With TV news stations often stretched thin and unable to send a camera crew to cover a story or event, it’s a good idea to have your own footage for each of your clients available to provide to them.

Providing professionally produced B-roll to a news organization is invaluable when pitching a story to the assignment desk. It is priceless to have footage to show what your client does in case a story opportunity is presented to you. With footage of the manufacturing process, employees providing a service or exterior building shots with company signage on hand, you are immediately able to provide the file to a news station.

B-roll isn’t just for timeless footage. For companies with events that are time sensitive, footage often needs to be shot and delivered to the stations on the same day.

Many businesses make the mistake of providing amateur footage that never gets on air. When you hire a professional video production company to gather B-roll they have the equipment and the knowledge of what the station needs to increase the odds of it airing.

Footage needs to be shot in HD and the shots must be fluid and steady. Shaky camera work is unacceptable. When shooting using pans or tilts, the camera operator should let the motion end before cutting to another shot. If you’re including soundbites, a good camera operator will know how much pre-roll to include and will make sure the audio is crisp. If your client is with a national company, try to localize the story to make it more relevant. And remember exterior shots matter. When pitching a local story, don’t send video of the client’s New York office with Times Square in the background.

The footage not only needs to be photographed professionally, but it must also be edited to provide the best shots in a concise package. A professional editor will know to include the ambient sound and know the safe area for graphics on the screen. The editor will create the dubs or digitally send the footage to the station.

For your corporate clients, it’s important to have professional video to best highlight the organization. Whether for airing on TV or other corporate use, brand is the most important asset a company has and by shooting profession B-roll and having it ready, you control how that brand is presented.

This link offers an example of how B-roll we provided was used during an in-studio interview as cover shots during the segment.

For assistance on producing B-roll footage or soundbite clips for your clients, or your own company, visit us at Spectrum Video & Film or call 602-889-0990. We are experts in video production and have been in the Valley for more than 30 years. We offer full-service video production from script to screen; lighting, projection and sound for events and meetings; and webcasting. Your facility is equipped with a studio, three edit bays and a sound booth.

When you enter a new niche — especially in search marketing via SEO and PPC campaigns — it’s important to identify strong players as well as smaller competitors that aren’t immediately on your radar. They might not rank for the most keywords, but they often rank for the most valuable keywords.

Be sure to include these two goals in your research:

1. Understand who really dominates the niche

Monster.com is a giant in the job listing field. They’ve been advertising during the Super Bowl for at least 15 years, so they have been the big name to chase. However, when you look for the site that ranks for top keywords in the job hunt niche, it is actually Indeed.com that dominates.

All it takes to gut-check old assumptions is to search one industry-related domain on SpyFu.com. (I started with Monster.com.) SpyFu finds your direct competitors and shows how they ranked over time for relevant keywords. If one powerhouse site appears in topical search results more often than others, you can spot that at a glance.

Before seeing that chart (and expanding the time window to look back 5 years) I would have guessed that Monster.com had dominated the niche, and that Indeed.com had just started emerging over the past year. I would have been completely wrong.

2. Give credit to websites with focused and valuable SEO.

Now that you can pinpoint the giants, remember that size doesn’t always rule. The previous example helps you battle wrong assumptions. However, ranking for the most searches doesn’t necessarily make them your biggest threat (or best example to emulate).

Many keywords a giant ranks for could easily be irrelevant, throw-away keywords. (Linkedin.com ranks for “ako” and “capital of Spain” to name a few.) Don’t be distracted by high keyword counts alone. Instead, pay attention to competitors whose SEO delivers meaningful traffic from valuable keywords. Here’s how to spot them.

Domains that create more value

When you switch to a “Monthly Value” metric on the chart, you can gauge the value that each domain gains from its organic traffic. Just like with PPC ads, more competitive keywords tend to be more valuable to the domain, so ranking for a few strong keywords can deliver big value.

Again, Indeed.com rises above the others. However, there’s more to uncover. We started this hunt to find domains with focused and valuable SEO — but not so large that they already jump to the front of our minds. A domain with tight focus (read: ranks for fewer keywords) could be hidden from immediate view.

With a monthly SEO value hovering over $9 million each month, Indeed.com creates plenty of value ahead of its competition where others are closer to $1M to $2 million a month. I kept the $9 million target in mind and scrolled down to the full list of Top Organic Competitors to see if I could find any others reaching Indeed.com’s levels.

BOOM! With nearly the same number of keywords as Monster.com, Glassdoor.com captures $10.6M in value each month from its rankings.

Now I can see Glassdoor.com and Indeed.com as two strong domains that create more value overall from their organic content. Glassdoor.com wasn’t top of mind before, and it would have slipped past our sights. The goal is to find competitors that capture relevant and valuable traffic, and these sites get more qualified traffic with every click. If you’re up against them, that’s a key point to remember.

Keep Your Eyes Open

Deeper research into this pool of competitors tells you an interesting story about clicks translating into value. It’s a case of a competitor looming so large that it’s tough to see what is really happening in the niche. There’s help on how to stay alert for market shifts and emerging competitors that you might have missed. Read an in-depth example here.

Now you’re armed with a better eye for potential threats and even possible partners. Anyone can find a competitor. You’re going to find the big answers that happen between the lines.