Leverage is the key to making what you have go much further. Just like the crowbar can assist you to apply great force from just a small push, leverage allows you to harness the power of good positioning and the strategic application of time and energy to move mountains. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we’re often dealing with a limited amount of resources, be it time, money, or a team on our mission to change the world through our products or services. And here’s the good news, we believe one of the best ways to gain real leverage in business today is through the strategic use of video. In this article, we’re going to be talking about the idea of leverage in video marketing, and in particular how businesses can use the power of video in various different ways to gain more leverage in their business.
Leverage in business and in marketing is the concept in which a small amount of input can lead to large results. As marketers, we believe that video strategy, when done right, has the power to add serious leverage across businesses large and small. So let’s break down five ways that you can gain leverage from your video strategy in a business.
The first way of gaining leverage is by thinking of video as a top tier of content, the top of the content pyramid. Video has a unique ability to contain both vision and sound and information communicated in a variety of different ways. When you’re producing video as part of a content marketing plan in a business, and leveraging that video as your primary form of content creation, what it actually does is it frees up more resources and creates a compounding effect on your marketing efforts, whilst also humanising your brand’s expertise and knowledge. Moreso, that’s the people in your brand or your business who hold that knowledge or expertise. By using video as the primary form of content that you are aiming to create, then you can dedicate time to just recording video and have the other members of your team, or even outsource the repurposing of that video into other forms of content.
I often refer to the idea of a tiered distribution strategy when it comes to video. This is taking that idea one step further. Produce the video content as your primary form of top tier content, and then leverage that video into various other forms to use across your marketing and your website and through your communications. From that video script, you can take a transcript and turn it into written articles, EDM emails, or a video course that you drip out via a nurture sequence in an email funnel, for example.
There’s a whole range of different ways that you can use the video once it’s been produced. That’s the number one way of leveraging video content in your business. It saves you time.
In many cases, video really is ‘do it once, do it right and reap the rewards for months and years to come’. Particularly when you think about video content published on YouTube, it really is the long game of content marketing.
We see it time and time again with our clients. Videos that they may have published on YouTube, say three years ago, are still returning on that investment for them today. That’s the way to think about video content and the long game of content marketing there is. If you invest in the right videos, strategically in the right way, then they can actually continue to return on that investment for years to come. The other way to think about the long game of video strategy is when you think about videos that are, say sales videos or onboarding videos for client onboarding or internal staff training videos. With those types of videos when you make the right video and you have a strategy behind it, you can make the video once and they become a valuable resource for your business for the long term.
You don’t have to invest time and staff resources into doing the same things over and over and over again. Video really has that longevity, which is a critical element to leverage when it comes to video in your business and your marketing strategy.
For many people, videos are often quicker and easier to create than written words. So using one-to-one videos in communications, whether it’s using a tool like Vidyard or Bonjoro to send one-to-one videos and emails with videos in them, it can actually be a more efficient way of using your time. You can avoid issues with word choice or getting bogged down in how to carefully use words in an email so that it’s not misrepresenting your ideas. Video also has that power of communicating with all the nuances of human communication. Particularly if you’re using video to deliver unfortunate news to a client, then using video is a way to actually get that across in a way that seems more human, seems more authentic, seems more real, and not like a crafted press release. So, video gets you back time.
The power of strategic videos
Another way that video gets you back time is in strategic videos that are designed to create more efficiencies across your marketing, sales and the customer relationship funnel. Perhaps that means you produce some FAQ videos, which means that your team doesn’t have to field the same questions over and over again. You are leveraging your team and you’re getting back time or customer onboarding sequences to prevent customer churn and provide quick wins for customers when they’ve recently become clients of yours.
People do business with people. It’s the humans that we connect with and the humans that do business with other humans. Video allows that powerful kind of one-two punch of emotional human connection whilst also communicating rational messaging. As I mentioned in the previous point, the nuance of human communication that’s made possible through a video really makes a viewer instantly more connected to the humans behind your business. There’s a certain feeling of deeper connection, which simply can’t be avoided when you’re using video. I kind of liken this idea to the idea of marketing like a magnet or doing business like a magnet, which is the idea that by putting yourself or your people front and centre using video means that people will either be attracted to you or repelled, right? The idea of a magnet is that you’ll attract the best and you’ll repel all the rest. Those kinds of people who actually don’t, aren’t going to be your ideal fit for your business anyway. They’re going to instantly realise and they’re going to connect when you use video. They’re going to connect much more quickly with whether or not they feel like they’re the right fit for your business. And that’s actually a good thing when you’re repelling those bad fits for your business, right?
Video influences persuasion principles
Think of the book about persuasion principles called the Seven Principles of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Chaldini. Robert Chaldini wrote about these seven persuasion principles, particularly four of these persuasion principles, which is Authority, Reciprocity, Sympathy, and Social Proof. For example, all of those persuasion principles have powerful influencing factors that stem from video content. By using video, you’re establishing authority much more quickly. By using video, you are invoking a sense of reciprocity where you are giving to people and they’re more likely to want to give back in communication with you. Video is very powerful in communicating sympathy and helping you to instantly and quickly communicate that you sympathise with your audience and you understand their pain points, and you can do that in a very effective way using video. Video is a very powerful way of establishing social proof for a brand or a business.
The fifth way that video creates leverage in your business is by really just leveraging you and your people. In any business, the key thing to success is often the utilisation of your people, both, whether it be the founder or the CEO or the manager of the business, or the key people within your organisation. If you can best utilise their time, then that staff time is often the biggest cost or the biggest investment in a business. If you can leverage those key people in your business who need to be front and centre, who need to be customer facing, getting your sales team on video, getting your customer service team using video tools, maybe it’s the in-home technicians, the people that go out and have that contact with your customers. If you can get them to better utilise video strategically, then you can just leverage their time better.
These people tend to be some of the busiest people in an organisation. So the great thing about implementing the right video strategy is that these people can be better leveraged through video and there’s a whole range of ways that they can do that. If you really need any more convincing about the importance of adopting a video first mindset in a business, then hopefully this article about the leverage that video strategy can provide for you should make it a no-brainer.
Strategic video across an entire organisation when implemented correctly, can have a massive impact on the team, on time, on marketing, on sales, and particularly on that human connection.
Innovate Media offers powerful brand story and client testimonial (case study) social media video marketing packages for businesses on the Sunshine Coast and across Australia. Check out these services we offer and see which suits your needs https://innovatemedia.com.au/video-marketing-services/
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