Our second most important job as business people, is to let people know about our product or service. (The first job being PROVIDE an awesome service or product of course.) If people don’t know what you do, where they can find you, or even WHY they are in need of you, what is the point of having a superbly amazing thing? There’s none!
This “sharing our story”, we call ‘marketing’ and every one of us does it in some fashion (for better or worse.) If you are a business owner, I think you should consider adding video to your marketing strategy.
1. Video gets eyeballs
For people to buy something, or buy into it, first they need to be aware of it, and then give it their attention. Did you know Youtube is the second preferred search engine? (After Google). And you’re not going to find blogs, or photos or websites on Youtube. People are searching for videos. Youtube gets 4 Billion views per day. 4 BILLION! That’s like 1 out of every 2 people in the WORLD watching a Youtube video every day. Online video is more than 50% of mobile traffic, and 700 videos are shared per minute on Twitter alone. Plus, Google seems to love videos for ranking on the front page as it gives searchers multiple ways to consume their information. Did I mention people like watching videos?
(These statistics come from the book Video Marketing Pro: Professional Video Marketing Strategies that Boost Leads, Sales and ROI by Chris King. Really good and short read!)
2. You can get good feedback
Think about someone who’s put his ad on a billboard. Does he know exactly how many people looked at his billboard? How many people resonated with it? How many needed the service or took some action because of it? Not really. With videos however, on nearly every platform you get metrics to track viewer interaction. How many people watched the video? How long did they watch? Did they do something because of it, responding to your call to action, sharing it, subscribing or going to your website? With this information, you can tailor your videos right to your audience, doing more of what they seem to like, and less of what they didn’t. The greatest part about it? It’s free. This leads me to my next point.
3. It’s relatively inexpensive to begin
How much will said billboard cost you? Probably a lot. And how long do you get the benefits of paying to have your information on a billboard (or ad, or commercial etc)? As long as you keep paying the costs. On the other hand, do you have a phone or device that takes videos? How about access to internet? That’s all you need to get started with adding videos to your online presence. Sure, you could hire me, or buy fancy equipment, and maybe you’ll eventually get to that point, but just to begin, the only thing it might cost you is your time. After you pay that cost, and post a video, how long do you get the benefits? Indefinitely. That video can be seen and re-seen, shared, re-used, searched and clicked until you take it down, the internet disappears or humankind is extinct. The entry point for video is affordable, but the potential return is high.
4. People love seeing people
People don’t do business with companies, they do business with people. I’ve talked to many who have successfully used videos in their marketing and what they’ve consistently said was “Customers like to see you in a video. They feel like they know you; they feel like they can trust you.”
I met a man who runs an assisted living complex, and because he used videos, he went from his salespeople trying to convince you to give them your mothers, to you calling him after finding him with a video to ask if he’d be willing to accept her. He replaced hours and hours trying to sell someone on the idea of using his company with customers coming to him by spending a few minutes here and there in front of the camera. What a way of leveraging yourself!
I know I only touched on a few of the many reasons why videos would make a good addition to your marketing strategy that I’ll probably write more blogs on the subject! In the meantime, get started, will you?
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