Building a video production strategy

Kevin: Hello everyone. My name's Kevin Lewis. I am indeed the director for developer experience at Director, which is an open source backend that helps developers build projects. I previously worked at Deep Gramme Orbit, GitHub Vonage among others, but as part of my current role, I run directors tv, which is a developer focused streaming platform that brings together education, entertainment, and stories from across the directors to ecosystem. And in this brief talk, we are going to cover three key areas to consider when planning your video strategy, purpose, production, and distribution. We're going to talk about how to map content to various parts of your developer journey, how to build a strong system to remain efficient, and how to root our awareness work in the rule of seven. And we know that video performs well. While a lot of this talk, of course is applicable for all kinds of content, video is known to be very impactful.

HubSpot found that 59% of marketers say that video is their most valuable content format and short form has the highest return on investment. Google reports that 70% of YouTube viewers bought from a brand after seeing it on platform and Twitter, I will always call it Twitter, say that tweets with video gained 10 times more. Engagement. Video specifically is also quite a portable creative output. One, one asset can be published natively on different platforms and being native means that it's more easily shareable. And we'll talk about why that's important a little bit later. Now, part of our roles is adapting to change and with any new format or medium we jump in to try and understand it and evolve. That's exactly what we do in our professions.

And there are people who do this well in service of the developer community and there are people who do this less well and rage bait in order to drive engagement for personal gain.

But regardless of your personal motivations, it's critical to relate video content or any content that you create back to the business goals that it supports. And to create a holistic strategy around video is also to understand the full developer journey and map that content to various stages. Last year at Dev Elcon, I delivered a talk with one of my favourite people, John Booth, called Learning from Marketing to Quantify Developer Relations Impact. I would encourage you to take a look at this if you haven't seen it already, because it's also important to understand who we create content and programmes for. Now, personally, I don't care what model you use to describe the developer journey. The traditional or bow tie funnels are the orbit model, the DevRel flywheel or something else. But whatever you use, you should be mapping your content to various points in that journey. I'm going to simplify it in the interest of time.

So working backwards, there is content to support existing users get more out of your product in an effort to increase usage of and retain them. In using your product. Here you're trying to expand usage. It could be helping users understand what's new. It could be showing them how various parts of your tools can be used together or multiple products can be used together or sharing optimizations and power user features. When creating video to aid implementation, we consider a wide range of factors when preparing that content, we think about the use case that developers are building against. We think about the features that they need or will use, and we think about the tech stack that we will use and then we use our skills to try and make that content as general and generic as possible, which is really the difficult part in doing this.

And a little tip here or a little thing to be aware of is you will need to, as you make your content more generic and more applicable, help people understand that the knowledge they need is inside of an asset. While of course making it, making it more widely usable. Most devs have a problem right in front of them and we think about content in terms of its most abstracted general form, and you need to do some work to bridge that gap in your messaging. And now we move on to awareness, which is where video content can have some of the most impact. It's first important to note that there are two kinds of awareness to people who understand your problem space. You are trying to show them why they should use your tool versus other tools and why your product is the right choice. And then there are people who don't even know that the problem space exists, even if they could benefit from understanding it in order to solve it.

And the key there is to create content that people really want to see. And you do that by embracing storytelling as your key strategic advantage. Why do people like superb base over firebase or superhuman over Gmail, linear over Jira? It's because one of them is cool, not necessarily because they're always better, and that's through very intentional and repetitive messaging. These opinions are established in the developer mind share. The marketing rule of seven is the principle that says a person will need to see your messaging seven times before buying or 14 as Joyce said in the opening keynotes, quoting Matt Billman from Netlify. I'll say seven for the rest of this talk because it's the principle of seven. Repeated exposure, message variation and timing, consistency, all play into this and other industries outside of tech get this.

Clothing, food, beauty, music, artists all coordinate campaigns to get in front of you with content that makes you feel good to capture your attention and to make you tick up towards that average seventh exposure.

I know we've all got done in by some Instagram ads I got done in by one the other day. And this is what you need to have in mind when you're creating content for awareness. When trying to present your brand to new people. The goal is to build content that is entertaining. It wants to be shared in an effort to maximise how many times someone will be exposed to your brand through sharing. Jason Lang's web dev challenge IRL series is a highly produced hackathon basically with a single challenge that is entertaining to watch and shows off. The sponsors develop a tool in an interesting and novel yet subtle way. In his dev cycle promo video, they reached new audiences that didn't even know what feature flagging was through engaging and entertaining storytelling.

But to that end, video basically never lives inside of developer relations teams exclusively in awareness.

Our goal is to reduce the cost of acquisition through exposing as many people to our brand as possible in implementation. It's to help our success, support and other post-sales teams. And this collaboration is not just to do our bit in creating a video and flinging it over the fence for others to make use of, but to build intentional cross-functional campaigns that deliver into an end goal that everyone is working towards. For awareness. Impact can be measured through the CAC or customer acquisition cost with and without the videos that we produce or more directly through more effective ad spend. In the context of top of funnel awareness work, I want you to always keep in mind someone has to see your brand seven times to buy Your goal is to repeatedly get in front of them in a way that is entertaining and they share. And that's why the native video is more impactful because native video gets surfaced more on most platforms and is more easy to consume.

So make sure you always remain coordinated and focused on the goal of any given piece. So all of this talk about video is great, but how do you actually make it happen? We run an incredibly operationally efficient developer experience team at directors and I'm going to talk to you a bit about what goes into our video work. So directors TV takes about 20 hours a week across three team members with the occasional contribution from other team members on specific shows. It's been going since Christmas. We publish on average 28 videos a month across 35 shows, and the direct cost of that programme is less than 40 grand a year. So that's just a bit of context about this programme. So let's start by talking about what you need to consider when conceptualising content that you create.

Firstly, you need to understand what success is going to look like before you even set out to try and brainstorm an idea.

Where in the developer journey are you targeting this content? And pick one. You can't do awareness and conversion on the same step if you are at most six more exposures away from a buying decision. And this is something we need to educate our stakeholders on so they don't have mismatched expectations. The success in the case of this awareness work is lower CAC and more effective ad spend, not a purchase. And to that end, you need to have a plan for measuring that success upfront. This is key to all parts of our work. Vibes are not an outcome given that the output always crosses over with other teams.

We should be collaborating with them to define success metrics that they already capture to check the efficacy of the work that we produce. Next, how will you work with what you have? You do not need to chuck thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars into fancy equipment, but if you are going to do anything, always prioritise audio over video, slightly rocky video and amazing audio is better to watch, but if the audio is crap, everyone's going to turn your video off straight away.

Next, keep it simple. The only show of ours that ever got cancelled before it got produced was the one that was high complexity to produce. Simplicity is cheaper, simplicity is more easily repeated, more easily. Repeated content gets in front of more people more times. And finally, use your power of understanding what resonates with our audiences to build an interesting and entertaining concept. Next, you need an operational process because to be consistent, I know I sound like a broken record, but to keep repeating this effort is important because you need to keep getting content and messaging and message variance in front of people once a concept is agreed on. Directors tv, our process involves a lot of batch work. All of the planning for a season happens upfront.

If there's a guest, we confirm all of the guests up front. All episodes in a season are recorded at once, sometimes in a single day, sometimes in a single week depending on the time needed for an episode.

We edit all of our episodes in a season together, we do all of the publishing, preparation, admin at once, and this keeps us super, super lean. Overall batching work is the key to reducing the overall time spent and how we manage to produce so much for so little time and money. Next, focus on what you're good at. My team of directors are really excellent at conceptualising planning and recording developer content. And that's where it really needs to be us because we know what's going to land and we are the faces of the company. But editing is not something that is our unique skill, nor does it require the skills of our team. So we work with an amazing external video editor. We deliver raw footage to him in batch and then we work with him on the first episode to make sure the vision is aligned.

And once we agreed that it looks good, he goes and bashes them all out at once. This process also keeps him efficient, which means we get more for the time that we have with him. But remember that resource is needed even when there are no direct costs to delivering your initiatives. Creative work take takes headspace and time and your leaders need to give you that resource because if you put zero in, you're going to get zero out. So the task here really is to find that minimum viable time investment needed in order to make this programme successful. And this is actually really important. I think we all are very proud of the work that we do, but we do tend to overcomplicate it, pair it back into something that's as minimal as possible in order to show success. And you may have money but no time.

And if that's the case, you may consider working with an external media producer or working with influencers to support your content creation and distribution. There are three main ways you can work with influencers. You can have them appear as guests in your content and draw more people in that way. You can sponsor them to create content either in ads or entire dedicated pieces of content or work with influencers entirely on the distribution of your content to their own audiences. Digging The Rabbit Hole is a show on directors TV that talks about the motivation to create the programme, how it was built, all of the processes in a lot more depth and the early feedback on the platform. So if you want to hear more about directors TV specifically, it's about 45 minute watch end to end. Now you may have some new fantastic content, but what some developer relations professionals often forget is there are two parts of our work when it comes to awareness.

One is the creation or the facilitation of creation of content, and the other is actually getting what we do out to the intended audience, which we are in theory in touch with and with directors tv. By batching all of the work to produce and prepare media, we can then at the time of release, give distribution the energy that it needs. I'm not going to go into depth into distribution, distribution strategies because it really does depend on your community and your team and your resources, but always have a distribution plan written up and agreed ahead of time because sometimes it will also impact what you create. Now of course, we built our own platform with which to deliver all of this video content. I want to talk about that choice for a moment. We did this because we have a big enough existing community and audience to make it work.

YouTube was the other option that we considered and we just realised it isn't our platform. We're at the whim of an algorithm. We dunno who watches our stuff and we can't draw attribution lines as easily, but YouTube does have a huge built-in user base and a recommendation engine that can work in your favour, which means you get in front of more people. Directors TV increased the control of our data and the attribution resulting from it, but it was also intensive in resources to create if not in money in our time. So you have to have a captive audience to make something like this worthwhile or be willing to spend more on ads as part of a wider campaign to launch it. And this simply comes down to the state of your community and your motivations. If you want to reach more people, head to YouTube.

If you want to understand behaviours and attribution and therefore have more data with which to iterate the content that you create, consider building your own two of the Digging That Rabbit Hole episodes. Talk about this very specifically. So this is all great in theory, right? But I want to actually break this down into how you piece all of these suggestions together into something that's actionable. So on Monday, or maybe that's a bit aggressive as early as Monday, you should do these things. Firstly, audit your existing high performing content and understand why people find it interesting. Then brainstorm ideas on how to wrap that in narrative storytelling and themeing that makes it entertaining. Figure out the minimum time investment for success.

And that possibly means pairing back your concepts to their truist form so you can make it more easily repeatable. And then given the point in the developer journey you are targeting, meet with other relevant teams.

Build out a wider campaign for most of the content and start to understand the outcome goals and how you are going to measure it between you Define what deliverables are needed. For example, some of our shows have trailers made for them, others don't. Some of our shows have a shorter version that goes on YouTube and a longer version that goes on direct to tv and some we publish partial series or delayed series on YouTube. Figure out a process to batch your work and wherever possible, utilise out of team resources to keep your time minimal. As a quick aside for those here at the event, I've put on the Unconference board for the slot after this talk a whole session on using contractors to buy back your time for the skills that uniquely have and then schedule in the time. That's something we are really bad at.

We know, oh, it's going to take three days and then the three days never get put in a calendar and then other things happen. So then block out the time that you have identified is required. And to summarise, I just want you to be really intentional about the purpose of your content, systemize your content creation for easier repetition. And remember that video is not just a developer relations project, but is one that is shared across disciplines in your organisation. And as we close out, I just want to show you just a short clip I put together to highlight some of what we've managed to do with directors tv so you get a flavour for some of the content that exists. I'm about to play the video. Is that okay over there? Yeah.

Okay. No, hang on, we've got to go back. We've got to do that one again.

Speaker from video 1: You don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. You hire smart people to figure out your problems.

Speaker from video 2: Can you build Netflix in an hour?

Speaker from video 3: I like this because every time I put it on it reminds me that suntec is just rubbish. Let's take a look at our logs. Woo. We have got some moss in here. Holy moly.

Speaker from video 1: Not pirating the way you want them to pirate.

Speaker from video 2: Now let's dive into our theme. So for this I'm going to pull out my trusty pallet knife. Keyboards are probably the main one that I could talk about where I have a bunch of custom mechanical keyboards, I have some behind me, I've got a bunch all over the place. Welcome to another

Kevin: Exciting episode of request review where we go over your hopes, wishes and dreams and potentially crush them.

Speaker from video 3: This is not going to be good for my lisp, but we're going to try it anyways.

Speaker from video 2: It's just a really great tool and I've just been really enjoying still using Typeform all these years later. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you somewhere.

Kevin: No, no, no. If you're okay with it, I love that as the end. All right, fine. Thank you very much.

MC: You have time. So I think we have a little bit of time for q and a with Kevin. So maybe two or three questions. I see a hand in the middle here. Let me come back there with a microphone.

Speaker from video 3:

You too kind. Great talk. So I was like, what do I say? So I do have a question for you with regards to earlier you talked about having great storytelling and I've heard this a lot. How would you get someone to improve their storytelling?

Kevin: That is a really fantastic question and I'm pretty sure there have been a few talks at devcon about this and there's also been talks in the, you got this content library plug plug about storytelling. There's two things I would say firstly is that there are a small number of defined story structures. They are well-documented online and familiarise yourself with those. So on the storytelling side, there are only a fixed number of story formats. And I think once you really understand what they are, you can start to utilise them in collateral that you create. There's another thing here, which is maybe a little less storytelling and maybe a bit more general entertainment and thematic, which is honestly, I match up things that already exist that I like with things I'm trying to teach. There's a show on directors TV about to come out called Dungeons and Dashboards.

We are going to build a virtual dungeon master screen in Directors insights. All I'm really showing them how to do is how to build panel extensions, six panel extensions over six episodes, wrap it in a nice narrative, set up some moody lighting, and now we have something that hits a little different because it is wrapped in a thematic that draws people in. There are other examples of this, of course. Some of them are just slightly more whimsical ways of talking about ideas in the trailer at the end, there was a brief slide for Authentication Avenue where we're basically to introduce people to concepts and some quite complex topics around authentication like a kid's TV show. And I think people resonate with content that is more novel and more interesting. That said, don't rest on your laurels. Things get old pretty quick. So this is another exercise in message variance, but also variance in your approach.

And we are very lucky to now have 35 shows on directors tv. We can, and they all have different concepts and purposes and goals, but it means that we can take an individual feature that we are focusing on and kind of spread it across the various shows so people are more likely to see it more times.

Audence member 1: I can say it pretty loud.

Kevin: I can repeat your question if you want, but...

Audience member 1: So the question is, when dealing with the monitors that is by classic education on marketing and they don't see the value of the video they following, trying to introduce you as a format to help them capture this, how you would deal this. What's your advice?

Kevin: So I'll just summarise your point if that's okay. And please tell me if I'm misrepresented. Basically, how do you work with marketers who aren't always vibing with the video work that you do? Or they fall in and out of love with it, right?

Audience member 1: Mostly they're like, oh, we're not doing this and put this...

Kevin: Okay. So there was quite a lot. There was quite a lot there. One is like dunno how to capture leads from it. I think this is all very situation dependent based on their skills and what you have. But I would say that not every piece of video content is awareness. I think the marketing team come in very well for the awareness type content, which to be fair is what we spent most time talking about. And if they're not into it, it's not going to be successful.

They need to get it in front of people too. And you need to get it in front of people. And as I said, what is the goal of awareness content? It's to make the cost of acquisition cheaper through repeated exposure. If they're not going to be measuring that field, they don't buy into that, kill it in its tracks, it's not going to work. Not every piece of video content is awareness. Of course, as I said, there's content for implementation, there's content for retention and growth. So I would just say this is one where we somewhat rely on collaborating with others to make our work successful.

I think pretty generally, but certainly in this arena. And if you don't have stakeholders that buy in, then it's not a project that has the stakeholders required to be successful. And trying to shoehorn it is probably a one-way path to not being very successful.