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Your Audience If you are planning to use video to promote your business, the first step is to carefully consider the needs of your audience – your customers and prospects. When I am about to step in front of an audience, I remind myself to first get to know them, help them understand me, and then take them where they want to go. These three objectives are the basis for a successful presentation or casual conversation, and will therefore work to for your online videos too. Your first priority is to develop trust. This is why you have to engage with your audience by getting to know them and then helping them understand you. Since you only have a few minutes to accomplish this, your videos should tackle only one objective at a time. This will keep you focused and ensure an acceptable video length that gets watched. Get to Know Them The best place to get to know your customer is on their turf. Most people will not admit this, but they enjoy being on camera. Take advantage of this. Get out within your community and have fun interacting with people in your market. This shows you are a regular person that gets involved, and it builds credibility and trust. Community fund raisers are great opportunities for impromptu videos. Help Them to Understand You Now that you have broken down a few barriers, you’ve earned the right to showcase what you do. Create videos about your company that show what you do well and how you do it. In a competitive marketplace, the company that can help us understand is going to be the winner. Many consumers do not understand even the basic operations of a successful green industry business. Show them you care about safety, being professional, and developing innovative practices. Take Them Where They Want to Go Now you can bring it home by highlighting the higher value of what you do, such as the lifestyle benefits that come from quality green industry products and services. Where do people want to go? They want to feel good. They want to be happy. Show them videos of your favorite clients enjoying their landscapes so they can envision themselves doing the same. Here’s an idea for showing your concern for efficiency and being green. Many of you are involved in lean management initiatives. Just a few days ago I read how Starbucks is adapting lean practices to their business. Use this to make a memorable association. Create videos that show your lean practices and how you are working hard like Starbucks to keep your costs down. Since many of your customers get their coffee from Starbucks, every trip they make there is a reminder of your professionalism and green leadership. That’s powerful. The Show Most of us were raised on television back in the days when commercials were lengthy, frequent, and disruptive. For this reason, when you are making a video for the Web, it’s critical to respect people’s time. Your video is going to be watched, or as we now say - consumed by a time-starved audience. So, skip the commercials and cute beginnings and get to the show. Wasting time with gimmicks like talking to imaginary people off camera will get you tuned out. You probably aren’t a professional actor, but you should still practice your delivery to make it smooth. Here’s a link to my blog where I walk you through the steps I use to create my video blog posts http://bit.ly/bFydN. Here’s another for writing blog posts http://bit.ly/EQ8IT. I can assure you will get better if you practice, as I know I have. Backstage Secrets The trick to making video work is to entice the viewer to take the next step to engage with your company. This may involve signing up for your online newsletter, subscribing to your blog, or better yet, making a phone call to place an order. For this reason, I prefer to have videos viewed on your website or blog. To accomplish this, you simply load your video up to YouTube, Vimeo, or any of the other video hosting sites where they can also be viewed, and then paste the HTML code into your blog or Web site. If you are like me, the mention of HTML will have you running in the opposite direction. Take it easy. Blogging platforms make it especially easy to embed the HTML code. You don’t have to understand HTML. All you have to know is contained within those characters is everything you need to embed video into your site to keep the viewer there so you can engage, and hopefully, sell them. It’s simple. We all learned cutting and pasting in kindergarten, didn’t we? Once you have your videos up and running, the next and final step is to “push” them through the Web through sites by sharing the links on Facebook and Twitter. You can adapt your blog with features such as ShareThis.com and Tweetmeme.com to make it a one-click operation for your viewers. If you think word of mouth travels fast, then try video. Once you have built your social media network, you can get your videos viewed hundreds of times in a single day. Try doing that through word of mouth. Jeff Korhan helps companies maximize marketing results with social media marketing and social entrepreneurship. He is the author of Strategic Social Media Marketing for Entrepreneurs. Jeff can be reached at 630-774-8350 or speaker@truenature.com. He blogs at http://jeffkorhan.com |