With the corona virus slowing down our daily life, not to mention our work and the global economy, it’s time to think about our business strategy and get ready for the next phase.
As many other local small businesses, we have seen booking cancellations coming through pretty quick, and it’s safe to say that for the next few months, this is the new norm.
So what do we do? Here we are working on our marketing, and writing this new blog article to keep our website alive with fresh content and hopefully, useful information for our visitors.
If you, like me, have been asking yourselves what to do in this peculiar times of our lives, and how to occupy ourselves with meaningful activities, so we can pave the way for the “post coronavirus” days, it means you’ve made the right step into the decision making process, rather than sit and wait for something to happen.
It’s clear that we won’t be seeing our customers any time soon, and that the four walls of our homes are closing in fast, leaving us with no choice but rest.
But how can we reach our customers without being there for them?
In order for that to happen, I need to have good content and a systematic publishing schedule. And this will help my SEO strategy, so my website can hopefully see the light of the google page number one, for some of my selected keywords like “sydney videographer” and the likes.
Also, I need my landing pages to be in great shape, so those paid campaign ads can benefit from a better ROI.
And because we do need all of these things, the focus is on making video content that can help put ourselves in front of our customers, so they can feel more comfortable buying our products and services when they are ready to.
Actionable item: check your competition
We all live in the visual era of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and video content is becoming more and more popular, with plenty of opportunities to make a statement and stand out from our competition.
Try this… go to google.com.au and type the keywords that you want to target. Check all of your competitors, what are they doing and how are they attracting sales?
In most cases, for local businesses, the formula is always the same. A website page with stock images and text, and a call to action. The buyer hovers over all these options and picks.
BUT… Statistics tell us that using videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86%, and if no competitor has a nice landing page video when the buyer is ready to click, then it means there’s an opportunity there, for you to be increasing your ROI simply by doing something different: telling your customers who you are, what you do, and why they should buy from you, IN PERSON.
Now, this all sounds very difficult, scary, and expensive. After all, we all know video production is not cheap, so we need to calculate the cost of making a marketing video, and how much return it will generate.
How to produce a marketing video for a landing page
My advice for the beginners is to start simple and do some testing. Producing a piece to camera video with a script, a background music and your company logo is not very difficult. It takes some planning (writing the script) and a good effort in front of the camera when it’s time to shoot, then some basic editing and audio recording knowledge.
A freelance videographer can help with all of the above, and it won’t be costing lots of time and money, if you know what the end product needs to look like.
A step further can be: adding some b-roll on top of the piece to camera, meaning while you talk on camera, you can show some footage of what you’re talking about. That means planning for that footage to be captured and adding that to the video.
It’s also a good idea to add subtitles, so the audience can look at the video without audio, in case they want to.
What to do when the video is ready
When the video is ready, upload it to your platform of choice. My advice is to use YouTube, for several reasons.
When you upload it to YouTube, make sure you choose the right title and add a description. The latter will be helpful for SEO, so your video can be found by search engines for the keywords you’re targeting.
Also, choose a nice thumbnail. Make your own if you prefer to.
Once the video is up on YouTube and ready to go, you can easily embed the video into your landing page, website, post it to your facebook page, send it to your clients via email and so forth.
As said, when real people on the other side of that landing page of yours, are ready to buy and choosing the best company to buy from, having a video can increase trust and confidence, so you can see your ROI increase.
Again, test this over time and see if adding a video to your landing page can be helpful gaining more leads. Compare your numbers to the previous period, and if you see that it actually works, then think about increasing your video production budget over time and investing in some more good looking content.