Click to Connect by Bobby McAfee
With so much emphasis being placed on the power and importance of engagement through social media, one of the fastest growing ways to encourage that engagement is by having online video play a major role in communicating your message, your company culture and providing value first.
Here are 5 ways you can enhance your marketing with online video:
- Use video to create robust email marketing campaigns. Your customers and potential customers check their emails on a regular basis. By providing useful video content as part of your email marketing, you increase the chance that they will find value in your future emails. I use the reports in Constant Contact to track how many people click through to the video. The response has been extremely positive, and I now make it a point to include video in every e-newsletter I send. According to Flimpmedia, a majority of marketing executives (52 percent) now use video in email marketing, and 88 percent of those using video in email marketing report obtaining a positive impact on their email marketing efforts.
- Facebook is a great platform for recruiting quality employees by highlighting your culture and positive working environment. By including video content on your page, you can tell your company story, leverage video testimonials and include things like a holiday party slideshow to communicate the positive environment you’ve worked hard to foster. By linking to the video on YouTube, you can use the free analytics tools that YouTube provides to measure video engagement and reach.
- Keeping new customers engaged from the beginning can communicate that you really do provide service after the sale. A welcome email with video tutorials or a simple “thank you” video from the owners, managers or the sales consultant can set the standard for customer engagement that could provide future referrals and positive word of mouth. To increase traffic on your website, you could link the customer to a page on your site just for new customer appreciation, including the “thank you” video, helpful links, tutorials, user manuals and perhaps even a short survey.
- Videos can be customized for important potential clients. I’ve often produced short, custom videos for individual sales consultants to promote themselves as the experts, and to tell the compelling story of how doing business with us would help the new client achieve his goals. I include the prospect’s branding along with ours, upload the video to YouTube and set the privacy settings to “unlisted,” so only those with a link have access to the video.
- Products and services you offer may be supported with videos that already exist online. If you have a national manufacturer as a partner, you can include their professionally produced videos on your website and social media pages to advertise the trusted brands you are aligned with. Many national manufacturers have programs where they will co-brand the video content with partner companies like yours (though this may not be provided for free). It’s worth looking into, and could be a fast and inexpensive way to get you started with online video.
I hope you find these strategies useful in your quest to better engage with your existing customers, and develop new customer relationships that build your brand and establish you and your company as the trusted leader in your industry.
Bobby McAfee is the Marketing Director for Crime Prevention Security Systems and Custom Home Entertainment.