Want to grow your videography business?

Hey — Ben here!

A big welcome, and thanks for subscribing.

Here’s the situation. I’m typing this in a hotel room, sweating profusely.

I’m sweating because today is the day I’m launching this newsletter - and launches make me sweat like a turkey on the night before thanksgiving.

I’m calling it VideoBizGuy, because it’s actually my real life nickname and I’m giving you some fine advice for your videography career/business (and It sounds cool, I think).

Today we’re gonna make a deep dive on 2 of my favorite strategies to grow a videography business. From the future issues you can expect: 

• detailed strategy explanations

• breakdowns on how other successful videographers made it

• scripts for acquiring clients

• ready made templates to simplify the planning and work with clients

• editing templates

• gear advice

• the top videography resources of the week

• many more strategies

• and much much more

Alright, enough talking. Onto the fun stuff..

2 of the top strategies to grow your videography business in 2024

I call these 2 strategies uncommon, at least with the following specific execution. The point of these strategies is to expand your work from a business perspective. This is where most videographers lack skill.

By always focusing on perfect your personal videography execution, you overlook how to even reach the execution stage.

It’s like being the strongest lion in the wilderness without knowing how to hunt down your prey. 

If you want to make money with your creative skill, you have to combine it with a business skill.

Now let’s start with the first strategy:

1. Aestethic local content

You never wanted to put yourself out there? Now it’s time. At least for some parts of you. You probably heard it a thousand times now, everyone is using social media. People who you never thought would use it 5 years ago.

Still, the quality of content isn’t as good as you might think. Especially in the context of local content. This is where you step in.

You have a way bigger chance growing locally, because there probably aren’t thousands of reels about your city (at least if you don’t live in new york city).

Even if this is the case, most of the content isn’t really aesthetically pleasing.

That’s where you show off your skill.

Where to post:

To make it short, I recommend using Instagram for this strategy. This platform is ideal for aesthetic visual content + it doesn’t have to be too personal like on TikTok (on TikTok you have to share way more about yourself. Without this, it can be really hard to grow organically unless you post extremely good content in view of virality).

If you really want to start with multi channeling, I would recommend to just repost your instagram reels to different platforms with short form video content like TikTok, Youtube shorts, even LinkedIn and Facebook. But be prepared: every platform has its own algorithm and user base. One video might go viral on TikTok but get zero views on LinkedIn.

If you reach a following of at least 2-4k, you can start with expanding on other platforms. Reuse your IG content and just change little tweaks at first. get to know the platform and its userbase (If you want to learn more about this, let me know, I will write a whole separate issue about this..).

What to post:

The easiest type of this content is to just post aesthetically pleasing local content. package this into a reel. The best reel length in my experience is

6-9 secs

17-20 secs

50-60 secs

This length depends on the type of your content. E.g. you can create a 9 secs long reel with 4-5 cinematic shots. Local people will recognize the scenery + they will like the pleasing scenes. This will make them rewatch the really short video easily. = the more often someone watches your reel, the more it will be shown to other users. The algorithm will recognize that the content is good by the repeating times someone watches it. This is a way to create viral content.

You don’t have to overlay the video with trending audio. If you’re a good videographer + editor, you will know what type of audio/music fits the best. If you still want to try it, look what audio similar viral content is using. The context here is important. It really has to fit.

Basic aesthetic shots of your city/area:

• timelapses/hyperlapse of landmarks, busy streets, famous spots etc.

• sunset/sunrise from different spots

• city views from untypical spots

• secret places few people know about

• small size street interviews with local celebrities or random interesting people

• beautiful scenes in general which will be recognized by users

You understand what I mean. The main point of this type of content is, that people realize it comes from their area. The three main ways to show this are:

1. showing a well known local place in the first scene

2. mentioning the city directly in the in-video title (optionally trough a voiceover)

3. mentioning the video in the first 3 words of the caption (with reels, the rest of the caption will be hidden. Few people read the rest)

Your goal is, to let people feel that they discovered something in their area or that they recognized something really familiar on the internet.

But what does this all have to do with business? 

Well, here comes the actual plot.

Your mission is to make clear that you are a professional videographer who can be booked. But in a non-intrusive way.

With this type of quality content, people will see ability. Here is how to let them know that they can work with you:

• link your website in your bio

• The first two lines of your bio should contain something local + what you do. E.g. “[your city] through the eyes of a filmmaker”

• use the third line of your bio for a CTA (call to action). Write something like:

  “Work with me👇”

  (the 👇 shows in the direction of the website link).

  Or

  “let’s make some great content for your business📹”

  If this is too intrusive for your taste, you can also write something like

  “take a look at my portfolio👇”

  Just realize that you shouldn’t be too restrained when trying to get clients.

• Use the end of your captions to mention your service. Formulate it in your style, here is how I did it:

  “You are based in [your city] and like my work? Why not work together! Dm me or check out my website (link in bio)”.

• Every 6-8 posts, you can post bts working with a local business, which also increases your credibility.

• Regularly post stories of bts and just some simple local scenes. The you also can mention your services.

You get it. There are many ways you can share your service with this type of IG page.

I could dive 10x deeper into this strategy but it would go beyond all limits with this first issue. I will save this for a different time...

Some more important things:

• use a nice and friendly profile pic of yourself.

• your profile should represent you as a person not a company.

• always watch who your followers are, if they are from an older generation, always have in mind that they perceice some things differently and won’t understand the social language.

• of course answer all your comments.

• follow other local pages. Make friends with some of them. Later you can repost their content in your story (only if its fits to your followerbase) and they will mostly do the same for you.

• Use this account to comment on posts of other local businesses to get more attention. You can also DM these businesses, but don’t try to sell them your service in your first message. Have a humanly chat, sometimes the business owner or account manager will ask something about your service by themselves. Patience is key here.

• Post at least 2-3 times a week. But still, quality over quantity. If you don’t manage to create this amount of quality posts, it will be better to post less while keeping the quality high.

• A good website is also important here (let me know if I should write about how to build a converting website)

• Don’t expect big results in the first weeks. It takes time to grow organically. That means also that you shouldn’t stop doing this in the first 2 months when you start it. It will pay off.

2. The Cold Email Approach

Okay, this one’s a little more advanced. I try to make it not too long. And it probably makes only sense when you live in an area with a high density of population (and businesses). But once you establish it, you will be far ahead business wise. Alternatively you can semi-automate this, but more about that in a sec.

Here’s the process:

1. use an email scraping tool like outscraper.com or rocketreach.co. Scrape the email addresses of the managing directors / bosses of local businesses in your area. If you want to work with a bigger company, you can also contact other important people like the marketing manager or someone on the board. But in the beginning I would recommend to contact smaller companies with <20 employees. When you are more in the game, you will have better chance closing deals with bigger companies.

2. Write a few very good cold emails or use a template/script.

3. buy 1-3 new email addresses, in case they will be blocked by google etc. for spam.

4. Use a “warm-up” tool like instantly.ai or woodpecker.co so your mail addresses won’t be flagged directly.

5. Apply a tool like apollo.io or instantly.ai to mass send these emails to the potential customers. The mentioned tools are self explaining, you will find all the instructions on their website (I have 0 affiliation with the mentioned tools, you can use any other similar tool).

With this strategy you have to keep in mind that these businesses get tons of emails every day. They are used to marketing emails and often just take a small grasp of what the email is about. That’s why the email + the subject line is so important.

5 examples of good subject lines:

• “Your website is missing something”

• “Why don’t you use videos on your Instagram account?”

• “[recipients city] wants to see [company name*] in action”

Increase the open rate & conversion rate with free offers:

• “Free social media content for your business”

• “A free professional video for [company name]”

*You can automatically incorporate the business name and employee of the recipient with the mentioned cold outreach tools.

The following mail worked really well. You can use them freely:

This example works with a very broad range of clients. The free offer is always good to set a foot in the door. You can choose a day of the week where you do all the free shoots in a specific area, so you save time.

Also, don’t exaggerate it. Make short, not too complex videos. It’s just there to impress them a bit and to show them their business through a special medium they haven’t used yet. Also, prepare some arguments why video will help this specific business.

There is also no specific mentioning of any type of business. In this case I like to divide these mails into different groups regarding the type of business. The more personalized, the better. Here’s how I would do it with a car dealership, this time without a free offer:

This email could work really really well if it strikes the right business(owner). In other cases, it could leave you on read. That’s why it’s quite important to have a feeling of who the owners are depending on the type of business. But you will learn that, if you haven’t already.

If you contact 100 businesses via cold email, you can expect to get a deal with 1-5 people. That’s also the typical conversion rate of cold emails. 1-5%.

When you call them or you do the walk in strategy, this rate will likely be much higher. But it will also take way more time. That’s why you only should do this in well populated areas. Then you can afford to “loose” some clients.

The 2nd option would be to semi-automate this process. For this, you can send these emails manually and use only a part of a template.

Also, you should personalize these emails. Then you can expect a higher conversion rate. It also takes some more time. But you can test this with your normal business email. This option makes sense in semi-well populated areas and when you are too lazy to do walk-ins or cold calls..

There is also much more to say about this, but this issue would be become way too long… It already is..

That’s why I will share my favorite strategy the next week, the walk in. I want to really dive deep into this strategy, so it gets its own issue.

Also, let me know your questions about the 2 strategies above, I will answer them directly or answer them in the next issue, coming on Saturday next week!

That’s it for this week. Let me know how you liked this first issue.

Your feedback affects how I write and what I write about in the upcoming issues!

What should I write more about, what should I write less about? How was the length? Should I use visuals?

Just reply to this email, I will answer everything..

Thanks for reading, until next week!

— Ben