Why Professional Video Matters
February 24, 2025
Professional video production is essential for businesses seeking to engage effectively with their audience and enhance brand credibility. High-quality visuals, compelling storytelling, and the expertise of professionals combine to create impactful video content that resonates and drives results.
• Understanding the value of professional videos
• The impact of visuals on brand perception
• Storytelling as a central element in video marketing
• Recognizing the importance of hiring professionals
• The cost-effectiveness of professional services
• Tips on when to pursue DIY versus professional production
• The role of partnerships in achieving quality content
Discover more tips in our free guide on consistent, story-led video marketing at https://letsbackflip.com/guide/
Topics in This Episode
- Introduction & Podcast Overview (0:09)
- The Importance of Visual Quality (1:05)
- Production Quality vs. Content Quality (2:14)
- Selfie Videos vs. Professional Productions (3:29)
- Crafting Compelling Stories (6:27)
- Leveraging Professional Expertise (9:28)
- Valuing Your Time & Cost Efficiency (12:38)
- Wrap-Up & Next Episode Teaser (18:20)
Transcript
Ryan Freng:
Hello and welcome back to the let’s Back Flip Show Happy Hour. This is the new podcast that we’re doing. It’s the John and Ryan chat about business stuff, specifically consistent, story-led video marketing. We’re going to explore a lot of different topics and essentially give away all the secrets. So all the things we’ve learned over the last 17 years on how to develop video marketing that converts, that’s impactful, that engages, that helps you fundraise millions of dollars, helps you get tons of views, tons of engagement online, but all to serve your business goals. So that’s what we’re talking about and today we’re looking at why professional video matters. We were talking about that the previous podcast, quality video production so maybe let’s just look at the words here again. So why professional video matters? What do you think professional video kind of means?
John Shoemaker :
yeah, so it’s a visual medium, obviously. Uh, you’re looking at something and the the most simple way to start this conversation is to talk about how you’re presented visually, like if you’ve got a bad photo, just like a poorly lit photo, poorly bad video, not good audio. Let’s just go the extreme example something really shabby. It doesn’t reflect well on your business. You put time into your business. You designed your store, your space, your office in a certain way. You designed a logo. Maybe you worked with a firm already on that kind of a thing, maybe you did the logo yourself, and if you’re happy with it and it turned out, that’s awesome. But then when we’re trying to do the rest of the marketing stuff video, photos people will try to cut corners sometimes and that to me is just the thing. Like you are, you are putting out your own image in that, in that video.
Ryan Freng:
so that’s just the visual side of it, not even to get into the storytelling side of it and how you like assemble and and write and tell a story yeah, so thinking about the visual side of it too professional video, high production value In another video that we shared, we talked about it and maybe Luke will have to remind me if I can’t recall but the idea that production quality is important, but the quality of your content is actually what is going to be the most important. However, if you have great quality and low quality, we will accept that to some degree so filming on your phone for a TikTok or an Instagram reel or something like that but when you have something like we describe them as pillar videos when you have these bigger videos bigger promotions, commercials, campaigns when that bigger item doesn’t have the production quality that speaks to your brand, like John was saying, that’s when there’s a problem, because you’re trying to fundraise, you know $30 million, but you create a video by yourself and you look junky.
Ryan Freng:
It looks like a $100 video.
John Shoemaker :
Yeah, Okay, so then we can span those two ideas and say so. Then how is professional related to the storytelling side of it, or maybe the strategy side of it to the storytelling side of it, or maybe the strategy side of it? Do you know why? You know you make furniture at your company. Do you understand why this video of you on your phone works and then why this video of you recorded with your phone doesn’t work? Do you understand why that is? I don’t understand how to make a dovetail joint in a chair that holds up or what you know like.
John Shoemaker :
that’s a goofy example, but you already know more about furniture than I do the I know a term right um, it’s because they’re different mediums and there’s different spaces where certain things are acceptable, like you, were saying so, the selfie video. We actually would encourage people to go ahead and use that. So there’s your tip, for you know, can I get started myself before I have the budget to do this?
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, how to get started today?
John Shoemaker :
Like, yeah, go ahead, but there’s a difference between your selfie video of you on your uh, you know tiktok or facebook or wherever you’re going to put it instagram and what you need to put out if you’re going to put a commercial on broadcast tv before the football game. Those are two different things. And and the selfie video there, unless it’s done really creatively and and purposefully, it’s just going to look sloppy and it’s going to look like you. It’s going to creatively and purposefully, it’s just going to look sloppy and it’s going to look like you don’t have any money. You know like you’re cutting corners and people are like I don’t want that business, right.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, I mean, are you going to show up to? I mean, unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg, I feel like I could count. Maybe, mark, you’re going to show up to a big business meeting. You know where you’re talking about millions of dollars or billions, you know, in sweatpants. Probably not right Now. Mark Zuckerberg is probably one of the people that could, but for the rest, you know 99% of people you can’t. You can’t do something like that. You have to project an outward image of your inward value and so, with the video production side, there’s been so many times where I’ve seen a promotion for a company and it’s maybe something that we pitched on or something that we didn’t and something that we came across in our travels on the internet, studying media, looking at different companies. But you come across a video and you start watching it and immediately loses attention, visually, story-wise, and I just don’t care. And there’s still seven and a half minutes left and I’m five seconds in right. That is why, for that type of content, you really, really, really want to consider professional video sure.
John Shoemaker :
And then the next part of that, the next point in that, is the storytelling side of it, the story driven side, which is, uh, story led that’s I was looking for the term, yeah, that we’re using uh, so it’s. We know how to create stories from somebody just telling us, just kind of speaking off the cuff and telling about the history of whatever. We know how to take that and turn that into a really compelling, emotional, funny, engaging three-minute thing. A lot of people don’t know how to do that when they’ll create, when people create videos on their own.
John Shoemaker :
I see this a lot and this is kind of what happens when you’re like in middle school and you’re like interested in video and you make your first video and it’s like an hour long and people are just like, is this over? Yet you know like it’s too long, it’s not paced well, there’s just there. There’s skill involved in like telling that story right, and you know all of the storytelling practice over the years. We also do branding, so we know how to like extract the, the brand, extract the story, the important part, from somebody when we’re working with them on a video.
John Shoemaker :
That’s a really good point, and then I don’t, that is that did take years of study. Sometimes we’ll say like I don’t know. I mean, do you need to go to film school? I don’t know. Well, there there actually were really important things that we did learn about. You know narrative arc and how to like keep things moving and you know what are important, like um pieces of the puzzle, the story beats.
Ryan Freng:
And yeah, that’s funny because I would. I would go the other way and say it’s probably learned on the job and apprenticed like through the actual storytelling that we’ve done. And you know, we’ve done it so many times. But you know, you remember things better, so you probably remember that from school and I don’t um. So a good analogy, I think, for this too is like, maybe think about your car or think about your house, right?
Ryan Freng:
So, to varying degrees, each of us can do a little bit of work on our car, a little bit of work on our house. On your car, um, you probably can change a light bulb. On most cars you can do something like that. Or if it dies, you can jump it or maybe replace a dial or just something simple. Right, there’s some simple functionality that we should do because it just saves a little bit of money and it’s practical. Or, at your house, you’re changing lights, you’re changing filters. You might even be able to repair a wall or replace something like that, but most of us aren’t building our own houses, most of us aren’t building our own cars. So when you have a major need in your car, or even a medium need, you’re going to the mechanic, you’re going to hire a contractor to come take care of some other big thing big you know or medium-sized work on your house.
Ryan Freng:
So marketing and video production are the same. There’s those things that everyone should be doing and has some level of capability, and it’s going to be a little bit different Whether that is creating a selfie video. Some people can’t even do that, and that’s okay. But some people can create selfie videos. Some people can even use a DSLR and get some great images and even maybe create a great little sizzle. But then, when it comes to that next step, when it comes to storytelling, like you’re talking about, when it comes to cinematic visuals or just more important pillar content, you know you’re gonna you’re building a house, you’re building a car, you’re replacing a transmission you really want to lean on the experts, and you can have those experts in your company too, and a lot of big companies do end up doing that. But for those who don’t those business owners, agency owners, marketing directors that’s what we want to partner with.
John Shoemaker :
There’s also this idea of what should you be doing with your time. You know, as a business owner, whatever it is that you do, that’s not let’s say, you’re not in video production. You should be doing more of that thing with your time. I shouldn’t be spending a huge amount of time in our business trying to build the conference table or something like that, because that’s not my area of expertise. I could probably figure it out, but I’d have to do a lot of research. It would take me a lot of time. It would be very inefficient. You could say that it’s cheap to do it that way, but that’s very costly in the amount of time that it takes. So I was thinking about the uh. The most striking example that popped into my mind from somewhat recent history is doing the uh commercial job with with Ho-Chunk gaming Madison Shooting 12 scripts over three days. Uh, and every single one had a different set. And then there were 12 actors interchanged with. Every single script was unique.
Ryan Freng:
Different leads, different background.
John Shoemaker :
And our experience in professional video production, we can pull that off. We could pull that off in three days. You know it was a large production, but we could actually make it as efficient as it could be. Just thinking about how long that would take somebody who doesn’t have that experience or what to even do how to like, change over a set with different walls and different set pieces and get a kitchen to a living room in a half hour. One hour changeover, get the actors back up there for the next script and then have all of that stuff be successful. I don’t really know how to describe it other than it’s like an obvious thing you need professional video production to pull off something like that and the amount of value they were able to get it was a huge amount of value versus maybe could have done it themselves, right?
Ryan Freng:
And varying companies have varying levels of internal capability. So yeah, again, the car analogy, the home analogy how much can you do and how much should you do? And Alex Hermozy, who I’m a big fan of, has some really great content around this too, and he even gets to the point where, when you’re in sales and you can make $500 an hour, you can hire a housekeeper to do your laundry, to do your dishes, to keep your house clean, to prep your meals, do all that kind of stuff. And he calculated for himself that he could save 96 hours a month and all he needed to do was pay $1,500, so three more hours of selling and he could cover that. So you wanna think about that in your business as well, and is your?
Ryan Freng:
Is your time best spent ideating on video or doing the video production, or can you save time and money? And I would hazard that most people can. Can you save time and money by working with a professional? So we don’t necessarily mean that it is the highest production value, because we’ll even create stuff that has lower production value because it’s that selfie video for a different medium or distribution channel, but the idea that professional video is by professionals.
Ryan Freng:
So maybe this is the third point. So you’ve got the visuals, you’ve got story-led, and then by professionals like you’re talking about just now, to produce something efficiently, on time, to have a regular cadence, to have milestones, to manage the project, that is almost worth its weight in gold. You know, as we hire other people to help us with certain things, the people who, when we launch, when we launch an engagement, and they have okay day one, here’s how it’s gonna look for the next month or here’s what we expect of you, versus and we’ve hired other contractors and companies where you started off and two weeks go by and nothing’s happened. And then you ask and they’re like oh, yeah, well, and you’re like that doesn’t feel great. So it’s the professionalism that I think maybe is the third part of this idea of professional video.
John Shoemaker :
Yeah, so this is just like the video of analogies, but if you’ve ever watched a professional it’s all got to be anecdotal stories. Yeah, if you’ve ever watched a professional drywaller work, the speed that they can get the drywall up and tape and and mud yeah it’s just mind, like what am I doing with my life?
Ryan Freng:
that I don’t have a skill.
John Shoemaker :
That is this dialed in I mean because I do some work around my house, yeah, and it is so slow, but I mean I kind of enjoy it. So that’s like the side of it is like if you enjoy the thing as a hobby and you don’t mind that it’s taking you more time, then you can do that. But you just need to understand that in business, that like understand the trade-off that you are spending more money on yourself as a non-professional video creator or if you’ve got a friend who’s helping out or whatever you are spending money. That is a resource that is going out the door. It may not be physical dollars changing hands and the professional drywaller can just go boom Right, super fast and efficient and really good quality Right.
Ryan Freng:
And I yeah, for me too, I think I’m on the other side. I came to this realization a couple of years ago when, years ago, when I’d been putting off some sink work, there was, I don’t know, a clog or we lost something or something was happening with our kitchen sink and I was putting it off and putting it off because I didn’t have some of the tools and didn’t want to do it. And then eventually I did it and started working on it, got the tools. I didn’t have the tools, I bought some, I borrowed some, and you know that’s a hassle and then I broke off the pipe in the wall and we had to call a plumber anyway, and it was.
Ryan Freng:
It was basically at that point where I was like, on these really important things that need to happen, I don’t have you know, it’s not fun for me to figure it out to get the tools, to borrow the tools, to buy the you know, to watch YouTube videos on how to do this, like I would rather pay somebody 90 bucks or 180 bucks just to come in in an hour or two, fix it and be done.
Ryan Freng:
And that was a big realization for me because I grew up with my dad, who’s super handy and was a remodeler, kind of on the side, so I learned a lot of those skills and it was enjoyable. But when it comes down to it and like in our house, I just don’t have a lot of time and I’m like I would rather not be under here for four hours. I would rather screw around with you guys or, you know, hang out with the family. So that was that was a realization that came came to me a couple years ago. So now I’m pretty brutal with like yeah, anything that comes up. I’m like just call whoever Hire whoever that’s, you know that’s worth somebody else, and certainly not at the place where we’re hiring a housekeeper, because my wife’s a stay-at-home mom, as well, so she has a lot of that responsibility.
John Shoemaker :
But I mean, that’s just fascinating to me when I think about all the things I do. And what should I be doing? Well, not everybody’s in Alex Hermosi’s place, but at least, at the very least, within your business within your work week, I mean, if you have a business like yes, you can convert those hours into productive time that moves your business forward, right into productive time that moves your business forward.
John Shoemaker :
But I’m just saying that you can, even on a less intense scale than his, just be like within your work week, what should you be working on? You’ve already got a full-time job.
Ryan Freng:
Do you also want to also?
John Shoemaker :
become a video production editor. That’s the thing that people have to decide.
Ryan Freng:
Well, and that’s a part of our guide, so I guess we’ll wrap it up with that. If you go to letsbackflipcom slash guide, you can get our free, consistent, story-led video marketing guide, kickstart sort of deal. It’ll show you kind of all of our secrets how we do it, our process, a lot of what we’re talking about now, but it’s in a codified document, a white paper that you can just take and you can run with if you want. So in as much as we’re like, should you be doing it, we want to give you away the information, or give away the information to you so you can see it. There’s probably some some of it that you can do and then what you can’t do, you can reach out to a professional like backflip and we can be your support team on that. So I don’t know Anything else. Professional video what do we?
John Shoemaker :
got After all these years. We’re professionals, I guess.
Ryan Freng:
We’re finally figuring it out. Yeah, alright, that’s it Next week. Let’s see what are we going to talk about next week? Ooh, why your Business Needs a Year-Long Video Campaign. I don’t know if that’s the actual title, but the idea is why you need consistent video. So similar to the podcast from three weeks ago, but this is more looking at quarterly and through the year and what you can get from that. So tune in. You won’t want to miss it. Please do like subscribe. Let us know what else you want us to talk about.
Ryan Freng:
We’re going to answer all the pain points that we’ve already talked to clients about. That’s what we’re going to be doing. But if you have questions, anything you want to learn more about, we’re going to go through budgeting. I’m pretty excited about that to just demystify the cost. Because somebody comes in and, yeah, we’re like oh, promotions will start at 15 grand. And they’re like oh, I was going to spend $500. Oh, promotions will start at 15 grand. And they’re like oh, I was going to spend 500. And there’s obviously a misunderstanding of of the work that goes in. You know, think of a car like huh, this car is 15 grand. Oh, I was going to spend 1500 or 500. Most people understand those are two very different cars. But in video people don’t understand. So we’re going to talk more about video. Anything else else, no, I’m like I’m rambling and then I’m like I don’t know. John, you should end it All. Right, that’s what we got. Thanks for hanging out. Bye.
