A guest post from Nick Belcher at Reputation Selling
The recommendation from someone else still remains one of the most trusted sources of information in helping people to decide buy a product or service. Many businesses acknowledge that word of mouth is an effective way of attracting new customers and so make an effort to use written testimonials in their websites and marketing materials. But is this enough?
Research has shown that more and more internet users are making and viewing video clips for all sorts of purposes; YouTube is an obvious example. It is important that businesses realise that customers can help to promote a business’s services by using online videos for their testimonials.
So are you capturing the great things your customers say about you and turning them into a sales development tool?
Benefits of using video testimonials
To prospect customers – they feel more reassured that the product or service they intend to buy from you has been rated highly by someone else and they are therefore more likely to buy. Prospects may also have a concern or objection about the service and if the video clip addresses this they will feel much more motivated to buy.
To the business – the main benefits to the business using video testimonials are increased sales and a stronger reputation. They will also find their website more helpful to prospect customers. The process can also be an enjoyable and interesting experience for the customers participating in the testimonial. In addition, it has the added benefit of creating a stronger bond between supplier and customer that can lead to repeat business.
To sales and marketing people – marketing managers have a new source of information with which they can employ to attract new customers. They can use video clips in websites, PowerPoint presentations, videos at conferences and exhibitions.
To sales people – video clip testimonials offer a new sales tool to boast the benefits of the service to prospects. They can be used as part of a presentation made on video conference calls and PowerPoint presentations. When sales people are at the introduction stage with a prospect they can show clips from laptops, mobile phones and iPads. We find that sales teams benefit from short bite size sales training sessions to get the best from video testimonials and to refresh their skills in resolving customer objections therefore reducing the time taken to convert a prospect to a paying customer.
Now on the subject of producing video testimonials there are two approaches. The first is to do it yourself. Select one of your best customers, get their agreement to do a testimonial, clarify the purpose and content of the video clip, grab an HD camera, find an office or other suitable location, set up the camera on a tripod and rig up the microphones; you may need to set up some extra lighting too. Make the customer comfortable - ask them to look at you when they are answering questions and let the camera roll. Then ask the customer prompting questions to get them talking about the positive aspects of buying and using your product or service. Once the filming is complete you need to edit the footage to create a video clip of all the good bits. Editing takes time and effort; as a result you could finish up with a rotten video testimonial or a great one - the difference lies in the editing stage. This is where the effort and skill is needed; it’s where the magic is added.
On the other hand you can employ a specialist like Reputation Selling who will manage the whole project for you and will ensure that the video testimonials do the job that they were designed to do and that is to attract more customers, increase sales and build the business’s reputation. Reputation Selling’s USP is their blend of talent; from sales and marketing experience gained at the sharp-end to a team of professional videographers; from expertise in website management to a proven capability to create bespoke sales training programmes. For more please visit www.reputation-selling.co.uk and speak with the managing Director, Nick Belcher.
Image by jsawkins
August 10, 2010
Video is fast becoming a key differentiator between companies that are actively marketing themselves and engaging in communication with their prospects and customers, and those companies that are plodding along, relying on the same old tactics to keep them afloat.
If you want to take the step into video, you might be unsure as to what you can create and how you should promote it. This is where we come in! Read on..,
There are many topics that you can create videos on:
- How to guides
- Demonstrations of your products
- Interviews with staff
- Interviews with customers
- Interviews with leading industry members
- Showcasing your office
- A summary showing a recent event you attended/hosted
- Advice on industry related topics
The list is really as endless as your imagination. Depending on your industry, your videos can be very lighthearted in their approach, or may have to be more serious. However, there really isn’t any company out there who wouldn’t benefit from promoting themselves and their website with videos.
So what are the basics of promoting and making the most of your video? This post doesn’t go into too much detail about the do’s and don’ts of shooting your videos and the content you produce, but focuses on what you should do with your videos once they’re ready to be let loose!
Ideally the video should be hosted on the main website and on other video sites such as YouTube; there are benefits to both, but in order to get full earch engine optimisation (SEO) credit, it must really be on the main site as a stand-alone video.
Making the Video
- Make sure that there is a logo/branding on it all the way through so people can’t reuse it without passing on credit to you
- Try and keep video length to under five minutes
- Make sure there is a strong call to action at the end along with your contact details
- Try and make the video thumbnail attractive to convince people to watch
Hosting the Video
- Use keywords in the filename of the video, and any titles and descriptions and the URL of the page it sits on
- Ideally all videos should sit under one URL on the main site – www.url.com/videos/
- Each video should have it’s own URL – www.url.com/videos/video-1
- Optimise the page on the website that is hosting/linking to the site, i.e. good title, meta description, good copy (paragraph or two explaining what the video is), good headers, use of bold text etc
- If the video is going to be hosted on the main website create video sitemap and submit it to video and content engines. This is quite technical (there isn’t really an easy way of doing this, so someone techie may have to do it. See Google’s advice page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472&ctx=sibling
- Create a transcript
- This can be used as a blog post, which can be linked to the video
- This can also be uploaded on YouTube (under the ‘Captions’ section)
Uploading the Video
- When uploading to video sites, make sure the titles, descriptions, tags are keyword rich
- Put the main URL at the beginning of the description, i.e. “www.url.co.uk/videos/video-1: This video looks at the produc X. How does it work and how can it help you?”
- List of video sites you may want to upload to:
- Download.com and CNET TV – www.cnettv.com
- Youtube - www.youtube.com
- MetaCafe – www.metacafe.com
- Revver – www.revver.com
- MSN Live Video Search – http://video.msn.com/video.aspx.
- BlipTV – www.blip.tv
- When you upload to BlipTV, your videos can be syndicated to accounts you have on other Web sites such as blogs, iTunes , Yahoo Video, AOL Video, MySpace, FaceBook, and Feedburner.
- Veoh – www.veoh.com
- When you submit to Veoh, they syndicate your video to youtube, myspace, and google video.
- AOL Video – www. http://video.aol.com/
- Myspace Video -http://vids.myspace.com/
- Break – www.break.com
- DivX’s Stage 6 – http://stage6.divx.com/
- Daily Motion – www.dailymotion.com
- Vimeo – www.vimeo.com
- Sevelload – en.sevenload.com
- TubeMogul is a free tool to submit videos to multiple video sharing sites in one go. Currently it works with Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, Revver, AOL Video, DailyMotion, Blip, and BrightCove
Promoting the Video
- Try and make some links to the video – blog post, article, press releases pointing to the source
- Promote the video with the standard social bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumbleupon etc) to build links
- You can also visit relevant forums and mention it when appropriate
- Tweet about it
- Upload to your Facebook business page
- Submit the video itself to video engines:
- http://www.blinkx.com/
- http://en.fooooo.com/
- http://video.search.yahoo.com/
- http://uk.truveo.com/
- http://www.videosurf.com/
- http://video.filestube.com/
- http://clipta.com/
- http://www.pixsy.com/
- http://video.aol.com/
If you want any further advice or assistance with your promotional videos, please give us a call on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com
February 23, 2010
