How to use video to drive more sales

In order to influence your target audience, and truly make a difference to your business or organisation, you first have to generate interest in your product or service.

Most businesses make a huge mistake when creating video - they assume that their audience is already interested in what they have to offer. This misalignment means that they are presenting information to an audience that is simply not ready to consume it - i.e. they will not be interested and they certainly won't be taking any action as a result.

The way to influence an audience using video marketing is by truly understanding who your target audience or ideal customer is, and serving content that they cannot ignore. This content should be aimed at people who are not yet aware of your brand - we call this Awareness content.

For awareness content you are simply trying to - you guessed it - create a awareness. You might not necessarily even want a CTA (call-to-action), it's enough to simply get views on the piece of content.

Awareness content can be a number of things, typically it calls into one of the following three categories:

Entertainment is where you create funny or entertaining content that your audience will naturally want to consume. This needs to be closely aligned with your ideal customer - what are they interested in, what are they likely to share with their peers etc.

Emotion is when you use emotion-driven content to get their attention. To do this successfully, it is essential that you tap into your ideal customer's desires - What do they care about? What are their fears? What are they trying to achieve in life? By tapping into their emotions you can begin to build a relationship with your ideal client, exposing your brand in the process.

Education is when you use your knowledge to add value to your ideal customer. Creating content that is useful and teaching them something, will build trust and credibility in your brand, making you the go-to person in  your field, as well as exposing you to potential customers.

The key thing in all three techniques is to research your ideal customer very specifically, so that you can create content that really hits the mark.

With your awareness content in place, you will have made a connection with your audience, so now they will be ready to consume the next stage of content - we call this Consideration content. This is where you can begin to talk more specifically about what your business or organisation actually does, and how you can solve the problems highlighted in the awareness stage.

In your consideration stage, your audience is now more interested in what you have to say, so you can afford to dive into more detail - whilst still remaining aligned to your ideal customer's needs.

The final stage is called Conversion. This is where you are now encouraging people to click on a specific call to action, whether it's making an enquiry, buying a product or subscribing to a service. These videos need to be more focussed on closing the deal, for example addressing any typical objections that prospects might have, or a powerful testimonial video featuring a previous client.

By creating content in stages, you can deliver the right information to your prospects depending on what stage of the buying journey they are in, and by following this system you can be more specific about your audience - 'how are they feeling before they watch the video and what would you like them to feel after watching the video?'.

Are you trying to improve your marketing? Get in touch with us for a free complimentary discovery session where we can chat through some options and let you know how a video marketing strategy could help you achieve your goals.