George B. ThomasIn this article, we are going to talk about four advanced video sales & marketing strategies your company needs to implement today.
Why advanced? Why today?
Let me explain.
Now that video has come into the light as a true sales and marketing tactic, how will you separate yourself from your competition?
You see, pretty soon all of your competition will be doing the 101 video tactics and strategies that you are doing right now.
This means at some point the early adopter success that you are seeing now will decrease.
What are you going to do about this inevitable future?
The answer is quite simple.
You need to start focusing on higher-level sales video and marketing video tactics now.
The ones that are not as easy, or scalable for most companies.
However, you're awesome so we know you got this!
Pro tip: Playing it safe and easy only works for a short time in any part of your business.
Let's dive into the strategies that will keep you ahead of your competition longer and therefore allowing you to have more success with your sales and marketing videos.
Advance Video Strategy: Communication and Storytelling Versus Tactic and Strategy
Starting at the beginning of why you began to use video at your company might be best.
If I had to guess, I would say it is one of the following scenarios.
- You attended a conference and someone told you to do it!
- You heard from the grapevine "other marketers" that video was getting a ton of engagement.
- You got an email from a sales rep for a product you were purchasing and thought WOW, that was cool.
Then as all good marketers, you thought to yourself, “This is a tactic we should use at our company” and away you went.
However, why did they tell you to use video? What was it that truly made you have your wow experience?
It had nothing to do with it being a fad strategy or tactic.
It did, however, have everything to do with the way humans are communicating now in a digital world.
You see, we humans need to be able to interact with verbal and non-verbal cues when trying to diagnose our level of trust and safety we feel when dealing with another human.
You were wowed because you saw their face, heard their voice, saw their surroundings, saw the hand movements, and so much more.
This set you at ease because it felt more like the real world communication we have every day.
So what is advanced about this?
Most of your competitors will continue to think of video as a new tactic and or a strategy. Then, that tactic or strategy will cease to be the latest shiny thing they should or could do and they will move onto something else.
Meanwhile, you will have moved video from a marketing tactic or sales strategy to company culture. You will continue to use video across multiple platforms in many different ways.
At some point, because of this video culture, you will even build out an entire video funnel.
Which leads me to our next advance video strategy your company should implement today!
Advanced Video Strategy: Company-Wide Video Funnel
I talked about this at length on my article The Ultimate Video Funnel For Sales, Marketing, and Service.
For companies that want to be more advanced with their video strategy, they realize video is an amazing communication tool that allows their company to do things like:
- Humanize Their Brand
- Simplify The Complex
- Disarm Potential Leads
- Educate Their Customers
- Evoke Emotional Responses
They also realize that the lead or potential customer is usually in one of the four major video viewer stages.
Video Funnel: Absorb Stage
Where consumers are trying to absorb as much content as they can around the problem they are facing or the desire they want to achieve.
Video Funnel: Assess Stage
This stage is where consumers start to leverage product and service videos, case studies, testimonial videos, and about us videos to build trust in who they are thinking of doing business with or in a product they are thinking of purchasing.
Video Funnel: Acquire Stage
This stage is located at the very bottom of the sales and marketing funnel. This is where the consumer engages with more personalized or even one-to-one video content. Simplifying the complex and building trust are key goals in this stage.
Video Funnel: Advocate Stage
In this stage, it is all about enabling those consumers who have made it all the way through your funnel and love who you are and what you sell. In this stage, we are giving them a way to shout from the mountain tops how awesome we are to their friends and family.
When you are building your video funnel, you start to think about what department should be in charge of what video type.
You start to focus on the problems being faced by the consumer in each stage and how you can best answer the question and remove any hurdles by using video to communicate in a very strategic manner.
You also start to think about the length of your videos. You start to challenge the thinking that all of your videos need to be under two minutes or whatever crazy stat you heard someone say.
As a matter of fact, you might even start to lean into our third advanced video strategy, the use of and creation of pillar video.
Advanced Video Strategy: Pillar Videos
As a consumer gets further down the funnel, they are willing to spend more time watching video content.
Why is this?
Because no one wants to make a mistake that could have been averted by simply watching a couple of videos and investigating the decision they are trying to make.
If you are about to spend a ton of money on a product, let's say in this example $5,000 or more, are you willing to watch a 15-minute video?
I don't know about you but, I would probably watch an hour on more of video before making that decision.
However, it's not just about money!
Another thing to think about is the time you are going to be spending doing something. For example, if you are going to build a new website for your company and not hire an agency, how many videos would you watch?
Would you want to learn about security, the best CMS, the needed plug-ins, how to connect it to your email provider and more?
I was getting ready to redo my George B. Thomas speaking and emcee website.
As I was doing some research, a video caught my eye.
It was called How To Make A Wordpress Website 2019 | Beginners. Now, I'm not a beginner to WordPress but what I saw made me stop in my tracks.
The video at that point had around 134,542 views and Ferdy had over 69,000 subscribers.
💥 BOOM! 💥
But wait, as I looked at the video I realized it was a three-plus hour video!
A three-hour video with 134,542 views?
Come on! Really?
Yep, I clicked the video and watched the entire thing.
There are a ton of other great examples on the article and I even break it down to the microelements that make pillar video amazing and super useful.
At the end of the day, these types of videos can take 5 to 10 scattered videos on your YouTube channel and bring them into one easy to find and share solution for your consumer and sales team alike.
It is all about communicating with and simplifying the process in which we make the consumer go through to do business with our companies.
As well as personalizing it to their needs.
And yep, you guessed it, that is our fourth advanced video strategy, personalization!
Advanced Video Strategy: Personalized and Reversed Personalization
Some of you may have heard about adding or saying someone's name in a video.
For marketing, this means using some software to add names to a certain part of a video at mass quantity.
For sales, it becomes a bit less scalable as you say the name of the person in the video.
Wait, is this not scalable?
How many George's or Betty's are there in the world?
The more I think about it, one-to-one personalized videos are not less scalable, they just need to be more organized and easy to grab for said person's name you are connecting with.
I am sure that will be an entire article in the future!
But, more importantly, and even more advanced is, reverse personalization in your videos.
What do I mean by this?
Well, ask yourself this question.
When someone gets ready to engage with your company, do you let them know they are going to get a project manager or that they are going to get Audrey?
Do you explain that every product has a twelve-step inspection process before it leaves the factory or that Bill takes his time making sure they get the product in working order because he cares about them as a customer?
I could continue on with more example but, I think you get it. Any place you use general words in a place that a human creates or does an action, use that human's name.
The fun part of this is that it doesn't only have to be done in video alone. You can do this with text as well. Also, it can be on your website, on your social platforms, and even in an app “you will see what I mean in the video below” if you have one.
Reverse personalization can be amazing and be a talk trigger for your business. My buddy Andrew Davis did a great video on this in a general marketing personalization sense.
Watch the video and after, put your video goggles on and try to brainstorm all the ways you could use reverse personalization as an advanced video strategy.
So, where do you go from here?
Well, if you are not creating a ton of videos and focused on building a culture of video, that's a great place to start.
After that, start to implement these more advanced video sales and marketing strategies.
If you have questions, you can always reach out to us in the comments, or on the social channels. You could also read our video marketing guide or take our on-demand video course to get started as well.
Bottom line, get started, get advanced, and get better at communicating with video in this digital world.
