Increasing Awareness and Content Output Through Video Blogging

Interview with Tim Llewellyn, founder and photographer at Llewellyn Creative.

How and why did you get started with video? Why Wistia?

The evolution and success of our business has been and continues to be inexorably linked to how quickly we can make our clients — many of whom are starting their own businesses — grow and succeed themselves.

As we got more and more into the analytics side of content marketing, we found the most effective way to help our clients produce useful and engaging content was to have it come straight from them, so video blogging was a nice fit. It makes us happy, it makes them happy, and best of all, it produces results. Our clients are too busy starting and running their businesses to make the time to sit down and blog for themselves. Video blogging has become an exceptionally productive and painless content creation method.

One of our most valuable sources for information and inspiration in the content marketing and search engine optimization world is Rand Fishkin, of Moz. In one of his Whiteboard Friday posts he recommended Wistia as a video platform. That got us into research mode, and we quickly signed on with Wistia.

What are your video goals?

Our goal, at the end of day, is to make it as simple as possible for our clients to generate content consistently. Before we were doing video blogs, we would have to repeatedly remind our clients to write content. And, the truth is, writing good blog content on a consistent basis is difficult and time-consuming.

“Our goal, at the end of day, is to make it as simple as possible for our clients to generate content consistently.”

We wanted to give them the upside of content marketing without the burden of content creation. We found that the best way for them to communicate complicated or technical topics was through video.

We go to our clients' offices several times each year to gather video footage, ask them about their work, and talk about recent trends — basically a half day long brain dump. We take that footage back to the editing suite and produce a few months worth of blog footage. We write up brief summary introductions to each blog post and transcript the footage. Then, we get the content approved by the client and post it for them. They can spend their time working while blog posts go up on their behalf.

Which Wistia feature is most important to you?

The most important part of Wistia is the SEO benefit. Our clients blog to increase visibility and drive more quality traffic to their websites. We have found that the Wistia interface is so simple to use, gives us a clean presentation, gets the message out there, and keeps all the SEO value heading in the right direction.

We are excited that Wistia’s SEO tools are always evolving. Frankly, anything that makes our workflow easier and helps our clients get found more effectively has a huge upside for us.

Can you share any specific results or stats that you’re proud of?

We work with a facial plastic surgeon in Boston, Dr. Jaimie DeRosa, and her content marketing story is a great example of how using Wistia’s SEO features in conjunction with a consistent content strategy can make a measurable impact on traffic.

Dr. DeRosa opened her private practice on Newbury Street in Boston a few years ago and asked us to help her get the word out. She’s an incredibly talented surgeon and is extremely personable, but she was competing with medical practices that had been established the Boston area for years.

We started helping her video blog. We produced a series of posts for her and saw dramatic results in just a few months.

After just about a dozen video blogs, there was a huge increase in organic search traffic. If you compare October 2013, before she started blogging began, to the same month in 2014, there was jump from 253 visitors from organic search a month to 430. That’s about a 70% increase. In 2015, that number was 784 — a 210% increase in organic search traffic from her pre-blogging days. Her first steady month of video blogging also saw a 1,154% increase in social traffic from her historical average.

“After just about a dozen video blogs, there was a huge increase in organic search traffic.”

We like to think of these numbers not in percentages and raw statistics, but potential patients. These numbers mean that 531 more new potential patients are finding Dr. DeRosa’s website from organic search every month, or 17 more potential patients per day.

The nice thing about video is that patients who find Dr. DeRosa through search and watch the videos can go to her office feeling like they’ve already met her. Video allows her personality and confidence to really shine. Wistia has let us show that.

What’s next for you?

Our goal for this year is to spread the word on video blogging. We want to blog for as many companies in as many industries as we can. Everyone should be creating video if they want to succeed with their online marketing. It’s where the world is heading. We want to learn more from the video experts out there. The more the merrier!

Find Llewellyn Creative online.