In today’s competitive market place every business is looking for opportunities to reach customers and drive business. Regardless of the business, the focus is on helping a customer meet a specific need and solve a particular problem. Taken together you need to maximize your efforts to reach customers and help them understand how you can address their issues.
Now, we know we live in an information age, where at the click of a button, you get information about a product half-way around the world. That is a good thing, and yet a powerful channel to reach customers, which means you have to do your homework and ensure that you have a solid strategy in place to answer their questions in a conversational tone.
Well, enter the power of video marketing, which can add bandwidth to your sales efforts, and quickly focus on how you can help your clients.
Video Marketing can upscale your Sales force
If your business is like most, and we have no reason to suspect it’s not, you are always looking for opportunities to enhance your marketing efforts and to add to your sales force. Well, video marketing; provides an entirely new path to reach the customer, and put your sales team in front of more customers – keeping the organization top of mind.
Video marketing can supplement your other marketing activities and allow your sales force a new tool to answer customers’ questions, drive interest, and prompt target clients to respond. The fact of the matter is regardless of how many boots on the ground you have – there is a limited number of conversations – especially those of the introductory nature – which the team can have on any given day.
The fact of the matter is video marketing allows your team to be more efficient, extend its reach, and avail your resources at the touch of a button at the exact moment a customer seeks out your organization.
Oh hail the Power of Video
Take a moment, and think about how you have used the internet to research a new product, how to do something, or learn about an organization. If you’re like many out there – you likely started with a video.
Video is a dynamic tool that cuts through the today’s cluttered media landscape. It lets you shine a light on the exact internal resources, team members, and meet clients wherever they’re doing their homework (and whenever!)
It’s one thing to share your executive team’s bios – and it’s a totally different thing to capture their personalities with vibrant high-definition video.
Or perhaps more pointedly, think about the power of video to explain a process, or capability, versus a lengthy block of text to illustrate the same.
Further, in today’s social media dominated society, today’s customers are bombarded with blocks of text and so they tend to gravitate toward visual content. To be effective, organizations need to take note of these video production trends and meet customers and prospects where they are looking for information – and often – not always – but often that answer is through a well-produced video.
How Video can expand your Sales force
Thanks to the internet, video marketing is now doing to digital marketing, what introduction of television did to traditional marketing in the old days. Modern technology has opened vast opportunities for creative uses and the ability to use video as a powerful tool in the sales process. While their colleagues in marketing have long used video, many on the sales side of the equation are just begging to scratch the surface of how video can play a role.
All these new platforms come with their unique ways of using video and best of all you don’t necessarily need fancy equipment or Hollywood-standards of video production to get your message across.
For example, Facebook is now the leading social media platform, and the introduction of Facebook Live Video became a valuable tool, especially for B2B marketing. It opened up new possibilities of connecting with the audience quickly and affordably. Likewise, with YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter there are a variety of platforms that can be used to distribute video and expand the reach of the sales team.
When it comes to using social and the digital media space to expand your sales force there are a few key ideas to keep in mind for a successful video outreach effort:
1. Thorough understanding of each platform
No two social media platforms are the same. Thus when thinking about how video can expand the reach of your sales force it’s important to think about the kinds of content, the style of video production, and which platforms are the best fit for your outreach efforts.
For instance, it may be best to have a part of your corporate website dedicated to providing specific video content, or it may make sense to weave it into the narrative of your website content, or to produce short vignettes for YouTube or any one of the platforms.
The reality is there’s no one-size-fits-all approach; what works for your organization, or even your part of the organization may be different from another part of the firm or even a competitor.
2. Have a Goal in mind first before your Video Production
When it comes to driving sales – members of your sales team know the questions they are asked most often. So, having those ideas in mind will help guide how you can use video production to supplement the sales process and alleviate some of the common bottlenecks that the team faces. All of that is to say, have a goal in mind before you start your video production efforts will go a long way to making your efforts a success. For example, are you seeking to first whet the appetite of prospects and draw them into the sales funnel? Or are you providing deeper dive content in the middle of the funnel? Or for any number of other use cases?
Also, you need to know what effect you need the video to have on the audience. Do you want it to be informational, entertaining, motivational, or a combination of any of those? Your video production will then work towards achieving such a set goal and prompting the viewer with the right call to action and relevant next steps.
3. Interest the Audience First and Fast
The key to using video to expand your sales force is to capture the attention of the targeted viewers early in the video. Make sure that it’s clear that you’re specifically addressing the identified topic of the video at hand. Keep the video brief, on message, and well produced to ensure that you retain the viewer’s attention.
It is also essential that you ensure that once they start watching the video, they find the content valuable. With engaging and valuable video content you’ll be able to move sales prospects through the funnel and expand the sales team’s efforts; which will mean a more productive sales process that reaps results and fuels better relationships.
4. Take your Viewers on an Epic Journey
As video is unique it offers another dimension to add to your sales efforts. One powerful ability limited to videos is the ability to take your audience to an epic journey visually. Video opens up new doors to take the customer behind the scenes, to share insights with experts that may not be available for every sales call, and allows on opportunity to shape the narrative of their sales experience.
To best use video for your sales efforts you can break away from the PowerPoint and creatively use the visual medium of video to entice sales leads and start building a relationship with the prospect, or even to strengthen the relationship with existing clientele.
5. Communicate your Brand-identity through your Video
Now, when it comes to driving sales you want to put your best foot forward and leave the best impression – akin to how printed collateral is treated. To that end, as you seek to use video in the sales process and to extend the efforts of the sales team – you need to be mindful of how you position the brand identity. Further, as per the point above about having a plan, when it comes to branding and the video production values these are very important aspects of any sales video initiative that need to be considered from the start of the project.
It’s your mission to use video to expand the sales force and you have to do so while ensuring that the tone, design, and authenticity of your brand is portrayed through the video production.
Your video content can be a brand within a brand, but one that has a consistent tone, design, and authenticity to your organization’s brand. That is not to say everything will be the same, but the content you produce ought to reinforce your brand’s image.
