Are You Using Video Yet?

Hello again

While marketing principles are mostly unchanging for year after year and even decade after decade, the technology that we can use to deliver our messages to potential clients and customers is changing ever more quickly.

Right now, the medium that gets more attention from more potential clients than any other is video. Video both promotes your business and brings traffic to your website.

So are you using video yet?

There are lots of different ways to make a video for your business and getting started needn’t be as difficult as you might imagine. Companies are successfully using everything from slide shows to mini-dramas, and from interviews to how-to’s, and almost any combination of these can be used to get your marketing messages across to an audience that might otherwise be difficult to reach.

One of the strongest ways to use video is testimonials from happy customers. However well you promote your business, someone else’s words will always carry more weight. When people see video testimonials on your website they are already thinking of buying from you and wondering if they should, so a good testimonial video could well be what tips the balance in your favour.

You can also promote your good name through video by being helpful and passing on free information that might be difficult to get across in any other way.

Another type of video is the guided tour, or ‘meet the family’, where you show people your place of work and some of the happy staff. This helps people identify with your company and reassures them that you’re real human beings. People buy from people, after all.

Or you can just create slide shows, with either a voice-over or a music sound track. These can be pictures of your business premises, your products or your happy customers, or they can be instructional or educational, more like a PowerPoint presentation – or they can be a combination of these.

You can even inject a bit of humour into a potentially dull subject with a cartoon like this one:

Finally, your video could be the equivalent of a sales letter, and you could even use the sales letter for a product as your video script. This has been shown to be much more effective than a written sales letter in some instances.

Your videos only have to be a few minutes long at most, and often less than thirty seconds, and it’s better to have a number of short videos than one or two longer ones that people will be less likely to watch to the end.

But the key is to keep making new videos and adding them to video sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video, as well as to your own website and blog.

And to get started as soon as possible!

Roy