Using Video to Connect Better with Customers

4 years ago

Nextiny Marketing chose to go all in with a video strategy. Most marketing teams were not using videos on an ongoing basis yet because it was all so new, even sales teams didn’t have a video strategy in place either. Everyone understood that video would create an impact and cause more people to engage in their material which then had everyone moving towards a video strategy. There was a stigma to videos that it was expensive, time consuming, you needed a huge team to execute it, etc.

To now

With COVID-19 it has forced companies to be more active on their video strategies and adapt to the new normal, this pandemic has taught us how to start living in the future. COVID-19 accelerated technology benefiting business to grow towards a successful video strategy. Implementing a video strategy into your business is getting easier and cheaper every single day. It is easy to apply a video strategy to your entire organization without breaking the bank, the idea behind it is to have a plan to execute to make communication better for your company.

What are you going to use video for?

Sales, Marketing, Leadership, etc. you should determine how you would like your brand to be portrayed on social media. What is your goal for videos on social media? To generate leads? Stay connected to clients? These are all the questions you should consider when implementing a video strategy. The goal of the video needs to come first. What is the target audience? Is this content valuable? It should be relevant to someone. Where should you publish the video? What are your goals for the video? Have a call to action with a video strategy. Have a set standard on your video strategy

How is video starting to replace emails, phone calls, etc.

There is more engagement on a video then text, more people are willing to watch a video to receive information. People’s attention span is short, video can solve it right away. Every marketing and sale offering that you use a video for, you will receive more engagement with it. People want to engage with videos, it is promoting sales and marketing. Leaving a voicemail in a video message is better than leaving a voicemail on someone’s phone, this allows people to have that human connection with the sales rep and be more likely to message them back. Video is starting to enhance the engagement of marketing sales and customer service.

What is right to focus on, should there be a layered approach?

Take advantage of the YouTube platform, Wistia is already SEO approved and will populate based on SEO. It depends on the goal of the video; it can be beneficial to add videos to both platforms to reach both audiences. Engaging with videos also has a higher close rate, because people can take a human approach and understand the material better through video. If you are trying to reach a certain audience on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Then you would want that video to live on those channels for people to view, all the channels are beneficial based on your goals.

What do you recommend is a great launching point?

Download Soapbox by Wistia, you can record videos directly from your webcam and upload the video. It records your screen and your face if needed for both, you can present a slide deck and still have yourself in the video. You can explain things on the screen and edit the video as easy as possible. You can decide to show the screen and yourself or not yourself and just the screen.

How to get people to love your brand

You keep spending money on your advertising, Impressions does not mean the amount of people are impressed, you must keep people engaged with your brand. Video is entertaining and brands can educate, engage and entertain their audiences. Brands can create engaging content; this is having people spend time with your brand to the point where they can recommend you. You can create micro audiences that can influence others to know your brand and purchase your products

Length of video, how long should videos be?

Video series can be repurposed, videos that can turn into blogs, podcasts or other content should only run 25-30 minutes. Video series on tips and tricks, website videos should only run 2-5 mins. Video series on social media shouldn’t be more than 30 seconds based on the content because attention spans are very low. A sales email should be less than 30 seconds, having value right away will get people to stay and talk. The idea of videos is to create as much value in as little time as possible.

Hardware

Don’t go all in until the adoption phase is comfortable. When starting out, get a cheap lighting set, microphones. Never go crazy, make the investment but keep it to a manageable cost.