Video marketing is the ideal platform to use if you want to communicate with your customers, but how exactly can you use it to solve your marketing challenges?

Build Trust and Develop a Relationship

Building a loyal customer base for your business is all about building trust through personal interaction – which is something that can be difficult to achieve in todays’ digital world – but it is essential for driving sales. The even trickier part of this is generating enough interest from the potential customer to gain an initial interaction with them, so that you can then build on this with to develop an interpersonal relationship with them.

This is where video comes in. You can use video to mimic personal interaction with a customer which you can then back up with other digital tools such as emails, banner adverts and customer service centre’s. Obviously, nothing replaces actual face to face interaction, but using Video as part of your CRM approach can help build trust and relationships at scale.

Video is such a rich medium because it gives you the ability to make the viewer feel like the person in the video is actually talking directly to them. This allows you to build a relationship with both existing and new customers very quickly. This is why it has been quickly adopted as a tool by brand marketers, customer care teams, growth hackers and sales teams – and why you should be using it to.

Pro Tip: Make sure you feature either yourself or an employee in every video you send out. However, if you don’t have anyone in your organisation who is a natural in front of the camera, then use a photo of yourself or an employee instead, and use captions instead of dialogue.

Sell an Experience

Writing blogs and using images on your website to don’t allow you to convey emotion and energy in the same way as a video does – mainly because video allows you to sell the feeling of the experience you are trying to sell rather than just the features of it.

Video allows you to immerse your customers in the experience of your product or service by placing them directly in the story and providing them with a sense of dimension, motion and place – and this can trigger a powerful emotional response.

Pro Tip: One irony of video is that although it can be excellent at helping you to sell experiences – raw video footage tends to not contain the level of emotion that is needed to really wow customers.  It needs some element of production before it becomes the powerful medium we have seen it be.

• Make a shot list. Use both wide-angle shots and close ups to show perspectives of experience and reveal cool details that you may otherwise lose.
• Choose the right soundtrack to convey the energy of the experience you are trying to sell.

Market to Millennials

Research shows that 74% of internet traffic is driven by video, a statistic that is driven by Millennials, who have grown up in a mobile and social world. This coming of age has led them to have a dramatically different perspective on advertising, entertainment and relationships than other audience niches.

The reason why video works so well for this generation is that it adheres to the new rules of how customers engage with businesses and the goods they sell through the content they create. Millennials want brands to speak to them where they live online (social media) and have an authentic voice.

Video dominates social media because it is easy to view on mobile devices and it is highly visual – which makes it ideal for Millennials. So, in order for your video to really speak to all of your customers you need to ensure it is optimised for every social platform you want to use it on. For example, a video that is optimised for YouTube won’t work on Instagram.  However, you can get around this by repurposing the key video creative and just optimising the message and format by platform.

Pro Tip: Video marketing for millennials should be less feature film like and more like a one-to-one conversation with your customer. Try putting your call to action at the end of the video or even just in the copy underneath the video post itself. Create value for the viewer by ensuring the narrative is more story and less hard sell.

Gain a Competitive Advantage

As we mentioned above, over 74% of internet traffic this year has been driven by video, and so you need to start using it if you want to get a slice of this action. Many brands are put off using video marketing as they think it is going to be as difficult to achieve as a television ad. However, it is important to remember that perfection is the enemy of good video marketing – the keys to success are actually frequency of posting and speed to market. Just get started, with a low budget and you will be amazed at the highly authentic videos you can produce.

If the thought of video marketing gives you the chills, then get in touch with us. Our videos will not only help to catch your customers attention but also keep it as well. Let’s work together.