Chapter Leader Q&A: Video Marketing and Interviews with Andrew Beaton
Posted on Mar. 11, 2024 / Marketing Strategy / Subscribe 0
Andrew Beaton, a seasoned marketer with a wealth of experience, recently shared valuable insights into the dynamic landscape of modern marketing during an interview with SMPS Boston’s Director of Communications, Allie Flood. Read on to learn what he had to say about interviewing experts, investing in video marketing, and building an opt-in audience.
Allie Flood (AF): As an associate and manager of marketing and communications at CDM Smith, what's your favorite part of your job?
Andrew Beaton (AB): I love sleuthing out interesting projects, innovative research, and technical superstars and bringing a spotlight onto them. Finding those stories and sharing them with an audience that would get value out of it is the core of what I enjoy most.
As a manager, I really like getting talented people together and doing what I just described but scaling that up. So, we're spinning off stories and content, messages, videos, and pictures in all different directions—growing something beyond what I can do myself and tapping into different talents, skill sets, and ideas.
AF: The last time we spoke, you mentioned how you started interviewing experts at CDM Smith. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
AB: One of the skills I've developed is sitting down with technical professionals and interviewing them to understand the work that they do. Initially, that was for proposals. I’d sit down with an expert and say, OK, what do we want to say here? What do we want to get across to the client? How do we convince the client that we can do this part of the project successfully?
Then, as my career transitioned to a corporate marketing communications role, it was for web content. I'm going to interview somebody to write a thought leadership article. I'm going to interview someone to do a project spotlight. I progressed along a little further to being in front of the microphone or in front of the camera. Then, we started to do webinars or panels where I would be live asking people questions or moderating a discussion. Now, we’re doing interviews geared toward social media.
To me, whether you're doing a cover letter for a proposal or sitting on a stage at a conference, it’s about having the ability to understand the professional’s philosophy, passion, or the nature of their work and turning that into something that's easy for the client to read and understand or easy for the audience to pick up on and get excited about. That’s the core of what we do. So, these videos are sort of a distillation of that.
AF: Can you expand more on your mission or purpose with your videos?
AB: Getting clients to want to work with us is the ultimate goal. We want to capture the insights that these brilliant people have and deliver them in a way that is really easy to consume. We consume video all the time. If you're on YouTube or TikTok, you’re watching these short-form videos all the time, and so we’re serving up the expertise of our team and delivering that in a way that people can scroll through on their phones. We are also trying to give some love to the brilliant people in our organization who are really distinguishing themselves with their technical prowess.
From a pragmatic point of view, I love the idea of cutting out the middleman. We really want the technical expert to talk to the client. If we can facilitate that through digital marketing, that's ideal.
What we're trying to do, in a certain sense, is get away from blog posts and traditional thought leadership. We still do those things, but we are now trying to create opportunities where the client can be sitting at their computer, and the expert is talking to them about a problem that they are facing. Across all mediums, our most effective and engaged-with content is answering a question that the client has or solving a problem for them, rather than centering ourselves. A client-centered approach to marketing would suggest that you really want to be looking at those client problems and addressing those because the client is the main character, not the consultant.
AF: What you’re doing is putting a face to the expert. A lot of times, you look at social media pages, and it's just, “Here's a project that we did,” and that's great, but it's nice to show people because people generally like to interact with people.
AB: You're totally right. This is where I have heard reservations about showing off your team—for example, showing your team on your website. People often fear that “it’s showing recruiters who they can come and steal.” But the product is the brainpower of the people who work here. It's not a widget; it's not a software product; it's the brainpower that we sell.
On our website, we have all these different kinds of pages: project write-ups, insight articles, webinars, and expert profiles, and most of the people using the website to reach out to us come through these expert pages. Also, from a social media standpoint, images of people are what create engagement. So, if you have five pictures of a project and at least one of them has some humans in it like, that's what people are going to click on.
AF: What is your advice to someone who is looking to interview technical experts and make video content?
AB: Like anything else, it’s about experience. So, the more experience you can develop in interviewing people, the more effective you will be. Preparation is critical, and asking good questions requires prep. The better questions you ask, the better answers you're going to get, and a lot of times, the best interviews come where you are almost a little bit more prepared than the interviewee expects. You can create a sense of delight in the interviewee when they see that you get what they're trying to say, and so they open up, and they're a little bit more dynamic.
On a practical level, we work with engineers who are all about precision and accuracy. If you want a sense of dynamism, you don't necessarily want to say, “Here's the five questions I'm going to ask you,” so they can script their answers. It's ok to say, “Here are the topics I want to ask you about,” and that way, you wind up getting a little bit more of a conversation.
AF: What do you think a video interview offers that you don't get from print (kind of like this one)?
AB: Going back to this idea of sort of cutting out the middleman—taking nothing away from print interviews, I think they can be great, too! For us, the value is you have the technical experts speaking directly and you are almost replicating the experience that the client is going to get when they sit down with this person. I think that's a thing that video can do very effectively.
AF: And how do you get technical staff excited about doing these interviews?
AB: One of the biggest keys I have found with any type of marketing content that isn't linked to a specific pursuit is being thoughtful and very aware of your collaborators’ time. Technical staff are expected to bill a certain percentage of their time, so any time that you get from them is taking away from their ability to achieve their work goals. So, specific to these videos, we communicate with them about the process and what they can expect. We keep kickoff calls to half an hour and the interview to an hour. It may not take the full hour, but we block an hour just in case we have technical difficulties. Then we send them an edited video, take their feedback, and publish it. So, all in…two or three hours, and it's easier for them to say, okay, I can give you that.
Anytime you're launching a series or launching some kind of marketing initiative, my belief is to pilot it first, start small, and start with people who are more excited to work with you or more eager to do it. This is where you learn how you can shorten the process and where the points of failure are. Then, as you start to reach out to people that you might not know as well, it's easier to say here’s what we’re hoping to create, here’s how much time it's going to take. Also, give people an opt-out, because not everyone's going to want to collaborate with you.
My goal for any type of content we do is for it to feel easy—for it to almost feel a little bit magical for the expert that we're working with. Like, wow, that's all I had to do. And wow, you made it look so good. And obviously that's a lot of work on our team’s side to do that. There are a lot of people putting in a lot of hours to make it feel that way, but we want them to feel like they only had to invest a little bit of time, and they got all this value out of it. And if we can get that feedback, then we're doing our jobs correctly.
AF: Do you edit the interview videos?
AB: I do not—we have a team. We have a lead video director, Val Tracy, and another videographer, Giancarlo Lavall, who films the interviews and does the editing. Rachel Herbst and I take turns serving as interviewer or helping with prep and cutting down the interview to the highlights. Then we bring in Lyddy O'Connell, a designer who does the graphic overlays. And we usually have an intern or two in the mix just to learn and help out.
AF: Video marketing is clearly something to stay for the future—is there any other medium that’s here to stay?
AB: Video is huge, but I think you need a combination of formats. Email marketing is a big thing for us right now, as well as website content. You also need social media content, which includes video. You need events, webinars, live events—so you need a combo of all those things. Generally speaking, in the same way, you say that a picture is worth 1000 words—seeing a video of something or hearing somebody talk about something just brings it to life in a way that's special. So that's the reason we've invested a lot in video.
AF: What do you think are the strongest tools that a marketing team can utilize?
AB: You need clients to opt into your marketing—and not just because of some of the laws and regulations, like the “accept cookies” thing, right? You need people to say yes. Even more than complying with the regulations, you want to be sending your marketing content to an audience that wants to receive it. So, whether that is through social media accounts that people can follow, whether that is through email newsletters and communities that people sign up for, or through webinars and events and things that people register for, you have to be getting clients to opt in. An opted-in audience will consume your content at a much higher rate and will be open to getting more from you.
To see the strategy discussed above in action, check out these video interviews:
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