Whenever you market your business online (or even offline), you have to make yourself stand out from the competition. Instead of doing what everyone else is doing, do what everyone else is NOT doing.
Did you know that YouTube is the second most-used search engine behind Google? More searches are done on YouTube than Yahoo!, Bing or any of the other search engines, except Google. (And Google owns YouTube of course, so they like videos!).
This should give you the idea that there are many ways to use YouTube to get your messages out to the masses and make yourself different from your competitors. Here are some ideas for you:
Testimonials
Testimonials are really important to nurture and collect. Unfortunately, there’s just a little bit of mistrust of type-written testimonials on your website. Did they make them up or are they real?
Something I like to do is get a short (60 second) video of my clients saying something about my business. Ask them if you can video record a short testimonial, and ask open-ended questions, like:
- How did my business help you?
- What did you like most about our service?
- How has your business changed because of what we did?
Then let them talk. The one to the right is one I did for my other business many years ago. It’s believable and candid. All of it was unprompted other than the three questions I asked. It took me two minutes to shoot the video, and a few minutes to edit/upload to YouTube.
Be sure to embed them on your website on a Testimonials page so your potential customers can see them.
Getting to Know You and Your Staff
I’ve said this many times: “People buy into you before they buy from you.”
In other words, people have to get to know, like and trust you before they hand you their money. A great way to do this is with video. You can record short introductions of each of your staff and of you or even a tour of your office, so people see the person behind the business. This helps them to trust you and feel comfortable with you the person.
They can just be as simple as, “Hi, I’m Tom, and I’m the owner of the business. I love doing x-y-z to help my customers.”
You can create your own YouTube channel and people will subscribe to it too. Here’s my YouTube channel I created with a bunch of videos from a couple years ago.
Product or Service Introductions
Finally, it can help to have short video introductions to your products or services because you can introduce it to people visually. An example is here.
Make sure you talk about the BENEFITS that people will get by using your product, and not the FEATURES. There’s a difference.
Benefits are what is in it for the customer. How will it improve their life? How will it help them overcome a problem? Make it clear what’s the WIFFM (What’s In It For Me?) factor.
Video Quality
Your videos do NOT need to be professional or studio quality. It looks more authentic if they aren’t. Just make sure there’s reasonable lighting that looks flattering (even doing it outside in the shade gives a gentle lighting).
Try to use your imagination on where you can fit a little video in here and there, and include it on your website, your blog or your Facebook page.
Always make sure the description on the videos has a link back to your website so people can find you.
Comment below and tell me how you’ve used video for your business (leave a link too!).
Hi Thomas,
Thank you for posting about how to increase customer engagement through You Tube.
I like your video example from your Chamber client. What did you use to record that segment?
Have you ever used your smart phone to record testimonials? If so, how do you do that?
I’d like to learn more.
Thanks,
Debbie
Debbie Silverman
President
Consumer Perspective LLC
Amazon #1 Best Selling Author “It’s Just a Conversation – What to Say and How to Say It in Business”
Hi Debbie,
Thanks for your note! Yes, that particular video I did a few years ago using my Flip camera. At the time, cell phone cameras were pretty bad, and I’m not sure they even did video. The Flip camera was an HD camera about the size of a cell phone, so the results are about the same as what you can do with a cell phone now.
My opinion is that using a handheld device (like a phone) gives it a bit more authenticity than doing a big deal studio thing with lights, staging and backdrop. So I’m a fan of using whatever is easy, costs very little in production and time. It’s also going to put your clients at ease doing it this way – just ask them to take two minutes out of their day to answer a couple questions. Easy.
I would say just try to hold the camera as steadily as possible, be cognizant of ambient or distracting noise, and make it short and sweet. Using a tablet like an iPad would work just as well, and I’ve done that too!
Tom
Thank you very much for relieving my Utube challenge. Your article is very descriptive and informative. I was always camera shy, however, with your instruction, I believe I can conquer this fear, which will drive more business to Social media networks.
Karen Sconyers
Owner/Designer
Simply Dawn Designs
http://www.simplydawn.com
Thanks, Karen! The more you just jump in and do it, the better you’ll get. I guarantee it. 🙂 My very first video I created of me (talking head) took three hours to get it right. But the more I did it, the better I got, and the quicker I got at it. You can do it too.
Thomas and Debbie,
Using the less than polished handheld device method can be a great way to capture client testimonials. I consider that an innovative way to underscore the importance of the message over technology. Using the most expensive gear, just because you can, is not good enough.
I forecast a new trend of low-tech videos taking over business sites as “the new black” in video testimonials.
EZWebPlayer is beta testing a new feature to be released later this year that optimizes mobile device recording direct to our web video manager for fast and professional publishing on the web to multiple locations simultaneously which will feature live streaming. Right now, EZWebPlayer customers already enjoy recording on any device and uploading it to their account for fast publishing over the trusted Amazon Cloud structure.
Stu Marks
EZWebPlayer.com
Thanks for the information, Stu. I appreciate your comments.