We’ve been really utilizing Vimeo lately as a way to showcase our video capabilities, and that got us thinking about, well, video! We love video, and use this medium for many promotional purposes for our clients. In the last several years, video has been the number one trending social media marketing medium. And for good reason. It delivers valuable content in a way that’s easy to consume and entertaining. The possibilities of marketing with video are endless. We’re going to talk about a few ways that we utilize video in our new “The Versatility of Video” blog series.
Thought Leadership
Video is an excellent tool for establishing yourself or your client as a thought leader in their industry. It’s no longer good enough to tell your audience that your product is the best and your company is the greatest. People have become more and more skeptical of advertising and are requiring hard proof. Traditional marketing strategies are a thing of the past.
Thought leadership is a marketing tool that provides your audience with valuable knowledge, without any obvious promotion of the company or products. Instead, it demonstrates the knowledge of the leaders of the business. Instead of telling the audience that the company is the greatest, it creates trust in the company’s leaders’ expertise.
- Prove it, but don’t boast.
You may have a display cabinet full of awards, but that’s not going to prove how you achieved that recognition. Instead, point to specific cases, explaining how your company solved a specific problem for a specific client. Or demonstrate your expertise with a how-to video that is both valuable to the audience but also shows that you know your stuff.
A prime example of this is in the videos we produced for American HealthTech’s “Customer Success” series. We interviewed the administrator and nurses at one of the facilities that AHT serves. Instead of rattling off a list of awards and recognitions, we let this individual case do the talking.
- Usable and Actionable
No matter how hard you try to disguise it, people know when they are being advertised to. With all the pop-up ads, tv commercials and junk mail we get every day, we’re inundated with advertising, and quite frankly, we’re getting sick of it! But if your content is something that is useful to your audience and elicits an actionable response, it will drive much more traffic to your site. We used this tactic in a lot of our Marketing Matters series. Check out this video as an example:
In this video, Pam provided a step by step how-to procedure for making deadlines. This video could be helpful for many different types of businesses and entrepreneurs. By providing insider knowledge “for free”, Pam helped to establish herself as a thought leader.
- Focus
When you’re trying to demonstrate your thought leadership to others, don’t be tempted to provide broad knowledge. You may feel tempted to show that you have a huge knowledge-base, but you’re better off if you focus on a specific topic, showing that your expertise is also specialized. Say you want to show off your social media skills. We’re sure you’re a pro, but to be truthful, social media experts are a dime a dozen. Instead, an in-depth video about deciphering Twitter analytics would be more useful to others and would demonstrate your specific knowledge.
Check out this video that we did for AHT’s “Beyond Words” series. We could have had president Theresa Chase explain why AHT is the best at what they do and list all of the different services they provided. But we thought it would be more effective for her to focus on one specific aspect of healthcare management–revenue management–and really demonstrate her niche knowledge.
- Talk with, not at
Don’t turn your content into a podium to preach from. Today’s audiences are more interested in having a conversation than listening to a speech. Collaborate with others, commend your partners and ask for input to keep the conversation going. Your audience will be much more likely to trust you and want to engage further.
In this promotional video for Caremerge, we took this approach. Instead of preaching about how great Caremerge is, we used interviews with actual users to convey the value. The video took on a conversational tone that makes the audience feel involved.
So what does your marketing look like? Are you stuck relying on traditional and dated marketing methods? Get in touch today and we’ll use video and other methods to establish you as a thought leader in your industry.