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Take better patient photos, create video testimonials, and get photo and video you can use for all your marketing. This highly visual lecture focuses on teaching you and your staff how to get quality patient photos and stories quickly and use them to radically improve all your marketing.
TOPICS COVERED:
- Using your phone for professional photo and video
- Learn secrets for great quality audio
- Training your staff to take better photos and videos
- Photo/Video in low light and office environment
- Editing and Uploading Your Video… Fast and Dirty Tips!
- Case Studies and Content Marketing With Photo/Video
TRANSCRIPTION: Photo and video for the medical practice.
If someone agrees to be in your website, to be part of your marketing, to be a before and after case, you owe it to your business to document that to the best of your ability.
Two lousy before and afters shot against blue is fine but really people are truly compelled by stories. There’s massive social proof in a story. There’s massive social proof in a testimonial. More and more, Google is cataloging testimonials and cataloging reviews. It’s obvious that this is the future of medical marketing.
Ask yourself: how can I best use this vocal proponent of my practice?
good content has real appeal to real people.
If you start taking better photos and taking better videos you’ve suddenly got awesome content for everything you do.
With great photo and video All your marketing tools – your print, your website, everything – looks better, performs better, and it lasts the life of your practice.
Your phone has every bit enough camera and every bit enough audio to take amazing videos. The technology is already there.
With new high-ISO cameras, is you no longer have to depend on strobes and flashes. They’re so sensitive to light that you can shoot in a relatively low-light environment and expect to have a dynamite result.
For $300, $400, you can have the camera that not only shoots a dynamite clinical before and after, but shoots a superlative quality portrait and then also shoots video that is every bit as good as a production quality camera that used to cost $600,000 15 years ago.
The more expensive your lens, the less light you’re going to need.
Typically, as you look at cameras, the more you spend on a lens, the better. Good lenses almost always equate to lower light conditions. It’s a big benefit.
Working With People
You should sit people down. This is true of taking pictures, this is true of doing interviews. People tend to be more relaxed when they’re seated, especially if you’re taking pictures of them. A lot of people freak out in front of cameras. Sitting them down and relaxing them is a very quick way to get a much better result.
Distortion And Lenses
If you come in close with a wide-angle camera, you’re going to add big time distortions to the face. This is the difference on the left between a 28 millimeter camera, which is pretty similar to a 35 millimeter, which is what most little point and shoot cameras are. Then if you look at a 35 millimeter, a 135, on the right, you get a much nicer portrait.
Be aware that if you extend the lens as far as you can to shoot it as telephoto as it’ll get, you’ll get a much better quality portrait. You don’t get that … If you look at people’s before and afters, you see a lot of this wall-eyed, giant-nosed look.
Here’s another example. As the focal length, as you go more towards the telephoto end of the lens, you get a much more flattering portrait. If you’re shooting with a camera that has an extendable lens, shoot it as extended as you can. You’ll get a better quality portrait. Try not to get too close. If you pull back and get a more atmospheric shot, you’re going to get a less distorted shot.
Your videos typically are going to be pretty good because you’re pulling back to shoot the whole room. The person’s, if it’s horizontal, they’re a small part of it on the right side. Something to be aware of is that as you come in close with a 35 millimeter camera, you’re going to get a lot of distortions, so make sure you’re shooting people from a good enough distance not to whack them out too much.
Lighting
Every room has light. Light color is graded on a Kelvin scale from 1000 to 8000.
Where you ideally want to be is daylight, that’s 5600 Kelvin. That’s a very clear white light. You need to tune in to what the color of light is because light carries color with it and that adds to the color quality of the photo, color quality of the video.
If we were to shoot a video in this room (ATLANTA LECTURE HALL) it would be pretty yellow. Shoot a video outside, it tends to be very balanced color-wise. If you shoot a video under fluorescent lights, it goes toward the blue spectrum. The more you tune in to what the color is the better the quality of your photo and video.
What’s the solution? Turn on more lights and use balanced light sources.
Ambient light is what we need to dial into. Because we’re not shooting with strobes, because we’re not bringing in expensive lights, we need to shoot with the ambient light in the room.
Every room has a color cast to it and you need to figure out, “Okay, if I’m shooting this person, what lights do I want to put near them to get the best quality?” I find two desk lamps with 5600 Kelvin lights in them, which you can buy at Walmart. It’s just a matter of not buying the cheapest bulbs you can find, there’s nice daylight balanced ones. That’s going to solve the bulk of your color issues with photos. If you’ve got a bright enough room, you can almost always shoot a really high quality shot.
If the lights are sodium, everything’s going to yellow. If the lights are fluorescent, everything’s going to go kind of blue-green. You don’t want green people. You don’t really want yellow people. You want nice, pink, tan, brown people and you get that with 5600k balanced lights.
Good lighting is a state of mind.
You have to really look at what the light is in the room, and that’s what you’re going to be shooting in. Really… what you see in the back of the camera is what you get.
How do you create video testimonials?
The first big secret to great video production is wipe off that filthy, dirty lens. Most hazy, crappy videos are because there’s a big fingerprint on the lens. Almost always, your phone coming out of your pocket is dirty. Keep your fingers out of the way, wipe it off. You’re going to have a radically better video.
Stabilize the camera. A little tripod will improve your production quality radically.
Add an external microphone.
A good mic is the best $60 you’ll ever spend in terms of production quality. If you can get good audio and reasonable video, you’re well on your way to having a great result. Just by putting your camera in a tripod and plugging in an external microphone that you can buy on Amazon. It’s got huge value.
Building a set.
look at your space as if it were a set. Make sure your lights are high-quality and make sure you’re setting up a couple places where people look good on camera. There’s no reason why you can’t take your little camera, turn it sideways and take a dynamite portrait of a person, where someone looks really, really good.
It’s about tuning in to the lights. It’s about tuning in to the room itself, getting people comfortable, and shooting a nice portrait. The clinical shot is not so far from a portrait shot, with a little more thought about the lighting and a little more thought about the set, where they are. If you can make that person look comfortable, and make that person tell an awesome story, that’s the stuff that separates practices from the masses.
Interview Questions and Setup
If you’re trying to get a good patient interview, these are the questions you need to ask. You need to break the interview into a timeline. You need to tell them to have a start, middle, and end. What you don’t want is one seven-minute testimonial.
What you do want is someone to repeat the question. “Well, choosing a surgeon’s a big choice, and I looked all around at different website and I found Dr. Jones because I really liked his website. That’s how I chose him.”
Ideally you want little bite-sized pieces of video because they’re easy to cut off the front and the back, and then you have a stand-alone video. Then you can string them together to make a longer video very easily.
Make sure the person is talking about each little section separately. Day of surgery, “My day of surgery, I came in and this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, and that’s what my day of surgery was.” That’s the setup you want, is to build little easy to assimilate pieces because you can then serialize those on your website as a series of seven very short videos, or you can string them together very easily, even with YouTube, to make one long video. It becomes a very easy manageable resource.
Tell A Story
Always try to get a person to tell a story. People love stories. You remember stories. You don’t remember facts, and slides, and anything. You remember things people talk about.
If you want to really set yourself apart, hinge your practice on people’s stories.
Marketing With Photos and Videos
Stories and people are the most compelling marketing there is. Nothing sells like a testimonial. If I had to go sell anything I would want to come in with lots of people talking about how amazing it was. There’s no difference between a great video and a true word-of-mouth referral in the mind of the patient after the fact.
