Video is fast becoming one of the key methods businesses can use to not only attract new customers, but also to turn existing customers into a community.
While there are many different approaches to business-related content, there are some basic principles common to all successful marketing strategies with videos that should form the foundation for any new initiatives involving production for social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.
The Best Ways To Work Facebook Video Into Your Business Share on XMost of these techniques are fairly general in nature, but can be tailored to each company’s specific audience as needed. Like most web marketing, content production and developing a “channel” of material for both existing and new audiences requires constant testing and constant adaptation. What works today may not work as well in six months. For this reason, no channel should stagnate, lest all the work you’ve done to build your audience become more expensive and less effective overall. If you are planning to move into marketing with videos, here are some things to consider.
The Internet Attention Span
By and large, web videos should be limited to no more than a few minutes, and perhaps five minutes at the most. The reason is because your message is competing with a thousand other distractions and priorities. Your audience is unlikely to devote considerable time to watching your videos instead of the other things they either prefer to do or must do. For that reason, you should replace any plans you have for long-form videos with a series of shorter works.
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This advice dovetails nicely with the strategy you will use to build your audience as quickly as possible. Your top priority is to build trust among members of your audience. They want to know your channel will be there for them before they devote their full attention. Consistency is how you build trust.
Frequent Updates
While you probably won’t have the material, the infrastructure or the time to come out of the gate fast enough to maintain a daily update schedule, that should be your ultimate goal. There is no faster way to build an audience on the web than to have new material to show them every day or as close to every day as possible. Updating once a week or once a month is fine, as long as you are happy with the fact it will take months or years to accumulate an audience.
One thing to be aware of is the fact that whatever your schedule, you absolutely must maintain it. All you need to do to imagine how your audience feels about a missed update is to think about how you would feel if your favorite television show just didn’t happen one day or one week. You’d be upset, even though you likely aren’t paying to watch. Your audience feels the same way. Once you go public with your show, you have a responsibility to your viewers. Update on time or you risk alienating your viewers and your customers.
Elementary Subject Matter
As a company owner and an expert in your field, you probably take for granted a great deal of information your potential customers and audience do not understand well at all. When you are working with the general public, it is important you not presume they know all that you know. There is no level of simplicity too basic for a general audience, because there will always be people in that audience for whom your simplest instructions will be valuable.
This is not to say you have to keep everything as basic and as simple as possible, but it does give you the freedom to start from the simplest details and work your way to more advanced topics. This is particularly important if your product is technical in nature. Basic instructions are often in short supply, and you’ll find if you are good at explaining things, your audience will appreciate your efforts in ways they may not appreciate other video channels. Covering the widest range of knowledge levels and experience levels will also give you more material and therefore ultimately more total videos. More videos are always better. Here’s why.
The Archive is the Power
Six months into your project, you will have a library of finished works all organized in your social media pages and feeds. At that point, a new customer or potential customer can come along and find a wealth of information about your company and your products. By the time they have explored your archives, they will have had an experience that nothing else you do can provide. Think about how you would feel if you found a series of videos answering important questions about a topic you are highly interested in. You’d be thrilled, and so will your audience.
Audio Quality
While your production values are important, your top priority should be the best microphone and the best sound quality you can possibly afford to engineer. There is nothing that will turn a Facebook audience off faster than a series of videos recorded with a built-in microphone that are nothing but room noise and distorted voices.
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If you don’t know how to engineer good quality audio, that should be your first priority before you even start thinking about going into production. Having great voice work and pleasant audio will set your videos apart from all the amateur content right off the bat.
Script
If you are planning for your videos to help your enterprise, you must write a script for each one. Under no circumstances should you ad lib a video for potential customers. When compared to your competition, your work will look and sound like an amateur production, which will do nothing for your company’s credibility or bottom line. Audiences are getting more sophisticated by the day, especially on Facebook. Don’t take the chance of losing sales. Write a good script and perform it well.
The world of business to business and business to customer videos is likely to advance by leaps and bounds over the next few years. If you position yourself well, you could find yourself able to take advantage of great opportunities.
