a recruitment video as part of any hiring campaign.

Many recruiters shy away from video because they think it will take too much technical knowledge or expensive equipment. However, the entire process can be completed with technology you already have access to.

From planning to production, we’ve collected eight easy steps you can follow to create your own engaging recruitment video.

FAQs About Producing a Recruitment Video

If you’d like to skip right to the details, scroll down to find the 8 steps.

How Do I Write a Recruitment Video for a Job?

To create effective company recruitment videos, start by laying out a basic story structure, including:

  • Your origins
  • The principles you believe in
  • Challenges on your road to growth
  • The role that your ideal candidate will play in the future of your business

From there, it’s best to flesh out the story with human interest by letting your employees speak on behalf of your business.

What Should You Include in a Recruiting Video?

You’ll want all the following elements in your recruitment video:

  • Interviews with current employees.
  • A cohesive, visually interesting narrative that tells your company’s story.
  • The culture of your company and why it’s a great place to work.
  • A relatable and optimistic plan for the future.

What Is a Recruitment Video?

Job recruitment videos, also known as video job postings, or work recruitment videos, are videos produced by companies looking to hire candidates for an open position.

How Long Should a Recruiting Video Be?

A recruitment video should be fairly short, about 2-3 minutes long. It should be long enough to communicate key details about your company’s culture and vision without getting too bogged down in minutiae or technical details about the open position.

Without further ado, here are eight simple steps you can take to make your own recruiting video.

Phase One: Planning

As with anything worth doing, it’s better to prepare in advance. Here are four steps you should follow during the planning phase of your recruitment video:

1. Determine Your Audience (Create Personas)

“In order to tell a great story that places your ideal candidate at the heart of the narrative, start with candidate personas.”

A persona is an idealized but fictional candidate representing the perfect employee you’d like to hire.

To design your ideal candidate, ask yourself questions like:

  • Who is my ideal employee on a personal level?
  • What are their career and life goals?
  • What do they need and want in a workplace?
  • How is your company better positioned to fulfill their desires compared to others?

2. Articulate Your Company’s Vision and Culture

After coming up with the ideal candidate persona, you should consider designing the image of the company you’d like to project.

Important factors to consider when developing an identity for your business include your ideal company culture, steps to achieve it, and how your business operations reinforce and feed off that image.

Your culture should feel cohesive with your ideal candidate. They are designed to be a perfect match for one another, so if something about this step feels off, it’s important to take a close look and smooth out any rough edges.

3. Come Up with a Rough Script

You should have a good idea of your final product before you begin video production.

Rather than trying to plan out every detail, focus on creating general guidelines that will shape the video you want.

Start by brainstorming simple ideas like music choices, office settings you can use, and visuals you want to include, such as office amenities or even a shot of your building and surrounding area.

Determine what you’d like to say in your recruitment video.

  • What’s the story of your company? Where have you come from, and where are you going?
  • How does your ideal candidate fit into this narrative? They should have an active role in the future of the company.
  • Don’t be afraid to talk about your challenges. Any good narrative involves a character overcoming problems. Your company has challenges and obstacles on the way to growth. Be open about those challenges and how you plan to overcome them with the right candidate.
  • Keep your video focused on the narrative. Don’t be tempted to include too many details about the position, job responsibilities, or other technical information. This will sap momentum from the video and detract from its ultimate purpose: telling an engaging story.

“Your company has challenges and obstacles on the way to growth. Be open about those challenges and how you plan to overcome them with the right candidate.”

4. Decide Whom to Put in Front of the Camera

No recruitment video can be complete without including the human element. Your current employees are the best resource you have when it comes to selling your company to potential candidates.

  • Ask for volunteers. This part is pretty important. You don’t want anyone in the video who may feel uncomfortable in front of the camera.
  • When asking for volunteers, make sure you keep the tone light. Let your employees know it’s a simple process that won’t take long and will involve them speaking honestly about their experiences at the company.
  • If possible, get someone outside the organization to ask recruitment video questions. This will reduce the pressure on them to feel like they have to answer questions a certain way. Keep in mind that a low-pressure, open-ended interview is the best way to get your employees to relax and relate to the interviewer on a human level.
  • Don’t forget to include some leaders in your video. Highly visible senior leadership gives the impression of a more dynamic organization that appeals to candidates.

“Don’t forget to include some leaders in your video. Highly visible senior leadership gives the impression of a more dynamic organization that appeals to candidates.”

Phase Two: Production

Now that you have a plan for your recruitment video, you’ll need to turn your vision into reality. This is the production phase of how to make a recruitment video.

5. Get Comfortable with Your Equipment

Despite what you may believe, having professional equipment is optional when creating a recruitment video. You can make do with just a couple modern smartphones—one for video and one for audio.

The only way to master the art of creating videos is to practice often. If you’re brand new to the process, here are a few tips for filming your recruitment video:

  • Avoid bad audio at all costs. Sound that is choppy, too loud, or incomprehensible will immediately degrade the quality of your final product and make it feel unprofessional. Record audio and video separately, then synchronize the two in the editing process.
  • Film in landscape, not portrait. Unless you create a recruitment video for social media where a portrait frame is appropriate, you want to avoid it. A wide-screen landscape picture is more visually appealing and will look better and more professional on bigger screens.
  • Keep the camera steady. Try resting your camera on a steady surface or invest in a tripod.
  • Get plenty of b–roll. In video production, a b-roll is the footage that is interspersed with your main shot. B-roll is important because it infuses the video with momentum and visual interest that a static, unedited shot can’t achieve.
  • Stay organized. Label all your video and audio files consistently, making them easy to reference in the editing process.

6. Be a Hands-off Director

Employee recruitment videos should feel natural and free-flowing while still having defined structures.

  • Keep interviews open-ended. Let employees talk as much as possible. The more freedom they have to search their thoughts and feelings for truthful answers, the more quickly you’ll get them to open up.
  • Be open to changes. You may learn that an idea or shot you wanted to include doesn’t make sense anymore. Be open to changing directions early and often at the suggestion of your employees or collaborators.
  • Minimize cliches and buzzwords. Compared to other methods, the best aspect of a recruitment video is the ease with which you can generate a compelling and engaging narrative. The quickest way to detract from this narrative is to bring the candidate out of it with too many buzzwords or cliches that will make it difficult to focus on what’s truly unique about your company.

7. Show, Don’t Tell

Remember that video is a visual medium, first and foremost. Keep your job recruiting video interesting by showing rather than telling.

For example, imagine an employee you’re interviewing bringing up how much they love the cafeteria. You should overlay that audio with a shot of the cafeteria, removing the need for the candidate to imagine what the cafeteria must look like and making it easy for them to imagine enjoying lunch there instead.

“Remember that video is a visual medium first and foremost. Keep your recruitment video interesting by showing rather than telling.”

8. Include a Specific Call to Action

By specific, we mean direct instruction, so the candidate knows exactly where to go to complete the application process. The less friction here, the more candidates you’ll have access to. Provide a link that is immediately accessible near the video, as well as instructions in the video for how to apply.

For Best Results, Go to the Experts

No matter your level of expertise or what technology you have access to, it’s possible to make a narrative-driven, personalized recruitment video that highlights the culture of your business to potential candidates.

However, if you really want to maximize your results, it might be best to let a professional recruiting video maker handle it for you.

Behind The Work is an inbound agency with a San Diego Videography team specializing in full-service creative campaigns, including professional recruitment videos for companies. We pride ourselves on our ability to collaborate with our clients and seek to fit ourselves into your production or marketing process as a partner first and foremost.

We’ll work alongside you to conceptualize and produce an effective recruitment video that tells the story of your business and relates it in a way that will maximize your recruiting efforts.

For an example of what we can do, take a look at what we created for the University of California. Of the candidates we helped them recruit, 100% were high-quality and still with them two years after the campaign.

To learn more about the services Behind the Work offers and how we can begin creating the perfect recruitment video for you, contact us to talk with one of our team members.

Why Technical Expertise is Essential in Marketing for Manufacturers

Contributed by Sonny Sultani

There was a time when all a manufacturer had to do was focus on innovation and sell quality products at affordable prices. However, to stand out in today’s competitive online marketplace, companies need to focus on digital marketing in the manufacturing industry. After all, it’s likely that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales will take place using digital channels. Not only is a digital manufacturing marketing strategy essential, but marketing for manufacturers must include technical expertise.

The manufacturing industry targets a niche audience with very specific products and services. As a result, technical expertise is key to communicating not only to prospective buyers but also to designers and engineers. Companies have to be able to explain features and functions of (sometimes) highly complex products and processes so buyers understand what they’re purchasing, so technical teams can design and build them. For this reason, a successful manufacturing marketing strategy relies on a complete understanding of the technical aspects of the business and the products they sell.

Learn how technical expertise impacts marketing for manufacturers and helps in attracting, retaining, and growing current accounts for continued success.

“The manufacturing industry targets a niche audience with very specific products and services.”

What is the Role of Marketing in the Manufacturing Industry?

Marketing for manufacturers is all about communicating the benefits of a company’s product to its prospective buyers. It’s one thing to create the best widget in the industry, but if it doesn’t provide value to your audience, it won’t sell. A successful marketing plan for manufacturing companies helps to connect with consumers, remove barriers surrounding understanding, and provide useful solutions to buyers for higher conversions and business growth.

To clearly communicate how a manufacturer’s products deliver value, marketers have to understand how they work. Marketing for manufacturers is interesting because, in this industry, marketers must be able to explain technical concepts to people who are also technically minded, as well as laymen who may not fully understand what products do or how they function. By having a thorough understanding of the technicality of the products they promote, marketers can bridge the gap and appeal to all levels of the audience.

Tracking the buyer’s journey will tell you where your clients came from before they signed up for your trial. Those previous touchpoints will be key channels for displaying your PPC ads to increase the number of buyers ready to sign up.

However, the attribution model you use for tracking your buyers and their touchpoints will impact how you view your channels. An attribution model is how you distribute value from a sale among each contributing channel.

If you use a last-click attribution model, you only attribute the trial signup to the last channel the buyer visited. This model doesn’t consider other stops they made leading up to the trial signup. For example, that same buyer might have spent significant time on social media earlier in their sales journey, making that channel another valuable location for ads.

Seeing the entire journey in your attribution model is the most effective way to choose the best channels for your PPC ads.

“By having a thorough understanding of the technicality of the products they promote, marketers can bridge the gap and appeal to all levels of the audience.”

Ultimately, a marketer’s job is to attract, retain, and grow current accounts for sustainability and longevity. Ways to do this effectively include:

  • Know your audience: marketers must know the demographics, background, and level of technical experience their audience has to create custom content that resonates and delivers value
  • Build an online presence: remain active on digital channels and consistently publish informative, useful information that educates, explains, and informs
  • Post authoritative content: position yourself as an industry leader with expert content that shares trends, forecasts, and findings

Manufacturing marketers who incorporate technical expertise help to earn credibility, build consumer trust, and develop customer loyalty. All of this helps to drive more business to the company and convert more prospects to customers.

How to Leverage Technical Expertise in Marketing for Manufacturers

One of the most effective ways to attract new prospects and retain current customers is to create a positive user experience. Typically this means delivering value and solving problems in a way that reduces friction and results in happy customers. In manufacturing, the buying process lends itself to several opportunities for consumer frustration.

Making sense of confusing technical drawings and complex industrial design while trying to purchase expensive industrial equipment can be an aggravating process. Luckily, a B2B marketing strategy provides several ways to eliminate those frustrations and earn loyal customers. Here are two ways a manufacturing marketing agency can leverage technical expertise for customer satisfaction.

1. Whitepapers

Whitepapers are educational, objective, long-form reports that focus not on selling a product but on providing solutions. They’re a terrific way to leverage your technical knowledge, as their expert-level data helps explain confusing technical data in a way that audience members can understand. Whitepapers help to:

  • Identify your customer’s problem and its greater impact
  • Recommend a solution
  • Provide research and credible statistics to support the solution

Readers can download your whitepapers from your website (often in exchange for customer contact information). Although not specifically a sales tool, whitepapers can be a powerful aspect of a sales strategy for manufacturing companies. They can help you create a contact list of prospective customers and serve as a resource that builds customer trust and loyalty.

Whitepapers that describe advanced capability and technical processes are especially beneficial as a marketing tool because they:

  • Build your reputation: position yourself as an industry expert and thought leader in your field
  • Gain consumer confidence: authority content helps people feel more certain in their purchase decision
  • Drive website traffic: people will visit your site to seek out your expert-level content
  • Generate revenue: buyers can see why your solutions are superior and will choose you over your competitor

Well-written whitepapers that explain technical concepts in a way your audience can understand help to deliver value while reducing friction.

2. Video Tutorials

One of the greatest drawbacks to a digital marketplace is the inability of buyers to test a product before they make a purchase. This is especially detrimental in the manufacturing industry, where features and functionality can be difficult to envision from a photograph or technical description. Video content can be instrumental in converting customers because it allows people to see firsthand the mechanics of how something works. There are currently more than 244 billion digital video viewers in America. Videos are engaging, entertaining, and demonstrative.

“Video content can be instrumental in converting customers because it allows people to see firsthand the mechanics of how something works.”

In manufacturing, video tutorials can do everything from show how a product works to how to submit files for processing. Seeing an actual demonstration gives buyers the confidence they need to commit to a purchase. In fact, video convinces 77% of consumers to buy. As a marketing tool, video tutorials can:

  • Help you connect with your customer
  • Provide invaluable information that converts
  • Set you apart from the competition
  • Boost SEO for greater visibility
  • Generate revenue

Videos are highly shareable, so they’re an effective tool to boost manufacturing marketing. They’re effective for the manufacturing industry because they can present information in three different, yet equally powerful, ways:

  • Explainer video: short videos that express how your company or products solve problems
  • How-to video: step-by-step instructions that teach viewers technical processes or ideas that are too complex for text descriptions
  • Demo video: shows people how to use a product or complete a task

Through video content, you can connect with consumers on a more personal level and give a face and personality to your brand. This helps build trust and earn credibility, leading to strong customer relationships that last.

How Do You Market an Industrial Company?

Just like any business, marketing is crucial to the current and future success of your company. You have to know your audience, their needs and pain points, preferences, and buying habits. Use that information to identify solutions you provide that benefit them and deliver value. Create custom content that is relevant to their needs and alleviates their concerns. Learn where they’re spending their time online and reach them with your messaging on those channels.

The digital age has made it easier than ever to connect with prospective buyers. The Thomas Register of Manufacturers is the leading comprehensive directory of American and Canadian manufacturers. Google adopted the registry (originally a set of bound books) and renamed it ThomasNet, now an online resource. As a result, companies can reach younger procurement officers and digital marketing can add enterprise clients where it was once not possible to do so.

Think about your unique traits that help you stand out from the competition. Highlight features, services, or technical expertise you have that nobody else can offer. Remember to always keep your customers in mind and deliver solutions that meet their needs. Building relationships will produce benefits that last beyond sales.

“Building relationships will produce benefits that last beyond sales.“

How Can Manufacturing Increase Revenue?

With 638,583 American manufacturing businesses currently in operation, you have to find ways to set yourself apart from the competition. Digital marketing and marketers with technical expertise are key to attracting more business to your manufacturing company. Here are three ways manufacturing can increase revenue.

1. Create a Positive Experience

One way to drive sales is to ensure your customers are satisfied with their experience with your brand. Customer relationship management (CRM) is critical in attracting new prospects and retaining current customers. CRM for manufacturers helps you manage all interactions with your audience, which yields the following benefits:

  • Improved sales performance: all conversations are located in one place so teams have access to all information and no sales opportunities fall through the cracks
  • Forecast future sales: seeing potential deals can help you plan for upcoming demand
  • Smoother supply chain: CRM provides visibility and insights about operations and processes

CRM systems help you ensure you’re providing a positive customer experience, which in turn sets you apart from the competition and drives business your way.

2. Innovation

Your manufacturing business should be constantly finding new and creative ways to solve your audience’s problems. Whether it’s a matter of improving the features of your current products or coming up with entirely new solutions, the company that stays ahead of the competition will attract the attention of the buyers in need.

Innovation can also revolve around your processes and operations. Find ways to streamline your efforts to make things run more smoothly and efficiently. These kinds of creative solutions can attract the attention of other industry leaders who want to learn from your ideas. They can also entice customers looking for a more effective way of doing business to give your brand a try.

Whether it’s new products or new processes, you have to be able to explain these new ideas to your audience. Use research to back up your claims and reputable resources to prove your findings. When you have the ideas, tools, and technical expertise, you’ll entice buyers to convert, thus generating more revenue for your business.

3. Strengthen Your Online Presence

With such a focus on digital interactions in today’s marketplace, if you want to generate more revenue, you have to strengthen your online presence. Use SEO to earn higher search engine ranking placement so you can increase visibility and drive more traffic to your site. Craft compelling content that includes high-performing keywords so your material aligns with online searches. Incorporate quality backlinks that offer valuable resources to your readers.

Engage your audience on social media platforms. Highly targetable and easy to share information, social media is a great way to build brand awareness and identity while learning more about your prospective customers. Chat threads and forums will reveal candid feedback about you and your competitors. Discover common industry concerns or problems and learn how you can develop a solution that would earn customers and generate more revenue.

Maximize Your Marketing for Manufacturers

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with technical expertise is a winning combination for attracting new prospects, retaining current customers, and growing current accounts. Behind The Work is a manufacturing marketing agency that can help position manufacturers to succeed with technical expertise. Enhance your digital marketing strategy and generate more revenue for your manufacturing business.

Ready to improve your performance? Visit Behind The Work today.

DLD | 637% + New Users

Contributed by BTW Content Team

Dental Lab Direct is a lab and online retailer that delivers dental appliances directly to your door, eliminating the need to visit a dentist. 

“Being able to consistently speak with 1 or 2 people from their team was great.” – Joe Bazzi, Founder of Dental Lab Direct

The Challenge

Dental Lab Direct is an online retailer that delivers dental appliances directly to your door, eliminating the need to visit a dentist. Dental appliances like partial dentures and retainers are costly on their own – visiting a dentist adds hefty additional surcharges that can prevent those with crooked or missing teeth from getting the products they need. These services can be performed directly from home, eliminating the need to visit a dentist.

The client approached us at 120/80 with three primary objectives:

  • Setting up their ecommerce operations
  • Building out a lucrative lead generation pipeline through digital paid and organic traffic
  • Identifying new opportunities for growth

Now just shy of a year after beginning their campaign, our digital marketing campaign for Dental Lab Direct has been a resounding success. Even as pandemic-related sales diminish, their sales continue to expand in all directions.

Our Approach

We began our campaign by starting where the client thought the greatest success would be achieved. After setting up ecommerce through Google Shopping, we experimented with adding additional channels to create more opportunities. The insights gained during this discovery phase allowed us to lift sales on products that were less popular while expanding sales for products with high demand.

Paid digital search generally focuses its efforts on Google, as the search engine constitutes a 92% market share globally. However, this percentage is not consistent across all demographics. It is estimated that around 71% of Bing users are 35 or older, and the average cost-per-click on Bing is nearly 60% lower than those on Google. As partial dentures constitute the bulk of Dental Lab Direct’s sales, targeting a search engine mostly frequented by older adults offered an easy opportunity to keep PPC costs low and revenue high. 18.5% of the clients traffic comes from Bing PPC efforts.

Our organic search campaign began with a competitor analysis to assess which terms they were ranking for, and keyword gaps that they had missed. A list was generated around these terms, and expanded to include related search queries. These keywords were further broken down by search volume against keyword difficulty to determine which content had the best opportunities for rankings.

The most successful content offers unique industry insights and perspectives. As our campaign gained traction, new keyword opportunities were discovered around products like DIY dentures – ones that dental experts have deemed neither safe nor reliable. Differentiating Dental Lab Direct’s services from these allows customers to learn more about what options will provide the best results, expanding our organic reach even further.

431%

431% Return on Ad Spend

637%

637% Increase in New Users

1650%

1650% Increase in Top 3 Ranking Keywords Positions

The Outcome

120/80’s campaign with Dental Lab Direct has been a resounding success. Over the course of a year, they have seen explosive growth with no end in sight.

A year after our initial engagement, our relationship with Dental Lab Direct has continued to evolve. A recent email campaign we launched has already seen a 1159% improvement in performance over the last three months when it was handled by a different vendor. Experimentation is essential to our methodology, and opportunities like this have allowed us to find new territory to expand beyond our competition.

Our success with Dental Lab Direct has taken place at all levels thanks to consistent communication between our team and the client. We have found competitors liable of optimizing an account at the beginning, and letting it run its course without communicating successes or missteps with the client. 120/80 recognizes that opportunities emerge throughout the life cycle of an account, and that the most successful digital marketing initiatives are an act of trial, error, and resolution.