Video As A Service (VaaS) Can Make Your Video Ambitions Come True ...with Daniel Borba

Summary

In this episode, Jeffro and Daniel Borba discuss the evolving role of video in B2B marketing, emphasizing its necessity for business growth. Daniel introduces the concept of Video as a Service (VAS), which allows companies to scale video production without the prohibitive costs associated with traditional methods. They explore how to tailor video strategies to individual company needs, measure the impact of video content, and the potential future of video marketing in the age of AI. The conversation highlights the importance of authenticity in video content and the need for businesses to commit to a long-term video strategy to see real results.

Takeaways

• Video is essential for business growth in today's market.
• Many companies misunderstand the balance between quality and volume in video production.
• Speed can be more important than quality in certain situations.
• Authentic videos often perform better than highly produced ones.
• Video should be tailored to the specific needs of each company.
• Developing a video strategy requires understanding the company strengths and weaknesses.
• Measuring video impact involves setting specific KPIs based on company goals.
• Feedback from clients can provide insights into the effectiveness of video content.
• AI will empower smaller teams to produce video content more easily.
• Practice and effort are crucial for improving video skills.

Chapters

00:00 The Importance of Video in B2B Marketing
06:07 Understanding Video as a Service (VAS)
08:09 Tailoring Video Strategies for Different Companies
13:40 Measuring Video Impact and ROI
21:04 The Future of Video Marketing with AI

Links

https://sparkportal.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielborba

Free Website Evaluation: FroBro.com/Dominate

Transcript

Jeffro (00:01.048)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Now like it or not, video is no longer just a nice to have in marketing. It's a critical tool for your business growth. But for many B2B companies, creating video content can be overwhelming, expensive, and difficult to scale. So my guest today is Daniel Borba, and he's here to change that. As the founder and CEO of Spark Portal, Daniel is reimagining how SaaS and B2B companies approach video marketing through his video as a service model.

So instead of treating video as a one-off project, Daniel helps businesses build a strategic and scalable system that actually drives results for the business. So in this episode, we're going to dive into how B2B companies can leverage video to grow their business, the benefits of this model, and how to overcome the common challenges in video marketing. If you've ever wondered how to integrate video into your strategy without breaking the bank or getting stuck in production bottlenecks, this conversation is going to be for you. So welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel Borba (00:55.394)
Thank you for having me.

Jeffro (00:57.452)
Absolutely. I'm excited. know, have videos everywhere now, so we need to keep talking about it. And I think a lot of owners want to create more videos of their own, but a lot of businesses still struggle to use it effectively. maybe we can start by, can you share some big misconceptions about video marketing for B2B companies?

Daniel Borba (00:59.843)
Yeah.

Daniel Borba (01:15.694)
I would say the first one is even though video is everywhere, it could be in more places. And I would say there's a lot of marketing collateral and communication and just overall marketing collateral or marketing communication that can be improved, that the performance can be improved if you inject video content in it.

So I would say the biggest misconception is that quality is more important than volume. And so you need a good, I don't want to say balance, but you need to be able to pick and choose whether you want certain projects to have more quality and other projects to have focus on volume rather than the quality. And you need to be able to kind of like pull those levers basically. And so those are good misconceptions there.

Jeffro (02:15.491)
Well, I think also timing is a factor, right? Because sometimes I might choose to get a video out now that's not edited and polished, but because of something that happened in the market or in the news, I want that video out there as quick as possible.

Daniel Borba (02:27.918)
100%. Like right now, if you are, and we were just talking about this, a lot of companies are being affected in California, right? Because of the fires, a lot of things change. Not just those neighborhoods, like all the areas and service providers around those areas are being affected. So how cool would it be if you could focus not so much on the quality of the video for that, for maybe creating communication or a video or several videos.

where you address how your company is maybe looking at this situation, how you're adapting your service to your audience, right? To your customer base or your prospects. And maybe that video wouldn't, quality wouldn't matter that much, but speed, right? Like getting it out there to your people so that they understand what's your position and also maybe not your position, but whatever message you want to communicate, fast enough.

Jeffro (03:23.821)
Yeah, and you need to know your audience too because again, if we use that same example, if you're sitting in some like nice fancy high rise apartment or something and you're like, yeah, we can come help you and you can have a disconnect where people feel like you don't get it and you're just trying to profit off of them or something. But if you actually just go down there and shoot something on your phone talking about the devastation and how you can help or how you were affected, maybe you, you your mom lived there or something, right? That's totally different and that's going to hit a lot.

different and get more engagement and actually be a better overall video even if it's not so quote unquote polished right.

Daniel Borba (03:59.886)
Yeah, 100%. And that's like across all industries. Like you can apply that to service industries. Like if you do like home services, you can also go also all the way to the other side. Like you can do technology companies too. Like how we're seeing this on LinkedIn as well where video that seems authentic and just like shot from the phone.

that there wasn't a lot of production behind it. Those videos performed very well on LinkedIn as a sales tool as well. And so as a sales tool, as a communication, as a audience engagement tool. And so what we're seeing is a shift a little bit in what people want to consume in terms of video. They want to be engaged and they want to...

look at the video and feel like the other person is being or whatever is being shown, it's authentic, it's true, and it's connecting with them.

Jeffro (05:05.112)
Yeah, and that makes sense. And it is interesting to see how on different platforms people are in different headspace and the way they consume video is different. So like the same video as on Instagram might go viral, but it's a very fast paced, lots of cuts and emojis everywhere. If you post that same thing on LinkedIn, like it's crickets.

Daniel Borba (05:14.146)
Definitely.

Daniel Borba (05:24.3)
You know, yeah, we are starting to see more of that a little bit on LinkedIn, but there's a little bit of a pushback from people. Because people are like, yeah, like this is not, like I don't buy that for this platform, right? But it's funny because the same person, like two hours later, sitting down on the couch at home on Instagram,

Jeffro (05:29.622)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (05:33.077)
Yeah, people complain about it.

Jeffro (05:43.221)
Yep.

Daniel Borba (05:48.888)
There'll be all over that video, right? But just because of the mindset, so it is interesting to see those dynamics.

Jeffro (05:56.31)
Yeah, it's very interesting. So let's talk for a minute about your company, Spark Portal. you're trying to pioneer this video as a service model. First of all, do you say VAS or V-A-A-S? How do you say VAS? Okay. So can you explain what VAS?

Daniel Borba (06:07.212)
Yeah, VAS, VAS. Or VAS for short, and then video service for fancy people like you and me.

Jeffro (06:16.413)
Okay, sure. Well, maybe you can break it down, kind of explain what that actually looks like and how it's different from traditional video production.

Daniel Borba (06:23.522)
Yeah. So first of all, yeah, thanks for bringing this up. But basically we noticed that a lot of companies were trying to scale video, to leverage video because they see the value in it. But then they kind of fell flat as soon as they start to hire or contract vendors to do video. Why? Because then the price starts going up and up to a certain point

you have to decide whether you're going to continue paying that price. And at some point it's not profitable to leverage the volume of video that you want while you hire someone else to do it. And so because of that, we decided to approach it differently and say, okay, in order for us to increase the volume and keep the same quality, we need to probably engage in a longer term relationship.

And our profits are going to come in later in engagement, not initially. And so in other words, we kind of met them halfway and the client is is willing to extend the length of the relationship if we can lower the price per video. And so that's how it started. The idea started trying to figure out how to increase volume and increase the value.

of leveraging video. so, yeah, that's how it started. And we specifically work with software companies.

Jeffro (07:51.767)
Okay, cool. And I kind of want to get into that a little bit more because I think for lot of SaaS or B2B companies, video is kind of seen as a branding tool rather than a direct revenue driver. And so I'm curious to hear from you how you're using these videos and how do you help the companies create videos that are actually leading to the results that they want.

Daniel Borba (08:09.688)
So it's very interesting because every company is different. And now we're in a sort of a changing or shifting scenario or an era where things are shifting. We're coming out of the template, follow this process, follow this template world where what's like you would go to Google and you would search what's the standard for this or what's the best way to do X or what's the

the industry standard to leverage this, you know? And you would find a few good articles, but we know that that's not the case anymore. We cannot trust Google. We cannot trust, so we trust our peers. But even then, we still have to confront the fact that we need to draw our own path. We need to kind of develop our own road that we're gonna drive, that we're gonna go into. And so what that means is you need to develop a strategy

that works for you, for your strengths and your weaknesses. And so there is no, if you do XYZ, you're gonna kill it with video. It's more like based on your scenario, based on how your company structure, how would it make more sense to use video? For some companies, hey, let's use it as a sales enablement tool. And in this quarter, we're gonna focus on that.

Because we can probably if we can shorten up the sales cycle with a few videos with a nurturing campaign for the you know The deals that are like just almost ready That will probably mean more revenue for us by the end of the quarter, right? On the other side you go up the funnel and then you say okay So we can also do a branding play we could start doing some LinkedIn video for a CEO like a thought leadership series and those are recorded over, you know, zoom or Riverside and so

and then anything in between. that's kind of how we, I forgot your question, but that's kind of what we're seeing where video is fitting today. It needs to be flexible to your needs because you can fit it anywhere. So did that answer your question a little bit?

Jeffro (10:22.485)
Yeah, that makes sense. It does. mean, I'm kind of interested also to hear more about like, when you decide, okay, this should be a commercial versus this should be a social post. And you kind of answered that like, it depends on the company and what you're trying to do, right? You just got to figure that out, make your strategy and then execute it.

Daniel Borba (10:36.503)
Yeah.

Daniel Borba (10:39.916)
Yeah. So what we found is if we meet with them regularly, we get to learn. So our methodology is to go a little bit deeper and find out what happens at those marketing meetings that you're not part of. And what happens at those meetings that the CEO is having? Like, is it? Where's his mindset? Because that trick goes down to the marketing and operations and all these other areas.

And so we kind of try to go deep to understand so that we provide ideas that support that. Because oftentimes the person that you're talking to, by the time they are telling you what they need, it's already kind of being washed out or it's like it's been decided by somebody that doesn't understand their job, right? And doesn't understand video. And so what we try to do is we try to kind of extend our, our hands kind of everywhere.

And so that then we can provide proper ideas that is rooted on their strengths and weaknesses, rather than say, hey, this is what you should do. We say, hey, based on because your CEO is actually not very, you know, or because your executive team is not very supportive of video, probably we should go with animation maybe and create a series where we do this in a different way without needing them. And so that's kind of how we approach.

and how we provide ideas to them.

Jeffro (12:08.084)
Okay, yeah, and so you're helping them develop a long-term video strategy. And it's interesting the way we throw away, throw around the term video because it's really just a medium, right? But you can use this as a, for a publicity stunt, it could be an infomercial, it could be any of these things. And so just recording video for the sake of video isn't going to help you unless you know what you're doing.

Daniel Borba (12:17.697)
Yeah.

Daniel Borba (12:29.194)
Exactly. I would say it needs a little you need to put a little thought into Experimenting and but even that doesn't mean so for some people when you say experimenting it's a I get to do whatever no you need to develop a little a little sort of a Hypothesis and then come up with a few tests that you can run Once you're done, then like say, okay, what have I learned? What can I adjust?

And for some companies, that's like a quarterly goal that they have, right? And it includes 20 videos. For some other companies, it could just mean, hey, I'm going to set 10 minutes, I'm going to talk about this topic, and I'm going to see how well I can communicate this message, and what clips can I extract. And that's the goal, depending on the business size, the size of the business that wants to leverage video.

Jeffro (13:23.485)
So kind of in that vein, how do you help companies understand and measure what the impact of the video content is? Is there a direct ROI? Because you can't always track it to a specific video. And oftentimes, it's because you have multiple impressions with the same person that now they're like, OK, I'm on board with this. So how do you do that?

Daniel Borba (13:38.318)
Interesting. So right now we're developing a little background. So we've been focused so much on the production that we have the team for the production. The area that we're kind of building now is the strategy side. And so because I'm a strategist but not a content expert, go figure,

My background is more like production and creative. But I understood the gap that was there. And so I said, I'm going to hire... So now I'm in the middle of hiring a strategist so that they're going to help us build a more robust reporting system. So it is not just based on, you got this many videos through your subscription. We're going to focus also on the impact of those videos. And so what that means is we're going to decide what are the KPIs that this company in particular is kind of looking at.

Some companies are still doing lead gen. Some other companies are still doing brand building and content and that type of thing. demand generation, there's different models out there. And so there are different metrics. And so because of that, we have to kind build a report that is, sure, it has some sort of standard, but it goes beyond that and it's more specific to the client and their goals.

So long answer, but in the short of it is for some companies, they care about views because they already have an audience. And so they're tapping into YouTube, for example. And so for them, we need to develop a strategy where the watch through rate is important. It's an important metric to keep in mind when we create content. So what that means is like, we should probably, instead of creating long for video, we should create a lot, a lot of like a quick to the point

content so that we have increased the watch rate and we increase the impressions that we get from all of our video content. On the flip side, if you think of like a different approach, like for example, some companies want to, like I was talking about earlier about increasing or sorry, shortening the sales cycle, then maybe we can like come up with a play where we say, okay, let's come up with a video content, let's talk to sales.

Daniel Borba (15:59.584)
get some ideas on what are the questions that come up or objections that come up at the bottom of the funnel, sort of when they're reaching the end, to kind of push them a little so that we can shorten that source cycle a little bit more. And we can leverage video from the get-go and the sales cycle so that we can start seeing some improvements, especially touch points with video. Have they watched, out of the 10 videos that we

created for this particular play, how many of those videos have they watched? And you could set that up in a CRM. Again, I'm not an expert on that, but a content strategist or a marketing strategist, they will be able to set that up. And I know that I'm throwing out big terms out there. Maybe for a small business owner, that's probably too much. If you can hire maybe a marketing strategist.

then you're set, but if you don't have that skill, maybe what you could do is keep it simple and say, hey, what do want my goal to be? I'm gonna do 10 videos and I'm gonna put them for this particular purpose, or I'm gonna do three videos. And I'm gonna wait and see what happens and then learn and then go to the next step. So you could go very simple and very tactical here as well.

Jeffro (17:14.31)
Yeah, there's so much there. And I like how you kind of gave the overarching answer, but each platform has its own analytics, right? You can see the impressions and the views. And so you kind of need a way to pull these together and compare and say, OK, this video did well on this platform, but not that one. But then how does that directly tie to revenue? I don't know. Maybe we need to have a survey that says, how did you find us? And that's not going to be 100 % accurate. if you plan ahead, go ahead. It looks like you want to say something.

Daniel Borba (17:16.557)
Yeah.

Daniel Borba (17:22.123)
It's a huge monster.

Daniel Borba (17:40.94)
Yeah, you know, yeah, what you said is so important and it's so underutilized. And I'm referring to asking the people that have closed, your clients, oftentimes the feedback that kind of tells you whether video is winning or not is the one that you can't track automatically. And so oftentimes you'll hear like your best clients that say, my gosh, like I remember when I was kind of talking to you.

Jeffro (17:52.017)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Borba (18:08.342)
Like I remember watching this video, that kind of really made sense to me. And that kind of helped me kind of make that final decision. If you're hearing that kind of feedback, it's amazing because the power of video is that you can take your brand, your personality, and put it in front of them and it lives there. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't have to go to sleep.

And so, and if you're having already an audience, somebody that, like, for example, lot of businesses, especially local businesses, they have Google reviews and they have like a Google page. So they usually, people poke around and go to like a page. So if there's some video there where they can already see you or the people that are going to be serving them, like that's a huge plus because not many companies are doing that. And so when they see a company that does that, it creates this sense of...

wow, this company is very transparent. They have their own people doing video. I already know what I'm gonna get. That makes me feel safe. That makes me feel like I trust them a little bit more.

Jeffro (19:08.837)
Yeah. the only other thing I was going to say is if you plan ahead, you can do specific promotions where you say in your video, it is a commercial and you're like, use this code when you sign up. Okay, now I can track how many times the code was used. I know exactly how effective the video was, but that's not always what you want to do. Like we talked about what your strategy is. If you're just trying to create all these small, compelling clips to kind of be an authority and get people to trust you, then what's going to happen is like you said, I'll give an example. You know, I just had somebody this past week.

Daniel Borba (19:27.339)
Exactly.

Jeffro (19:38.872)
scheduled a meeting with me out of the blue. I didn't know where he was. It wasn't an introduction. And he just came to me. like, hey, I've seen your stuff. We need help with this. We need help with that. What can you do for us? And so I told him, he's like, all right, great. Let's do it. I don't have to sell him because the videos already did the work for me. He already knows he can trust me. He's heard that I know what I'm doing when I talk about this stuff. And so that's the impact that you want. But it's not an overnight thing. You can't do one or two videos and be like, hey, video doesn't work. No, you got to commit to the long term approach.

Daniel Borba (19:41.986)
Hahaha

Daniel Borba (20:03.735)
It's not.

Daniel Borba (20:07.766)
Yeah, you do have to commit because a big part of the sales, I'm not a great salesman and I still try and I put effort into it. Obviously, I'm the owner of a company, but I don't consider myself a great salesman. But I do know this, a big, big milestone in a sales conversation is do they trust you enough to want to continue either having a conversation or want to buy from you?

What video does is it does help you because it helps them have an experience with you before they even commit to having a conversation with you. And so if they do decide to have a conversation with you, they've already have a little bit of a higher level of trust, especially if it's something that is authentic, right?

Jeffro (20:57.423)
Yeah, it makes a huge difference.

Daniel Borba (20:57.486)
So I'm glad you had that experience. This is really interesting.

Jeffro (21:02.17)
Yeah, I'm going to have more of them too. That's the plan. So I also want to ask you before we get to the end here, know, with AI and automation continuing to evolve and improve pretty quickly, how do you see, you know, these technology changes kind of shape the future of video marketing?

Daniel Borba (21:04.002)
Nice!

Daniel Borba (21:21.154)
That's a good question. And I'll just say this, AI kind of sucks right now because it's like a love-hate relationship. It's like, it's like, it's very unstable, right? And it's not, it doesn't give you the freedom yet that you need. And so it's almost like, it's almost like when you bite too much and then you're like, but like, that was great. But now that I've tried it,

So I can, I only see more problems than solutions here. And so my take is this, each person needs to figure out how they can leverage AI to do their job better.

At some point, some roles will be removed from an operation of a business. But I don't think that's gonna happen like, it's gonna be a point in time. I think it's gonna be more like a transition. There's still people today that use,

antiquated technology and they're still millions. So this is a big opportunity. At the same time, it also sucks because it's going to replace some of the ways that people make money today. So it's not like this. I think it's going to be a transition. It's going to suck for some people, but it's going to be great for others.

other people. so I, in particular, so that's like my general take on AI. Specifically to video, I think it's going to empower more video, more people that have small teams to leverage video, to produce video without having technology or without having like knowledge about how to produce video. That's my, my more simple take on in terms of

Daniel Borba (23:22.472)
So I think that's going be a plus in other words. It's going to be a huge plus for... Yeah.

Jeffro (23:25.197)
Yeah, it's a tool. Like it's there to help. So don't think it's going to replace everything tomorrow. But yeah, just don't be too scared of it either. It makes sense. All right. Well, Daniel, I appreciate you joining me today and walking us through your video as a service model. I think it can be really helpful for a lot of businesses who want to get more video out in the world. They're busy with other stuff. They can just kind of let you guys help with the strategy and actually make this consistently because otherwise it's not going to work.

Daniel Borba (23:34.03)
100%.

Daniel Borba (23:49.784)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (23:50.796)
So listeners, if you want to connect with Daniel, his links will be in the show notes. So go check those out. I do have one final question for you, Daniel. If a business owner or marketing person in the company is listening right now and they want to start leveraging video, but they have no idea where to begin, what's one simple thing they can do to start today?

Daniel Borba (24:09.166)
Practice makes perfect. Skill is important, but more important is effort. So, if you are scared of jumping on a, you know, recording yourself, record yourself, practice, you don't have to publish it. Record yourself, and then see. Get familiar with watching yourself, how you talk to people.

And over time, you'll get more comfortable and you'll be like, wow, I need to get this message out there. And that's what I would say.

Jeffro (24:47.115)
Yeah, no, that's great advice. If I look back at my first videos, I'm like, yeah, that was pretty bad. But that's what happens. You do it a lot, you get better at it.

Daniel Borba (24:51.214)
The humble beginnings. man. Yeah Dude, if I showed you one of my videos like you'll be like wow Like I even surprised myself. I'm like wow like And and I think I think a lot of business owners know this Like they know that if they put effort into something over time They're gonna get better at it. So I'm a huge believer in that

Jeffro (24:57.631)
Yes, exactly.

Jeffro (25:03.277)
You've come a long way.

Jeffro (25:20.47)
Awesome. Yeah, same here. Well, thanks again for being here, Daniel. Thanks to all you guys for listening. Keep leaning into video, putting in those reps, and I'll see you next year. See you back here next time for the next episode of Digital Zomynist. Take care.

Daniel Borba (25:32.216)
Thank you.