This week, let’s delve into the advantages of creating video promotions for a channel. Whether it’s video trailers for books, short promos for a business, or video marketing for an online course, videos can be a great canvas for expressing ideas visually.
Good ones will interest new readers and great ones might prompt a click to a sales page.
There are several ways to build influence through Video Promotions. Here are some of the latest ideas:
- Share a personal tip with your LinkedIn or Facebook connections. Rough and raw is OK, but it’s better if there are key words as captions — since many watch with the sound off.
- Promote your book with several Text-over-Stock-photo videos – Lumen5 makes this super-easy and can even create the draft video straight from a blog post!
- Use reviews from your clients and ensure you highlight any 4 and 5-star reviews on it (See ibuildsocial for that service).
- Use a videographer and highlight how your work with people makes a big difference. This can be used in social media ads (e.g. Instagram ads) and on your website.
What Kinds of Videos do I Learn From?
While animations and novelty videos are popular, it’s better to represent my personal brand in a way that people learn something. It’s good to see natural faces, with clear ideas, for that. When I was interested in author marketing, I went to find authors who are doing valuable video education. The winner was the author of “Platform”, Michael Hyatt, who has 22,400 Youtube channel subscribers. Coming a close second, via blogging and videos about writing, was Joanna Penn.
It’s nice to see successful authors sharing what they’ve learnt, isn’t it?
Video Promotions for Small Business
When you’re thinking of making a video promotion for your business, it’s better to think from the audience side. So you want to consider what’s of interest to them at the awareness stage… What types of things (that you know about) do many of your customers search for?
If you go to the trouble of getting a videographer, then ensure that you also get quality video editing. It’s usually an inexpensive service and a good editor can make a routine shoot (raw footage) into something impactful. (If you want a local video production recommendation, please enquire for we certainly know one)
With your own video production, you’ll need to think about WHERE you will put the video. Better quality is needed for putting eternally on your website, the highest for television, and lesser quality for a Facebook post. Vimeo encourages higher resolution and shows only your video once embedded (in Vimeo Pro), while YouTube may show other videos at the end but is free and has a vaster general audience.
A TV commercial costs between $5,000 and $110,000 to make, according to media producers, Lokomotion. Then comes the booking fee, which ranges wildly in price. So anything you make for online is going to be a fraction of that. For a long-term video to promote an established business with a lot to gain, you could budget $2,000 for production and editing costs.
Video Promotions on Social Media
But for just getting short promo videos out there on social networks, you can use free-ranging shots (via your phone camera or good webcam) and a tool like Wistia, if you don’t have a video specialist to put it together for you. (Full Wistia is about $136 per month, or do 3 Wistia-branded vids a month, free). This is perfect for sharing 1-minute videos to your LinkedIn network.
Wistia Learn is a good avenue for learning more about video making. Wistia also have a tool called Soapbox, which lets you take boring Slide Presentations and put yourself (on your web cam) right alongside them. It’s almost like having you there, making a sales presentation. (For create + share online, it’s free, or for promos; Solo plan is $300 a year).
The format – 16:9 or 4:3 or 1:1? We think Wikipedia answers this the best, and 16:9 seems to be the most popular format for television and computer screens these days. Square or 1:1 is good for Facebook and Instagram (regular).
Short on ideas? You can also use a tool like Dreamstime to search for video stock photography, and it costs about 15 credits per video item.
