Treating your customers like individuals

It’s a good policy to adapt – treating your customers and your prospects as individuals rather than as part of a mass market to whom you’re selling at any cost. So how do you make your customers and prospects feel like you’re talking to them and that you’re interested in their specific problems? Of course, if you’re in a position where you’re in a one to one situation and you’re lucky enough to have the customer in front of you, then all’s well – good sales technique, understanding the benefits and features of your products and services and relaying those in a way that makes it clear how you’ll ease your prospect’s pain is relatively easy. But…

Making your website personal

What about the situation where the prospect or customer is in online research mode – as most of us are these days before we buy anything – how do you ensure your website visitor gets the feeling you want to help them with their specific needs? It’s how many of your new customers will find you – online . How many of us enjoy being bracketed into some mass group where we are one of many with a diverse range of interests & problems that may or may not be properly addressed by what we’re seeing on a website? How much more effective to feel part of a “tribe” – part of a group that share my interests, being addressed by someone or some brand that “gets” what I’m about and what I’m after?

The pregnancy & postnatal expert, Dr Joanna Helcke uses her YouTube video embedded in her website homepage

Putting a “face” to your business name

Well, one way to start that process is to personalise your business front – to put a face to the name as it were. In Dr Joanna Helcke’s video above you can see how simple it can be to create a truly personalised welcome to your precise target market, once they arrive on your website. If you can show that real people are behind the business front – real people who are qualified to talk about the interests and issues that your prospective customers have – you’re going some way to acknowledging  that everyone is individual and deserves to be treated as such. We’d all rather do business with a real person, other than a faceless business entity wouldn’t we? Certainly that’s true in most circumstances and is why so many big brands spend money and resources on developing the “face” of their business – one that aligns with their brand management & the brand values they want to promote. Of course, the easiest way to create a sense that your business has real people behind it is to show them! And video is the best tool for doing that. It can be as simple as Joanna Helcke’s introductory video on her website for prenatal, pregnant and post natal women. The alternative is to use case studies and testimonials which give the viewer the chance to hear about you from others – peer referral and recognition goes a long way towards encouraging new customers to give you a try.

Case studies & testimonials on video

Easy to do and very effective – here’s how Windsor racecourse launched their new menus in a video testimonial  in 2012.

Notice how Windsor Racecourse’s clients not only comment on the great food, but also say great things about the staff – it’s so much more effective if we can share examples of other people saying good things about us – rather than blowing our own trumpets! Do you agree?

Video for your business website

You know you should be using video – you’ve heard all the stats about improved SEO and better ranking for your website in the search results. So what’s the best way for your business to make the most of video content in your marketing strategy? Are you looking for advice and tips on great ways to use video for your business on your website?

Video content ideas

One of the most useful & effective of our  video content ideas is to use stories about your business. Why not highlight a great job that you have done on a recent project for a customer or client in the way our client did in the video above?

Using video case studies will highlight how you faced & met the challenges of a particular situation – and, of course, you should also include customer testimonials. A good case study video will show the background to how the work was commissioned, the way that you met the brief, the work that you have done in the delivery of the service or the product, before and after shots (if that’s applicable), and how your customer felt about you and the work you did. Bringing these all together in a high quality, well produced video will help build trust and credibility around your business and your brand – help you create a video halo effect around your business.

Customer Testimonials & Recommendations

In the example above,  a Housing Association is filmed talking about the work that a commercial building project, design and refurbishment company provided for them. It includes interviews with the key players, footage of the building as an empty shell and during the work, and shows off the finished areas in all their glory. Importantly, it features the client saying nice things about the company that commissioned the video – peer recommendation and referral is a zillion times more powerful than things we say about ourselves, and so never underestimate the power of an impressive customer testimonial or recommendation.

A Before & After case study video is a very powerful tool for your website – particularly if you are in the business of transformation – architects, builders, workplace designers, interior designers, commercial project managers, maintenance & refurbishment, shopfitters – any business where you take something that already exists and use your skills to turn the chrysalis into a butterfly. Video demonstrates how you did that in a way that static photos and text can never do.

Could you use this for your company website & marketing strategy? Many of our clients use video to increase the number of leads dropping into their sales funnel with well crafted video landing pages and email campaigns that link to a YouTube video. If we can help with advice on how this could work for you, give us a call – we’d love to chat!

How green screen works

This girl is on FIRE! How green screen works in video production

Video Tips

Green screen is a large green sheet or painted wall in a studio & when a person or item is filmed for a video in front of it, chroma key can be used in the editing process to remove a single colour – in this case the green gets removed, which means you can insert any other background into the space where the green is.

Green screen or Blue screen?

That’s why you can’t wear green against a green screen – or you can, and have fun with the effect that it causes as in the example clip above!  Blue also works for this effect – that’s because green and blue are furthest away from natural skin colour. We also find blue is better for blondes when we’re filming interviews and pieces to camera in the studio. Once we’ve filmed you against a green screen we can then composite your footage with a background of our choosing.

So there you go – an easy layman’s explanation as to how green screen works in video production. It’ s used to good effect in our creative video production for Nigel Botterill’s Entrepreneurs Circle here:

How to optimise videos on YouTube

Do you know how to optimise the videos you post on Youtube? Videos, wherever you are positing them, should be helping you to drive visitors to your website or your online content hub as part of your video marketing. They should  be driving traffic to  the place where you are able to capture the details of your prospects and those who are interested in your product or service so that they can drop into that all-important sales funnel you have created for your business (you have, haven’t you?? If not, take a step back and work on your Market. Message, Media planning because that is what defines the content you will need…)

Videos help you deliver your content in the most satisfying and consumable way for your prospects and customers.  Your videos need to be about driving traffic to your website and of course they should improve the experience of the consumer – the viewer –  in some way.

Are you using YouTube properly?

It’s no good just commissioning a video production company to make you a website video though – you need to ensure your are publishing videos on YouTube and other relevant video sites, and that they are optimised so that they can be found by our friends, the search engines. This is where SEO comes in. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google so it makes a lot of sense to upload your business videos on YouTube if you want to get found, does it not?

For a YouTube video to rank well on search engines you need both on-page and off-page SEO. Let’s start with On page SEO for YouTube videos:

On Page SEO on YouTube

Your video title and description needs to be optimised to rank for the keywords that you have identified as relevant for your business. The video title needs to be interesting enough to encourage click throughs and it does need to include that all important keyword. You have 66 characters – after that Google will shorten the title in its search, so get your keyword  in the first 66 characters of the YouTube video title.

The description – it needs to be relevant to the video content of course – if you trick people into watching your video with deceit and lies they will exit pretty quickly and no-one benefits from that . You will certainly not register a video “view” for instance and you may encourage a “dislike” or an angsty comment unless you’ve disabled those – and if you’re looking for maximum exposure that’s not a good idea either! Don’t  stuff the description with keyword terms for the sake of it – the description needs to give value to the viewer and the ranking will come naturally if you’ve been intelligent about it.

We recommend including your website or online page URL at the beginning of the video description. We also like to reiterate the call to action in the description – tell the viewer what you’d like them to do in the text as well as in the video. Of course, you can add annotations and links into the video itself if it’s appropriate.

Don’t forget to add relevant tags – YouTube will suggest some anyway but they aren’t often the right ones –  so remove any suggestions you don’t like and add the ones you do! Simply start typing in the tag box and return after each tag. We like to add at least 5 tags per video but if more are relevant, add them!

YouTube selects the “related videos” which it shows on the side of the main video based on the tags that have been given to the video – those videos with similar or relevant tags to the one being watched will be highlighted so it’s a great way to get your video seen by more people.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how you maximise your off page SEO with your YouTube videos.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/seo/how-to-optimize-youtube-videos-for-seo-0382566#1ubs0DJKp5LQ7u5S.99

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Well, gets you more website traffic and a chance to find more prospects for your service or product.

Marketing checklist:

WEBSITE Been there…

SEO Done it… well, on it anyway, at least until Google updates the Penguin Algorithm

EMAIL MARKETING Bought the T-Shirt…

and of course Social Media is hopefully on the list too – a strategy and a presence on the relevant platforms where your audience are is fast becoming a marketing must-do.

So what other online marketing tool can you use to increase your ranking in the search results and get on that all-important page one of Google?

What other tool can you use to help you get more visitors to your website, and to make those visitors happier, better engaged and more likely to become your customer once they’re there?

The answer, my friends, is VIDEO

In the old days video was seen as something that only the big boys could afford – and even then it was considered problematic with upload times and rendering problems on many websites.

Now that we all have superfast internet connections wherever we are, that problem is no more – adding video to your homepage is one of the fastest-growing website features for small-business advertisers, according to a study by WebVisible.

Video can be used to build your video company profile, boost your brand, build trust & give your customers comfort about who they are dealing with, show product demos, show happy customer video testimonials, and help position your business as experts in your field or sector. As well as featuring on your website they can be uploaded to YouTube on your own business TV channel – YouTube is the second biggest search engine behind only Google. Your customers are looking for your service or product online every day,  and you will only be found if you are up there! There are a plethora of video distribution platforms available to you and they can be used to get your video assets out into the world where your customers will find them.

Video is an excellent way to cut through the noise that is email marketing these days – we can set up short URLs to a specific piece of video content which you can then use within your email. Full tracking of who is opening and watching can also be provided. The possibilities are endless – how about using QR Codes or Textback Marketing to deliver fully mobile video content to your customer’s mobile phone? Property videos sent to your client’s IPhone or Blackberry as they scan a property in the estate agents’ window?  Perhaps you prefer to drive the customer to your website with custom URLs that they can scan to be taken directly to your homepage where they can watch a video about the specific search term they entered?  Oh, it’s exciting!

Putting up static brochure websites is the same as not having a website was 5 years ago – we are all incredibly sophisticated these days in terms of our viewing habits and our acquisition of information, and we want to be given it in an attractive, engaging, effective package. Video does that. And because it makes your website visitor’s experience so much better, the search engines will love you for it, and reflect that in your rankings. And rankings is where it’s at – if you’re not ranking high up on that first page, you won’t get a look in.

Please call me if you’d like to chat about what’s possible within your budget. You can have a look at some prices and gallery of our work at Saucy Horse Video

Google owns Youtube

Google owns YouTube – so it follows  it’s imperative that you add video to your website whether your business is large or small.

Why? Well, let’s start with the obvious. You are more interesting to your website visitors if you provide a 60 – 90 second video that talks about what they came onto your website for in the first place!

Perhaps you are right on top of your SEO and website visitors are finding you via organic searches (video definitely helps with that by the way). If that’s the case, they don’t know you – not yet anyway – and the best use of video for your business would be as a builder of credibility. No prospect will buy from you unless they believe you can deliver. Some of us like to think it’s all about price – but it’s not true. We make buying decisions based on a number of factors – and high on the list is whether we “like” the business and whether we have confidence in their ability to deliver. Here’s a good example of a new business establishing its mission and introducing the viewer to what the business is all about.

Muddy Carrot – I’m Local And I Know It video on YouTube

 Video Marketing Halo Effect

This is where the video marketing halo effect comes into it’s own. Video on your website is an opportunity to show your professional offices and premises, your staff – which means you can inject some personality and a reason to choose your business and not that of your competitor – and, of course, your products. It sets you apart from the chap on Ebay selling what you sell from his sitting room, or the one-man band that cannot offer the back up and service that your team offers. Unless there’s a video on your website showing people how you work, what actually differentiates you from these other people running businesses in your sector? And don’t tell me you write it all down – I know you do… tiny text, boring long swathes of words all about you… you’ll be lucky if they read a third of it, and it certainly won’t engage them like a well crafted and professionally produced video will.

The SEO reasons for video on your website

Google know if you have a video on your website. If you do, it makes the assumption that you’re probably  more credible than a business that doesn’t – you’ve gone to the trouble of producing it and embedding it after all. It also likes cross links between good quality websites and it’s own assets like YouTube and Google+. As a result you will move further up Google’s search results.

Viral Videos & Social Shares

Video content of course is an excellent asset for your social media activity and it’s a zillion more times likely to be shared by your followers and influencers in your sphere, than anything else. So, if views and viewers is what you want, then you need to look at embedding the YouTube video on your website  - this saves bandwidth and a faster download time for your visitors. Make sure that you optimise your videos on YouTube for SEO in your YouTube listing – check out our short blog on optimising your YouTube videos so they get found here

Optimise your videos on YouTube

Make sure that Google connects the video with your online assets & content. In the YouTube description of your video you need to include a link to your website – we recommend you make that the first thing you put in the description.

What’s your call to action?

Make sure your viewers know what you want them to do – make a strong call to action. Tell them to sign up on a data capture page, give you a call, visit your website or place of business, follow you on your social profiles – you need to make sure the call to action will resonate with your target prospect.

Marketing Brand

Include your logo in an animated form if possible at the beginning and end of your YouTube video & ensure that the “voice” or personality for your videos matches your expectations in terms of how you want your business to be perceived.

YouTube Community

Get your business known within the YouTube community – comment on other videos related to your business sector and related to what your customers are interested in. Add links to videos on your website. Tweet videos or share them on Facebook or Google+. You can do that with your own videos and those of other YouTube accounts – it’s nice to  be nice and they’re more likely to reciprocate if you share their content.

Link your videos to all your social media profiles – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn. It all helps with getting it out there and towards the tipping point of the Holy Grail – the viral video.

Video Quality & Production Value

Big point here – make sure you are investing the right amount of time and money into your video’s quality. You may feel that an extremely professional & polished video may distract from your message or the authenticity of your product or service – and in that case you may decide to go native and use one of the easily accessible video camera options to make a DIY interview or piece to camera. Be careful with the sound & audio quality of your video though

There is a whole art to making video look low budget and home made because that’s what suits the subject matter. Take a look at this “Will it Blend – Vuvuzela” YouTube video – filmed in one location, with one person, one camera, and minimal editing.

However, your business may be one whereby low quality video is out of place – it may not suit your brand or represent your company in the way that will benefit your standing with your customers and prospects. That’s when you need to call in a professional video production company who are singing off the same song sheet as you. Check out their video showreels and video work beforehand and look at the creative concepts – boring interviews on video that don’t answer your customers’ questions rarely cut it in these days of the sophisticated online website visitor.

Be sure to keep the length of your video to a gentle roar – these days we are producing more and more videos that have done what they need to within 60-90 seconds, and rarely over 2 minutes, unless they are training or event videos.

Social Media Video Shares

Remember, the best way to get eyeballs on your videos is to share it on your social media profiles. People love a good video, especially if it’s short, possibly humorous, but always interesting. What sort of video would get your business most publicity?

Marketing Campaigns 2013

I liked this blog over on Marketing Directors on the use of music to market your products - it’s a timely reminder that we all prefer to be aurally and visually engaged, and sensible marketing managers and directors should bear that in mind when planning their marketing campaigns for 2013

Using music & video in marketing

Did you know that for the last three years, John Lewis Retail has been top dog when it comes to using music to market their business? Gabrielle Aplin’s version of ‘The Power of Love’ currently being used in their 2012 Christmas campaign, knocked Olly Murs off the top of the official UK singles chart on 10th December. Can’t say we’re unhappy about that – Olly’s ability to create an ear worm is surpassed only by the team behind “Go Compare” . Here’s a reminder of The Journey -

And for those of you who remember the original, here’s Frankie Goes to Hollywood… Wishing you all a peaceful & happy time this festive season.

How IE10 is using video to change perceptions

Any video that can begin by denigrating its own product and include a hashtag – #Kids+KittiesRULE – is a pretty damn fine one by me – so have a look at Microsoft’s latest video production & how they are promoting the new IE10 – the browser you loved to hate  … and tell me you don’t love it!

Video marketing – Brand re-positioning

I’m with many on this historical bandwagon – prompted I’m sure by techies repeatedly telling me over time that Internet Explorer is the work of the devil and that I’d be a fool to even mention it’s name out loud in polite company (the browser that must not be named – and that’s why I think this video works. It’s made me interested to find out more and check out the testimonials on their website – the browser you loved to hate – clever domain by the way guys!

Therein lies the problem that Microsoft have decided to tackle head on with this video marketing campaign. When you have a new version of a product that you know is so much better than what’s gone before, how do you overcome the inertia and even the outright hostility that exists towards your brand in the market place? And let’s  not forget of course, the power of a competitor that is has stormed all over you with an absolutely stonking product – I’m talking Chrome here obviously.

Well, here’s why I love this video – number one, it does what we often do with our video clients at Saucy Horse – it identifies the objections that exist in the mind of the potential customer and the prospect, and number two, it’s not afraid to face them – face them, publicise them in great big fat neon sign letters, and then take them apart – explode the myth of the “misconception” and make the viewer smile in the process.

I’ll also give it a big gold star for talking in the “language” of the viewer – you might think that’s an obvious one, but not everyone does it, and it’s a good lesson for anyone in business who wants to use video effectively – your message needs to resonate with your viewer if you want them to take action. Here we see references to the lifestyle, iconography & symbols of today’s internet troll – albeit stereotypical ones, but that’s the whole point. They want you to take a step away from automatic, stereotypical thinking when it comes to their product.

And how about the use of social media stalking to find your influencers?? Love the way they show how you should engage with your detractors as well as your loyal fans, do your research ( online bios will identify if your follower is big into Knitting, Stamp Collecting or Karaoke of course) – and use that to get their attention.

Love this soooo much – how can you use video like this in your business? If you need ideas, talk to a video production company with a track record in marketing as well as making videos. This is about thinking out of the box – Don’t be Vanilla!

Be Bold With Your Website Videos

“Heyyyyyyyy, sexy lady!”

Should we apologise for putting that in your head? Don’t know what we’re talking about? Then watch this.

I love it. At first it was “WTH IS THIS?” then it suckered me in. He just doesn’t care and takes us along with him. By taking it totally seriously in the video he makes it 10 times more hilarious.

It’s the power of a great video. K-Pop has been around for years with a small but dedicated following outside Korea. The strength of this video has broken Korean rapper PSY all over the world – he’s been on chat shows, awards ceremonies and has reached number 1 in 14 countries.  It’s a video made to be shared. Not only shared, it has been parodied, worked into Flash Mobs and lip-dubbed. It’s the most liked video on YouTube ever, and the views are skyrocketing.

How do you make a great video for your webpage?

We’re not saying you could emulate PSY’s success with your company video (ah, but if wishing made it so…!) but you can take some tips if you are making a video for your website.

Play it straight

This video wouldn’t have worked as well as it did if PSY was giving knowing winks and laughing all through it.  Watch the models in the foam – it’s their “oh we’re so professional but blooming hell this foam is getting everywhere and we’re ignoring it” faces that make you laugh, not them being covered in foam.

Don’t overdo the inside jokes

Gangnam is an upmarket area in Seoul (PSY has likened it to Beverley Hills) and the video is a parody of the people who pretend to be upmarket in dress and style but are really just like everyone else. Did you know that? I didn’t when I watched the video and it doesn’t matter. The video stands alone; you don’t need to know the joke to get the video. Stick in inside jokes for people in the know (most of the extras in this video are Korean stars, the locations are around Gangnam) but make sure that your video doesn’t stand or fall on them.

Use YouTube and Social Media for sharing your video

So important. Promote your video through blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest – everywhere.  Make it easy for others to shere your video too.

Making website videos to be shared

Here are some client videos we’ve made recently. Some are music parodies, some aren’t but they all have one thing in common – the customer has embraced the concept, added their own personality and reaped the rewards!

(over 29,000 views)

(over 13,000 views)

(over 18,000 views)

(over 15,000 views)

Website Videos That Get Results

What sort of video would you like to make for your business? Do you think there’s a place for these kind of videos or should it be all business, all the time?