Episode 10: Five Ways to Connect With Your Audience Using Video.

As we are forced to move our lives onto the internet (more than before), many business owners and organizations are looking for ways to remain connected to their audience while being apart and staying home. On today’s episode, I’m sharing 5 ways you can connect with your audience using video.

If there’s anything good that is coming out of this is that, is that,  we are really being pushed to think outside of our comfort zones and reimagine things because in a different circumstance, we probably wouldn’t have done so. 

1. LET THE STORY DO THE SELLING.

While we do want to sell, we don’t want to be salesy and  push our services or products because it is likely that people will be pushed away by that. Instead, by using storytelling you can have the story do the sale for you. Marketing is really about emotions. When telling a story, think about possible pain points that clients might have in which your service or product can help with that. An example of this could be sharing a clients’ experience. Testimonials are wonderful and word of mouth is the best marketing there is.

2. GRAB YOUR AUDIENCE'S ATTENTION WITHIN THE FIRST FEW SECONDS

In an era in which our attention span is shorter than a quick finger snap, you want to captivate your audience’s attention fast! One of two impact phrases can keep them engaged. Think of a hook phrase, something like: Grow your audience in 30 days with these Five Steps. In this example you are presenting a solution that is Specific, Time Based and Measurable. Specific because you’re referring to growing an audience

Time based - because you are establishing a 30 days timeline.

Measurable because you have a starting point and ending point in which you are looking at growth in a particular way.

Remember those SMART Goals?

if you haven’t already, check out Episode 2 on how you can set your SMART Marketing Strategy and download the free SMART goals worksheet.

 3. OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO FOR SEO

If you haven’t heard what SEO means, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. To do this, you want to tag your videos in ways that identify your business, what you do, and where you are. For example:

A fitness instructor that creates a video on how to do a 20 minute workout from home. These tags will look something like: Fitness, Home Workouts. You also want to consider tagging your video with a generic category such as Fitness or Health or even Exercises. To improve your tags, you can add refining tags which don’t stand alone but are useful when combined with a larger tag set.  For example: Upper body at home workouts. 

If you’re in need of ideas, you can also use youtube’s auto-suggest. This goes without saying, remember to include Your Brand-Specific Tags, in other words your business name!

Quick Pro Tip: Youtube has a cool feature where you can set default tags to pre load upon creating or uploading a new video. 

As you come up with tags for your videos, I suggest you save time on to a word document so you can just copy and past them whenever you need to.

4. EDUCATE YOUR CUSTOMERS

You can use video to educate your customers and tell them more about your business, a service or a particular product. You can do:

• About Me video / Which should be tailored to The Experience your customer will receive 

• Product Specific - What makes that product special or unique.

• How To Series videos - An instructional video on how to complete  a task, build something, access something etc.

• What’s next? - Next steps. It could be inspiring or very much instructional in nature. Either way, make sure that your voice shines through so that it doesn’t feel unnatural.

5. EQUIPMENT

Lastly, I’ve given you ideas on how you can use video for marketing but I haven’t talked about how you can do this. While you can always have a large video production team, in reality, all you need is a smartphone and a microphone. 

Nowadays, smartphones are pretty impressive and can produce high quality video. When creating videos, make sure you’re standing in an area where you have soft and even lighting, consider facing a window or next to it. This will give you a better look and will avoid having odd and unflattering shadows.

To kick it up a notch, wear your brand colors! This will make it look extra professional and needless to say, On brand!

6. BONUS TIP: EDITING

There is one last tip on making videos and that is Editing. There are a variety of applications that can help you put together a vide in a matter of minutes and of course, you have more professional applications which will give you more flexibility and customized options for you to create amazing videos.

Applications like Animoto and even Vimeo Create, have wonderful options for predesigned templates for all sorts of videos. They even have it in different formats too! This means that you can have a video up and ready to go in no time! They even have music you can use which cuts a ton of time in finding music. 

If you find yourself not having enough time to edit the videos, you can always check out Fivver.com. There you can find lots of creatives who can help put all sorts of projects together. I’ve used fiver for blog writing, video animations, and even podcast editing.

I hope you’ve found these tips useful and helpful. Head on over to our group on Facebook; The Focus and Bloom Lounge and let me know what you thought about this episode and if you’d like to learn more about video!

Stay creative (and healthy)!

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