It’s time to revolutionize your video marketing strategy! So I spoke to Ben Amos, who has written “Engage: The Definitive Guide to Video Strategy for Business.” Because in today’s digital-first world, video isn’t optional—it’s essential. In his book, Ben reveals the proven 7-step framework to plan, create, and distribute videos that deliver real results.
SPECIAL GUEST:
Ben Amos, author of “Engage: The Definitive Guide to Video Strategy for Business.” Find Ben’s podcast, services and masterclass at EngageVideoMarketing.com. And see his book at EngageVideoMarketing.com/book or on Amazon.
HOST: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by:
– Dane Golden, YouTube Consultant
VidAction.tv | LinkedIn | YouTube
TRANSCRIPT:
Dane Golden:
It’s the VidAction podcast. I’m Dane Golden here with Ben Amos of Engage Video Marketing. And he’s written a book: “Engage: The Definitive Guide to Video Strategy for Business”. Welcome Ben Amos!
Ben Amos:
Hey Dane! It’s awesome to be here and good to reconnect with you. It’s been a while.
Dane Golden:
Yeah, it’s been a while. And of course, Ben also has a great podcast that you should listen to: The Engage Video Marketing Podcast. That’s what it’s called, right?
Ben Amos:
That’s right. Yep. You got it.
Dane Golden:
Great! So that’s probably, I would say, the best from someone else who does a video marketing podcast. His is the best. Keep an eye on that one.
Ben Amos:
Thank you!
Dane Golden:
So you just wrote the book, Ben. What was the goal in writing “Engage: The Definitive Guide to Video Strategy for Business”?
Ben Amos:
Yeah. So this book is kind of everything I’ve been working on and working with my clients and with my coaching clients and with other people in my community for, I would say, seven or eight years. And obviously the world of video marketing’s changed a lot over that time, but ideas and concepts and frameworks that have been developing that are now in this book is something that really drives everything that we do both for our clients in my video marketing agency and also the work that I do with other people to help them help their clients and for businesses to help themselves with video marketing as well. So the reason why I wrote this book was really, I felt like it was in me and it needed to get out. But you know, I’ve got to say selfishly as well, I always wanted to be an author, right? So I wanted to have a book in the world, which I know many people do. So I encourage you if you’re listening to do that, to get your book into the world. But yeah, like I’m stoked that it’s out and I’m stoked that it’s in people’s hands and people are reading it and learning from it, bookmarking it, scribbling in the margins and all of that sort of good stuff.
Dane Golden:
So who needs this book?
Ben Amos:
Good question.
Dane Golden:
Or, who should have this book?
Ben Amos:
So for me, I was writing this book for two distinct audiences. One of those was me seven years ago, right? Basically. So I run a video production company, a video strategy agency. So one of the core audiences for that book is someone who is, you know, professionally able to produce video. They’re out there. They’re getting paid to make videos for clients, right? But they don’t understand the strategy, the marketing strategy behind this video content in order to best guide their clients towards the right videos for the right purpose in the right way. And when a video producer or a videographer can really become a video strategist—that’s the ultimate aim of the book—then they’re able to better serve their clients to get better results with video content. By doing that, then they unlock bigger budgets. They, you know, have stronger, longer term relationships with their clients. It’s a win-win-win. That’s my experience. And that’s the experience that I’ve had teaching these frameworks and ideas to, you know, a couple of hundred video producers through my big course, which I’ve been releasing for a couple of years now. So that’s one audience: that video producer, that professional video creator who’s doing it for their clients or that social media marketer or that marketing company. The other audience is the business owner themselves. Because one of the things that I’ve increasingly seen over the years as videos become more ubiquitous—kind of everywhere online—is that the businesses themselves are starting to realize we need to do more video. And you know, they may not have the larger budgets to go out and hire a video producer for everything. So what they’re doing is they’re getting their smartphone or they’re getting their webcam or they’re using available tools like Canva or CapCut or whatever, and they’re making video content, but they’re often making video content for the sake of making video content. Just making videos and sticking it up online. Seeing what sticks. But they’re not doing that strategically. They don’t even have a sense of how to do that strategically in order to get results. So the book has really been written for that business owner as well. That marketer working within a business—either your own business or your employer’s business—to figure out how can you actually get some plans, some structure around the video content that we’re planning to do so that we ensure that we’re investing the right time, money, human resources into creating videos that work and using them in the right way.
Dane Golden:
So you know how to use the tools. You’ve got the equipment. You’re excited about video. You spend a lot of time maybe on the socials, but taking it from just understanding the basics to having a plan, a strategy and executing on that. That’s what this book “Engage: The Definitive Guide to Video Strategy for Business”… that’s where this takes you.
Ben Amos:
Yeah, that’s exactly what this book is. What this book is not, Dane, and I’ll be super clear about that, is it’s not a “how to make videos” book. It’s not a “how to edit”. There’s nothing in there about what microphones to choose or what camera to pick. That’s not this book, right? This book is around how to ensure that you’re planning for the right videos to be used in the right way to get the right results for your clients, for your business or your client’s business.
Dane Golden:
And before I forget, tell me what the name of your course is.
Ben Amos:
So my course is specifically for those video producers and it’s called the Video Strategist Masterclass. So they can find that in engagevideomarketing.com. But yeah, that’s really designed to support that person who’s, you know, wanting to build confidence as a video strategist to better serve their clients, right. If you’re a business owner and you’re wanting to do it yourself, really the book’s the best place to go because it really allows it to be self-paced, self-directed and gives you the tools you need to just run with it.
Dane Golden:
Okay. So this is something I find very important. You wrote about optimizing for action in a video. What does that mean and why is that important?
Ben Amos:
Yeah, so one of the key frameworks in the book is seven elements to an effective video strategy, and optimization is one of those seven elements that are broken down in detail in the book. Optimization is often one of the things that most people are either confused, overwhelmed or scared about when it comes to video content. That confusion often comes from that sense of optimization typically referring to search engine optimization, right? And when we think about digital marketing or online marketing is people tend to think about search engine optimization around, you know, keywords and doing things with their video content or with their content if we’re talking about search engine optimization in order to make sure that the algorithms are favorable to the content, right? Now, when we talk about video optimization today in 2025, and increasingly over the last few years, it’s less about algorithm optimization. Algorithms are still at play here, but it’s more around what I refer to as audience optimization, right? So audience optimization is more important because all of these algorithms—whether it’s the YouTube algorithm, the Google algorithm, LinkedIn, Facebook—they’re all basically set up in a way to serve the best content for the audience right? And the algorithms work today based on mostly audience signals. So how is the audience engaging with other bits of content? And if they’re showing those right sorts of signals, then the algorithm is going to show more of that sort of content to that person. So if you’re going to optimize your video content, you need to optimize for the humans that are going to watch it, right? And that comes down to three things: attention, retention and action. Okay,so we can talk about attention. Most people think about like titles, thumbnails, you know, hooks of the videos. Retention is about keeping people watching. But the one that you just asked about there, Dane, is the third one, which is action—optimizing for action. And this is sometimes a little bit of a challenging one for those traditional YouTube optimization kind of gurus, right? Because often with any of these platforms, if you optimize for action off the platform, like getting someone to click a button and leave the video platform to go to your landing page, your website, then that can be a negative signal to the algorithm, right? However, when I’m talking about optimization as a video strategy for a business, ultimately, that’s your goal. Your goal is to drive the action that you want that viewer to take, to drive your business forward, not YouTube’s business forward, not Facebook’s business forward, but your business forward. So optimizing for action is critical for success of your video content. If people watch your video on whatever platform they’re watching, but they don’t take the action that you want them to take. Then you’ve failed at the opportunity to drive your business forward. Does that make sense? We can go into some of the ways you can do that, but does that make sense from an overview?
Dane Golden:
Yes. And I personally am focused on YouTube. And so one of the things with YouTube is that if, let’s say, you’re working on an organic video and you tell every single person that “don’t watch another video,” “go to my website” or click something that’s in the description and they do that, that tells YouTube to not show your videos. Is that right?
Ben Amos:
Yeah, more or less. It’s one of the key, one of the signals that YouTube looks at. Obviously, you know, there’s multiple signals that YouTube’s looking at. It’s not—in my understanding anyway and my experience—is it’s not a direct, you know, black flag on YouTube’s algorithm. If there are other signals that are driving, you know, good attention, So you know, clicks on the videos, plays, and then retention, so you get good viewer retention or watch time on those videos. And then, you know, it’s still a good percentage of people click off the platform. It will still get traction on YouTube, but ultimately you need to think if the goal of that video is a sales type video, then that’s what you want the viewer to click off. You want the viewer to click through (audio overlap)…
Dane Golden:
That’s my next question. That’s my next question. What should the CTA or the call to action be of a business video? And we’re, you know, you focus mostly on—and I do too—focus mostly on helping businesses do well on social video, but for me, it’s just YouTube. What should the call to action be or does it depend?
Ben Amos:
It absolutely depends. So optimization is the fifth element in the seven elements that are referred to in the book.
Dane Golden:
Not like the movie, The Fifth Element.
Ben Amos:
Not like the movie The Fifth Element. And it’s the fifth in a sequence of elements because, you know. And the other elements just to give a quick understanding for the listeners here is, and starting from the top is audience. You need to understand your audience first, right? So audience and then your goals. What are your goals for your business? What are your goals for your content? Then your content. So what is the substance of your video? What do you see your video content going to be about? And then you go to distribution. So what platforms are you going to distribute your content on? Then optimization, how are you going to optimize that content for that platform and for the action and the, you know, the action that you want to take to drive the goal forward. And then you talk about metrics is the sixth element. So metrics is how you’re going to measure success with that video. And then production, how are you going to make the videos? So that’s the seven elements, right? So optimization being the fifth means that you need to have made strategic decisions around who is your audience? What is the goal for your business? What is the goal for this video? What’s the content going to look like? What platform are you distributing on? Then you make the decision about how to optimize. And one of those things we’re optimizing for is action. So what we’re going to talk about here is the different kinds of action that you can optimize for. And it’s not always a what we’d call a direct action. So direct action is like a click to a link, you know, off platform to a landing page. Buy my thing, right? That’s a direct action. Sometimes if that’s your strategic goal for the video, you do want a direct action as we’ve just talked about. Sometimes a better action is a soft action or an indirect action. So an indirect action or a soft action is “watch this video next,” which is very favorable on YouTube, for example. A soft action could be, you know, “if you found this useful, share this video with someone,” right, who has this same problem. So that’s again, another good platform algorithm signal—that sharing of content. So if your goal for your content is more around the value in the video itself, right? So the education that it provides or the thought transformation that the video provides so that someone better knows, likes and trusts you, which is a very important goal as part of a strategy. Then you probably want more a soft or an indirect call to action rather than a hard or direct call to action. No one wants to kind of have this great value-based video that they’ve just watched and they’ve learned a lot. And they’re like, “Hey, I kind of like this guy. He seems to know his stuff.” And then, you know, pitch slap them with a “Now you got to buy my thing” really hard call to action at the end of that. So there’s a place for soft call to action or an indirect call to action. And there’s places for direct and hard calls to action, but you know, you need to decide what makes sense.
Dane Golden:
I loved what you said about the soft call to action and sort of did you say hard call to action, I guess?
Ben Amos:
Yeah.
Dane Golden:
The other reason that a soft call to action is nice is you’re getting someone in the habit of doing something that you ask them to do.A like is just a small thing, but now we’re in the “I ask you to do something, you do something that I ask” process.
Ben Amos:
Right. A hundred percent.
Dane Golden:
You’re more likely to do the next thing.
Ben Amos:
Yeah. And I think, you know, what you’re touching on there Dane, is the biggest failure, is having no call to action, right? No call to action in a video is an absolute missed opportunity. But having a call to action doesn’t need to be those hard call to actions or even those direct call to actions. Sometimes a soft or indirect call to action could just be, you know, for example, “so next time you’re in this situation, think about this.” So it’s just, you know, very soft. It’s just like, now that I’ve taught you this kind of framework or idea or concept, you know, next time that’s, you know, in your life, like, think about this and think about what I’ve just taught you. That’s still a call to action. You’re still telling the audience to “I want you to take this and run with it and do something with what I’ve just shared with you.” So calls to action can take many forms, but you need to think what’s the right call to action for your particular video according to the strategic approach that you’ve mapped out.
Dane Golden:
And the…I want to talk about one of my favorite things that I feel never gets the credit that it deserves and that is audience retention. And so I’d like you to explain to me what audience retention is and what it means versus clicks or views And please do it in the YouTube environment because I have very specific opinions on this and the value. And I feel it’s just really misunderstood or underappreciated the relationship of audience retention to clicks and views. So could you tell me what it is and how it relates?
Ben Amos:
Yeah. So audience retention is quite simply how long people watch your video for with relation to how long the video is, right? So that’s the simple way to think about it. And sometimes that’s measured in watch time, you know, in minutes and seconds. Sometimes that’s measured in percentage. So percentage of the total duration of the video, depending on the platform, that’s the kind of metric that you’re going to be looking at. But really, you know, I talked about optimizing for audiences before, and it’s really that combination between attention, retention, and action. So when you talk about the click or the click through all the play, right, or, impressions as well on YouTube, really that those are the things that indicate the ability for your video to capture attention of your ideal audience. So attention is something that stops someone in their tracks or stops the scroll or draws their eye towards a thumbnail in a YouTube search results page. So attention can be, obviously, managed or controlled by various tactics, such as the title, the thumbnail and the promise within those things. So in order to really capitalize on that attention aspect, it really needs to be, you need to really understand who your audience is. Who is this video for? And how is this video through the way that you structure the title, thumbnail and the promise within those? How do you do that in a way that proves that this is ultimately relevant to that person? Because people aren’t going to watch things that seems irrelevant or uninteresting or disinteresting to them. So capturing that attention first with the right relevance is critical because, obviously, we can’t talk about retention unless we do understand the first aspect, which is attention. Because if you don’t get them to click play in the first place, retention is not going anywhere, right? So you know, getting them to click play and watch those first few seconds. So the first words that come out of your mouth, you know, in that hook, what we typically call the hook or the visuals on the screen or whatever that is included in that hook kind of tells the viewer: “You’re in the right place. You’ve landed in this right video. This is relevant to you. This is going to be valuable to you. This is interesting to you.” But retention—keeping people watching—is your next challenge. And this is where it’s mostly about maintaining that relevance. When I talk about retention here, I talk about relevance to a few different things, right? You need to think about how you can maintain the relevance to the human, to the context and to the platform and to the funnel stage that they’re in when we’re talking about business, a business video.
Dane Golden:
Alright.
Ben Amos:
So I’ll break each one of those down really quickly, and then we can dive into, you know, whatever you want to there, Dane. But so in order to maintain retention or to keep people watching, you need to ensure that your video is relevant to the human. So relevant to that audience member, right? And recognizing that they are a human, there’s, you know, problems that they have in their day-to-day life. There’s experiences that they have that are relevant to them. So for example, if we were to be creating a video which was targeting school moms of school-aged kids, primary school-aged kids, right, and to help them, I don’t know, organise their life. I’m making this up on the spot, right. So that video, obviously you can do various things in the hook and in the thumbnail and the title to capture that attention of that person. But in order to keep her watching, you need to be including information that’s relevant to them. So it might be stories that you tell that they can relate to because they’ve experienced something similar in their life. It might be locations that you film in that feel familiar and relevant to them. It might be…. Yeah, go ahead. Jump in.
Dane Golden:
I wanted to ask this. So I have this theory, and this is what I tell people. I don’t know if you agree with it or not. I’d like to know if you agree. So when I look at that audience retention graph in YouTube Analytics, and that’s one of the most important things to me, to look at each individual videos. How fast does that sync at the beginning? Because it syncs for everyone. How fast does it sync at the beginning of a video? And I’m leaving out shorts for the moment here, and I tell people that the speed at which it syncs is the amount of disconnect between the promise you made in the title and thumbnail and topic and what you’re delivering at the beginning of the video. This is the disconnect between what you’re promised and what you’ve delivered at the beginning of the video. Does that sound like a good way to explain?
Ben Amos:
That’s exactly right. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And that’s that disconnect between that attention and the retention things that we’re talking about here. So they need to work together because if you don’t attract attention in the right way, then you know, you can do all the right retention strategies as well, but someone’s going to have clicked for the wrong reason in the first place. They’re going to think they’re watching for some other reason. So everything needs to work together here. Like you say, you’re always going to get that retention drop off because, you know, people, you know, click on videos, you know, very quickly realize it’s not for them, which is fine. That’s the actual importance of your hook, of those opening seconds of your video, so you got to treat it like a dog whistle, you know, like what you include in those opening seconds of the video should be, should really stand out to those people who you want to be calling over to you, right? But it should actually not be heard by or ignored or, you know, not interest people who shouldn’t be watching the rest of this video, right? So and sometimes that’s actually a really good thing that you get that big drop off of that retention curve because you don’t want people watching a video that it’s not for. If it’s not for you, then, you know, why are they watching anyway? And you don’t want them to be watching. So…
Dane Golden:
Right. It’s not for everyone. Nothing’s for everyone. Now, you mentioned funnel a moment ago, and I just want to go back in time and thank you for something that you told me, I think it was like six years ago at Social Media Marketing World. We were sitting together and you gave me a piece of advice that didn’t somehow… it’s so clear and I should have gotten it and I didn’t and I want to thank you for it and I’ll explain to you what this was and I don’t know if you remember it or not. You probably don’t. Do you remember it? No.
Ben Amos:
I remember being there probably 2019, maybe, or maybe 2020, but…
Dane Golden:
It was 2019 and we were talking about funnels. Everyone knows what funnels are. And I said, “Oh, it’s a video funnel. You go from step to step to step.” And what you explained to me was the video funnel is not what you, the marketer, say it is. It’s not what you have a sort of a prediction or a desire that a funnel goes from A to B to C. But duh, it’s what the user or the customer says it is because they may go from A to D to B and back to A again. You don’t know which way they’re going. They decide. And it was so simple that I never understood it. And yet you explained it so clearly and it has really helped me reframe so many things. And I just want to thank you for that.
Ben Amos:
Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear that because that is a misconception when you think of a funnel as a purely linear kind of a thing, right? But I think sometimes the visual of a funnel does people disservice because they think of things going in the top and things coming out the bottom, which is nice.
Dane Golden:
It’s a good way to explain it, but it’s not you, the marketer, that says what the funnel is. It’s what you hope the funnel is.
Ben Amos:
Right. And I mean, the reality of the funnel as well as there’s holes all the way through it, right? Because you know, a standard working funnel—you should—everything that’s poured in the top should come out the bottom just in the right place, right? But we know that in a marketing funnel, that’s not the way it works. So you know, I think of it like a very holey funnel, but also people are coming into, particularly video content or any content strategies, people are coming into the funnel at all sorts of places, depending on where they are in that customer journey, right where they are in that decision to buy.
Dane Golden:
Oh, so I’ve got too many more questions for you and we don’t have enough time. So I’m going to ask you to not be so complete in some of your answers. All right. So what do we mean by sound off versus sound on in videos? Why is this important?
Ben Amos:
Well, I mean, it does what it says there, right? So “sound off” is videos that are engaged or watched with the sound turned off, usually in some sort of a feed-type situation—like the LinkedIn feed, Facebook feed, Instagram feed—where people are watching videos by default with the sound Off. Platforms like YouTube, typically sound on platforms, right? So sound on viewers on those sound off platforms. So on those feed-based platforms, if you are looking at your metrics and you’re measuring how many people viewed with the sound on, it’s kind of, it’s a higher engagement signal, right? It means that people, you know, click to turn the sound on because they wanted to, you know, hear what you had to say. Does that make sense without going too deep?
Dane Golden:
Yeah. No, I think that’s great. So there’s some platforms where people are, by default, going to watch with the sound on. Some with the sound off. When it’s sound off, you may want to burn in some captions.
Ben Amos:
Yeah, that’s it. I think that’s the critical takeaway there is on those sound off platforms. You need to be planning for your video content to be produced for someone to watch with the sound off. Otherwise, you’re missing so much potential ability to communicate.
Dane Golden:
Okay. So how long after… how long should it be after the start of a video when someone speaks? So for me, it’s 0.1 seconds after the start of a video when someone’s voice comes on, but what’s your answer and why?
Ben Amos:
There’s no definitive answer here. I think, if you go for definitive answers, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I think that how long… like probably to rephrase that question into a better question would be “how long after the video starts playing should a viewer’s attention be immediately hooked.” The answer is 0.01 seconds, right? Sometimes speaking is one of the simplest way to hook someone. So the first words that come out of your mouth and doing that very quickly is a great way to get someone kind of connected. The fact is humans connect with humans. So hearing and seeing someone’s face speaking to you is going to, by default, just capture more attention. But it’s what you say, obviously that’s more important there and how you say it. But you know, there’s absolutely examples of videos that, you know, you click play and you’re immediately hooked by the visuals or the location or the scenario that’s presented to you. Like someone, I don’t know, standing on the edge of the cliff or, you know, driving erratically through downtown city traffic. That’s going to hook you because you’re going to be like “what is going on here?” And you’re going to keep watching. So that’s, you know, the visuals, the text elements on the screen can hook. Audio itself can hook as well, like non-spoken audio. So it could be, you know, sound effects, I think ASMR-type videos. There are plenty of ways to hook in those opening milliseconds rather than just speaking, but yeah, speaking is an easy way to do it.
Dane Golden:
All right. Okay. So we know a lot of metrics and analytics. What are vanity metrics as they relate to video?
Ben Amos:
Vanity metrics are the bane of business’s existence when it comes to corporate videos, particularly when there isn’t a strategy in place. So what we’re talking about with vanity metrics is looking at the wrong metrics, looking at metrics that might boost your ego but not be a good indicator of whether or not the video is successful in achieving its goals or its outcomes. Vanity metrics typically are what people are looking for like impressions and views. So they’re looking for how many people viewed my video. I want to, you know, a million views over, you know, the first week or whatever. Those often are just vanity metrics because, you know, the video might be… Actually, the goal for the video might be driving clicks through to a landing page or purchases of a product rather than views, right? If your goal for your video is brand awareness or, you know, just awareness of you, your brAnd your message, your product, then maybe those views might not be vanity metrics. Maybe they’re valuable metrics. But you also need to look at who, you know, what’s the actual breakdown of the demographics who created those million views. If those million views were primarily in Bangladesh, for example, and your company only sells your product in the U.S., then maybe they are vanity metrics, right? So you need to often dive deeper.
Dane Golden:
Yeah. I tell people, “Hey, if you need a million views, I can get you a million views by tomorrow. Just give me $10,000 because it’s a penny per view in YouTube ads. But just so you know, they’re all going to be gamers from the developing world. As long as you’re okay with that.” And they’re like “No, that’s not my customer.” I’m like “Oh, okay. Well, so really views is not the only thing you’re asking for.”
Ben Amos:
A hundred percent. Do you need to start with your audience? That’s why the first element I talk about in the book is audience—really knowing who your audience is and how you’re going to reach them.
Dane Golden:
All right. So I want to talk a little bit about the magic of attribution, which I also think of as a sort of attribution. There’s a lot of money spent on trying to track exactly where something came for. And there’s… Is it the first click of someone’s engagement with your brAnd the last, the middle? I sort of think, you know, if it’s the last click, meaning the person just before the purchase, that would be like saying a fancy restaurant spends a lot of promotion on getting people in the door, but the only person who should get paid in that marketing should be the host or hostess because they’re the one that brings the person into the door. But that’s not exactly the reason they showed up for that restaurant. The host or hostess does a great job, but it’s not the necessarily the most important person in the branding experience. So I would like to understand how we should value clicks. And also sometimes from video. What we see with clients is that they may never have clicked, never ever have clicked, and yet we find out in the sales discussion that they’ve seen maybe dozens of videos from this client of mine who’s making YouTube videos. How do we value clicks and attribution?
Ben Amos:
Right. It’s a good question. Attribution is one of the trickiest things to manage expectations and control around video content specifically. Because if we were to measure last click attribution, for example, to determine the success of our video content, then every video should, needs to have a direct call to action in there through a trackable platform, right? So every act, every video should be driving that hard direct call to action, but that’s clearly not what video content is designed for. Much of the video content that we plan for in a video strategy is higher up in the funnel. It’s more awareness or engagement kind of content, which is designed to just build a connection, like build awareness and build a connection and build affinity with an audience, with your brand or your offer or whatever it is that you sell, right? So that sort of content often doesn’t lead to a direct last click attribution. People don’t watch that video, click a button underneath and go and buy the thing, right? Often there’s many more steps in between. So a better attribution model would be what’s called multi-touch attribution, which is recognizing and trying to measure the different actions that the audience takes at different stages of that buying journey. But that’s very hard, you know, to measure that in a consistent way. Big brands, big enterprise companies, you know, have platforms that can do that relatively well, but it’s still fairly fuzzy. I think for most brands like looking at attribution as, not a hard metric, but as a way of planning for success. So what I talk about there is you think about what’s the goal for the video and how are we going to measure the metric that matters for this video? And so that’s more important than directly, kind of, trying to attribute a sale to a particular piece of content. But there are ways, as you kind of mentioned there, Dane, in better measuring attribution without it being a hard kind of metric on a dashboard. For example, making sure that your people ask the questions of a new customer. How did you first hear about us? Or you know, why did you decide to buy today? And often that’s where some of that more fuzzy metrics comes out. Like, well, you know, I’ve actually been following you for years, or I’ve, you know, watched a whole bunch of your videos, or I think I first saw you on YouTube, you know, that kind of thing. That’s still attribution. It’s just harder to directly measure on like an analytics dashboard.
Dane Golden:
But if it’s a part of every discussion, then you start to realize, oh, they are watching our videos and our podcasts and whatever the things and our social and it’s all part of the equation. So I have one last question for you Ben Amos of Engage Video Marketing, which is: What is the one question I should have asked, but I didn’t?
Ben Amos:
Haha! That’s the catch all question at the end, Dane. I love it!
Dane Golden:
This is where I get you to interview yourself.
Ben Amos:
Yeah. Look, there’s probably so much that we could have dove into. Like we really spent a bit of time here talking about optimization and metrics, which are, you know, two of the seven elements. There’s so much more across those seven elements. So if anything, I would say that the questions that you didn’t ask me, or the answers are in the book. So hey, Dane, maybe, you know, self-promotion here, but the question you didn’t ask me is where can people go to pick up the book?
Dane Golden:
Where Ben Amos of Engage Video Marketing, where can people go to pick up “Engage: The Definitive Guide to Video Strategy for Business?”
Ben Amos:
Fantastic! Good question, Dane. I’m glad you asked it. Yeah. Look, it’s available on Kindle on Amazon. The Audible version is coming around probably around about March this year as well. I’m in the middle of recording it. So Amazon, wherever you go, but if you are in Australia and you want a copy personally posted out by me. You know, because of postage costs, I’m not going to personally post it out to people around the world. But if you do want a signed copy and you’re in Australia, you can go to engagevideomarketing.com/book.
Dane Golden:
Which is where people should also go to check out any other information, your course, your podcast, and other things as well. And to hire you.
Ben Amos:
It’s all there at engagevideomarketing.com.
Dane Golden:
Fantastic! Ben Amos of Engage Video Marketing. He’s the author of the new book, “Engage: The Definitive Guide to Video Strategy for Business.” Thank you, Ben!
Ben Amos:
Thanks Dane! It’s been fun.