VIDEO MARKETING SECRETS

What is the purpose of your company website?

Strategically, you have three options:• Establish your credentials• Generate leads• Sell your products and services

Imagine, for a moment, you have to interview your website for one of these three roles. How well will it perform?

Will you have to send it on a sales training course? Will you have to fire it? Appoint a more suitable candidate?

You squander your most valuable online asset if you have an underperforming or counterproductive website.

So, let’s see how we can fix this.

Let’s start with this simple question: which will be more effective at establishing your credentials, generating leads and making a sale:

• a selection of pages nailed to a fence on the side of the digital highway

• or you, with your knowledge, your sunny personality and unbridled enthusiasm?

Unfortunately you are not a website.

• You can’t be everywhere,

• you’re not available 24/7

• and you can’t really deal with thousands of simultaneous queries

So, the next question is: how do you transform your website, with all these benefits, to be as effective at establishing your credentials, generating leads and making a sale as you are?

The answer is VIDEO!

Video has several key benefits:

• People like videos. Facebook and YouTube report 4 billion video views per day on each platform.

• Customers can see your product or service in action

• Video is better at getting us to feel

• Videos boost your search rankings. According to some research it is 50x easier to achieve a page 1 ranking on Google with a video, than without

• Videos are easy to distribute

• Video marketing can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be

What are the rules for creating a great video?

• You have to capture people's interest within seconds and hold it throughout.

The script and the way in which you communicate your message visually are critical elements to get right.

• You have to make an emotional connection.

People love to be entertained. They want to feel excitement, shock, relief, admiration ... something. That’s what makes us human. And you want them to feel positive about your company.

• You have to explain things so they really ‘get’ the value of what you're offering.

Using metaphors and visual aids play an important part in getting people to really understand that they should buy from you and not the competition. And keep it simple: problem – solution - how it works - call to action.

• Focus on benefits, not features.

People want to know how your product or service is going to make their lives better. They want to know you’re going to make a difference.

• If you don’t give people what they want they are unhappy, they look around, they go somewhere else.

Let's look at some of the types of videos you can create:

• Explainer videos explain your value proposition.

• When people ‘get’ it, love it and want it, they will buy it.

• An explainer video is your most effective lead conversion tool.

Viral videos – Viral videos are meant to spread your brand through social sharing.

They usually don’t try to sell anything and are often entertaining.

These primarily create brand awareness and generate traffic to your website.

Vlog – These are video blogs.

They’re cheap to produce, personality-driven, and quite possibly the best value for money in terms of sheer engagement value.

Vlogs primarily serve to maintain brand awareness, build a fan base and generate leads.

Webinars – Webinars are usually high-value, low-cost endeavours.

• They are good for diving more deeply into relevant topics.

• They create a stronger sense of connection, especially where the audience can ask questions.

• Webinars are primarily for generating leads but also to build your reputation and community.

How-to – Webinars are usually high-value, low-cost endeavours.

• They are good for diving more deeply into relevant topics.

• They create a stronger sense of connection, especially where the audience can ask questions.

• Webinars are primarily for generating leads but also to build your reputation and community.

Let's look at the process of producing a video.

• The Value Proposition:

Start with a well defined value proposition. This will form the basis of your message.

• What is your elevator pitch in 1-2 sentences?

• Who is this for?

• What are the key benefits?

• How does your product or service work?

• What makes your offer different?

• Why you?

The Creative Idea – you need to come up with something that will make you stand out and be different from everyone else. This can be in terms of what you have to say about your subject matter, how you say it, the metaphors you use, your tone of voice, the visual aids you use.

The Script – it’s all about the script. In most cases it is better to get an external script writer to write your script because they will look at your offer from the outside in, the way your customers see it, and will therefore explain it in a way that anyone can understand.

Storyboards – The storyboard is based on the script and helps you plan and pre-visualise how the video will unfold. This is not really necessary for small, ad-lib productions.

If you are going to use animation or motion graphics get your script voice recorded.

There are many online services that offer access to voice talents.

The Animatic – An animatic is basically editing the storyboard and the voice recording together so you get a good idea of the pace and flow of the video.

The animatic is really important for videos where making changes in the production process could get very expensive.

Production – Once all the planning is done, you go into production: you create all your visual aids, shoot your video, produce animation. This is a whole subject on its own, but always keep this one question in mind: does this video, the way it looks and feel, do justice to my brand?

Post Production – Post production is basically putting all the bits and pieces together into one video. For this you will need some video editing software. Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premier are two professional packages, but they have a reasonably steep learning curve.

There are also some free software available, such as Windows Movie Maker, Apple’s iMovie, Resolve Lite, MPEG Streamclip, Free Video Dub, YouTube Editor or WAX.

Music – music binds the video together and enhances the mood you want to create.

There are many online audio libraries available.

Launch – You have a choice of uploading the video to your server or to a hosting server such as YouTube or Vimeo. You will need a catchy Title, Description, Thumbnail image, Keywords, Transcript and links.

So, let’s get back to our two entrepreneurs and see how they do.

They’ve created a mind blowing explainer video and started a series of short Vlogs with a few How-to videos thrown in for good measure.

The Vlogs are starting to attract a lot of attention and the audience numbers are steadily rising. Fans share news of the Vlogs on their social media channels.

All this activity channels people to the website where the Explainer Video stands ready to turn curiosity into interest, interest into desire and desire into positive action.

Our two entrepreneurs are now well on their way to building a high value company.

Brought to you by WAKSTER.

Developers of Wow-Factor loaded Business Videos that works.

For examples of Explainer and Viral videos visit us at

WAKSTER.COM