Every year, companies and brands of all sizes pour billions of dollars into advertising and marketing.
And rightfully so. What good is the next life-changing technology or impactful service if nobody knows about it.
But sometimes, it seems like there can be a disconnect between the brand and the consumer. We’re constantly surrounded by ads and marketing materials that seem to be more catered to the Board of Directors or executive team than to the end consumer that is meant to be served.
This can mean wasted advertising dollars and resources. Not only that but if your marketing isn’t relatable or authentic to the audience, you could be causing long-term damage to your brand.
Here are 3 tips that you and your marketing team can implement to ensure that your marketing builds trust and ultimately leads to more results.
1. Show, Don’t Tell
Far too many businesses are making bold claims about how they can “get you to the next level” or “make a happier and healthier you”. Or how many times have you seen a business commercial where they claim to be “innovative” or “disruptive” with nothing to back it up?
Whether is promoting innovation, company culture, or the benefits you bring, I want you to make this your mantra when marketing from now on:
Show, Don’t Tell.
Instead of claiming how “innovative” you are. Give an example of something your company has done to innovate in your space. Instead of simply stating that you have a great company culture, tell a story of how an employee or customer’s life was positively impacted as a result of having a great culture.
At first, it might feel risky to not outright say what you want your audience to take away, but as long as your story is a clear example of what you are trying to promote, it will work.
And even better, it will help build trust because you are showing real impact, not just throwing out corporate buzzwords.
2. Stop Talking About Yourself
Nobody cares about your industry awards, large team of employees, or advanced technology.
At least not yet. Not until you give them a reason to care.
Humans are largely driven by the question of “What’s in it for me?” It doesn’t mean we’re all selfish. From an evolutionary perspective, this was key survival. So before you start bragging about how awesome your company is or how great your products are you must first speak to the needs of your audience.
How can you do this?
Start by putting them at the center of your marketing messaging. Make them the hero of the story. Your job is to help them on their journey.
Once you’ve identified and addressed their challenges, dreams, and desires then you can speak about how your org or your product is best suited to help them on their path. But be sure to always keep it relevant to your audience and think “What’s in it for them?”
3. Focus on Emotional Impact over Statistics
It’s been proven that we usually make our decisions based on emotion, then reason with logic. When you’re creating any marketing materials whether it’s advertisements, videos, brochures, or even pitch decks focus on creating an emotional response in the audience.
While facts and figures can be powerful for building credibility, they are just not that relatable.
Of course, people want to see results. But most importantly, how will those results positively impact your customers lives on an emotional level.
For example, there’s a tendency in the B2B world to believe that business owners only care about ROI or quantifiable growth. Obviously, these things are very important to speak to and are going to be big drivers in the decision-making process.
But if you can just look a layer deeper and think about how those results will make your clients feel your marketing will become much more powerful.
Conclusion
As you are creating marketing materials and campaigns moving forward, think about these three mantras:
Show, Not Tell
What’s In It For Them?
How Do We Want the Audience to Feel?
Maybe even print them out and post them up on your wall or in your marketing department. This will ensure that your marketing if more authentic, relevant, and trustworthy. Which means more results and less guesswork.
Are there any other mantras that you live by for your marketing? Let us know in the comments and share with a fellow marketer/business leader.
When we are talking to brands about how they can leverage video, we are frequently asked:
“How long does the video need to be?”
And it makes sense that this would be one of the first questions that come up. There is no shortage of online blogs, articles, and courses that talk about video marketing pushing broad blanket statements about how the video “has to be short” or “no longer than 1 minute”.
Why video length isn’t the place to start
While I’m not arguing that videos shouldn’t be short, the video length is usually not the correct place to start when planning a video or campaign.
There are a number of factors that are much more important to determine before thinking about how long the video should be.
Some of these factors are:
What is the target outcome of the video or campaign?
Who is the target audience? What matters most to them?
Where is your audience in the customer journey?
What is the key message?
What platform will the video live on?
Now that we’ve decided on a strategy, how long should the video be?
Despite what you might read from the “video marketing gurus” there are no hard rules or magic formula’s here.
However, our rule when it comes to creating videos is this:
As long as it needs to be to achieve the target outcome, but absolutely no longer.
This means that yes it is important to be looking at how you can cut the video down. But this must be done without sacrificing valuable information or story development that will help maintain audience engagement and drive action.
Of course, each platform will have its limitations. For example, you might be running a 6-second YouTube pre-roll ad or 30-second television spot. But beyond that, we recommend focusing more on telling a great story. Then you will have more room to maintain audience attention.
The quality of the video and storytelling is more important than the length
This is why we can’t stand watching even a 15-second advertisement that’s aggressively pushing a product but we will pay to watch a 2-hour movie.
Again, the quality of the story is what matters most.
I hope you found this helpful. Feel free to share with a friend and let us know what you thought in the comments!
In less than 5 minutes, I explain how you can segment your audiences and create targeted messaging to get the most advertising and marketing results.
If you’ve done any advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn you know how powerful these ad platforms can be for delivering your messages directly to your target audience.
With traditional advertising (like TV, Print, and Radio) you have very limited options when it comes to who you can target with your ads. Usually, this is based on location, age, and a few other options.
Still, there’s no guarantee that the people you are reaching are in your target audience.
Now, with current social media platforms, it seems that the options are limitless. You can target based on simple demographic choices such as age, location, and gender.
But there are even more powerful (and precise) ways of targeting. You can also choose your audience based on interests, job roles, income ranges, lifestyle habits, and a number of other options.
This means that your marketing and advertising budget will be maximized and not wasted since you are only serving your message to the people who would benefit and likely be interested in what you offer.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Get more results by segmenting your audience and creating personalized content
Now that we know you can choose exactly who to target your ads to, it’s time to get more creative about the ads that you are showing.
Gone are the days of creating one video or one marketing message and blasting that out to all of your potential customers or potential clients.
Instead, what you should be doing is segmenting your potential clients and customers into different groups and creating very personalized creative messages to each group that will resonate with them much more strongly.
The best way to explain this is by giving you examples.
B2B Example
So let’s say you’re a B2B business, so you’re trying to reach other business owners. Maybe you’re a SAAS, or insurance agencey, or similar.
I would think about who are your top two to three industries or types of businesses that you tend to focus on and create specific messages for each industry.
So for example, let’s say maybe you serve three industries: Healthcare, Construction, and Financial Services.
Instead of creating one blanket message and blasting that out to all
of these industries and hoping that it drives results, what I would do is create three separate messages. These could be ads, these could be pieces of content, blog posts, videos, etc, and I would make sure that they’re catered to these industries.
Then as we spoke earlier about the power of targeting on these modern advertising platforms. You would make sure that you’re serving your healthcare focused ad directly to the health care industry, construction directly to the construction industry, and finances.
But this obviously it doesn’t just apply to B2B. This also applies to B2C if you’re selling directly to consumers.
Let’s say you’re a lifestyle brand. Perhaps you sell a fitness product or health supplement.
So maybe you start with these three segments: Moms, Fitness Enthusiasts, and Working Professionals.
Again, you would create three different creative pieces of content and target each audience segment respectively.
Make sure that these messages are very tailored. So the one for moms might be a video featuring a mom using your product or using your supplement.
Now when you think about it and you combine the power of creating very personalized messages, segmenting your audiences, and serving those to those segments directly, you’re going to get a lot more results out of your marketing because it’s very personalized.
I hope you found this tip helpful. I hope more importantly that you actually take it, implement it, test it, see how it works for your business.
If you found this useful, share it with someone else who might find this helpful for their business.
Watch this video to learn how you can increase your response rates to your emails and ultimately get more sales.
Struggling with B2B sales email and prospecting?
We recently asked some of our clients what their biggest marketing/sales challenge was and you want to know what they said?
Reaching the decision maker.
This is always a challenge whether it’s cold emailing, cold calling, or advertising.
We need to change the way we email sales prospects.
Let’s face it. Cold emailing is never fun. It’s impersonal. It feels sleazy and even if you’re doing everything right, you probably seldom get a response.
You know the phrase…”It’s a numbers game!”.
When you do get a response, you spend hours getting to know what the prospective client’s needs are and preparing a beautiful proposal. But when you send it, things go silent.
Sound familiar?
Luckily, there is a simple and easy way that you can make your cold emails stand out, build more trust, and improve the success rate of your proposals.
Enter personalized videos.
There are some great free tools online (we love Soapbox by Wistia) that allow you to record a personalized video with your webcam as well as record your screen.
This is powerful for so many applications. You can use it when you are prospecting, cold e-mailing, sending proposals and presentations, as well as staying in touch with current clients.
Soapbox allows you to also include a clickable call-to-action link at the end then easily edit and share the videos.
Some Tips for Creating Personalized Videos
Be sure that you are in a quiet environment for optimal sound quality.
Tidy up your background and dress well. Look professional!
If possible, try to position yourself in front of a window or somewhere with clean flattering lighting.
Check out the video above for more specifics on our favorite tool for creating personalized videos and examples on how you can use them for your own business.
If you implement this tool, you will start to see a huge impact on your B2B sales email and prospecting results.
If you found this helpful, feel free to share with a fellow B2B sales person.
Although the construction industry seems to be booming right now, winning new projects is still a challenge that every contractor and builder faces. How many times have you spent hours gathering quotes, putting together extensive proposals, and schmoozing potential clients, only to find out that the project was awarded to another company?
I’m all too familiar with the challenges of trying to win new projects and growing the number of clients that return for more work. Before launching my first company and going full time, I spent years working as a lead estimator for a multi-million dollar commercial construction company.
The good news…
The good news is, there are some simple things that you can do to immediately differentiate yourself from other companies in your field and add that “wow” factor to your marketing and bid materials that will demonstrate the level of care and experience that you bring to every project. Enter online video. Video has quickly proven itself to become one of the best ways that you can boost your sales and marketing efforts.
Here’s the kicker. Video is not one size fits all. Different videos will serve different goals and support various stages of the sales process from awareness to decision. So it’s not enough to just have any video. You must have the right video and implement it in the proper way. Here are 3 video types that are sure to help you get your foot in the door with dream clients, win more projects, and add that “wow” factor to your sales and marketing efforts.
1. Brand Vision Film/Company Overview
The first type of video we recommend is a strong brand vision or company overview video. This will be the video that introduces your company, your values, and what makes you unique.
The benefits:
Having a solid brand video on your website and even contained within your proposals is going to immediately set you apart by giving the potential client a quick and engaging way to get to know your brand and how you will add value to them helping to build a personal connection and strengthen the relationship.
Why it works:
This video is the next best thing to being right there in person with your prospective client. And we all know that being face-to-face always increases the likelihood of winning new work.
Pro tips:
Stay away from buzzwords like “professional, comprehensive, ect”. Go deeper and find ways to include your own personality, origin story, and anything else that may resonate with the audience.
Remember to not just talk in bullet points and facts. Include the bigger picture values that your company holds to be true. As Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they why you do it.”
Example:
2. Testimonial Videos
One of the most powerful video types that will have an immediate effect on your sales process is testimonials or “success stories”. Testimonials feature past clients talking about how you helped them on a past project.
The benefits:
Testimonials are extremely effective in convincing and converting prospective clients that have discovered your brand. They show real world cases of how you have helped others that are like your potential clients which inspires confidence that you are the right person for the job.
Why it works:
Testimonials are effective because they are “3rd party endorsements”. Think about it this way. If I told you that I made the best videos around and you should hire me, that would come across as arrogant and not very convincing. But if someone who is just like you told a story about how we have helped their business using video and recommended that you give us a shot, that would be much more effective.
Pro tips:
Focus on story
It’s not about getting the person to talk about how great you are. Instead, have them talk about the real challenges that they faced and how you helped overcome those challenges. More importantly, how did that make their lives better?
Ditch the script and shoot for conversational.
Example:
3. Educational Video Content
OK so now you have a strong brand video that helps nurture prospective clients that find you. And you’ve paired it with some powerful video testimonials that help show real results and aid the decision-making process. But there’s one more thing you can do to really supercharge your sales and marketing efforts and that is by creating short educational video pieces. Often times, these will feature a representative of your company speaking directly to the camera about a specific topic that is relevant to your audience.
The benefits:
These videos are extremely powerful in establishing credibility for your brand. By creating videos that help your potential clients and feature you or your company speaking from experience, you are demonstrating your expertise in your field, not just claiming to be experts. These videos are also helpful in arming your prospective clients with the upfront knowledge to aid the success of a project and ensure a smooth workflow.
Why it works:
This video type leverages a powerful psychological concept called reciprocity. By adding up front value to your prospective clients without charging them a dime, the are more likely to want to return the favor down the road and give you work.
Pro tips:
Do some research to find out what pain points or questions that your prospective clients have to make videos that are actually relevant to them
Focus on adding as much value as possible. Simply throwing together a video with “fluffy” content will not have a positive effect on your business
Share the videos through an email newsletter to get even more use out of them
How to get it done?
There you have it! Implement any one or all of these video types properly, and you will be sure to see lasting results on your sales goals. If you need help with any of this, please reach out. We not only help produce the best videos possible but work with you to gain clarity on your unique brand messaging as well as determine what content is going to resonate most with your audience. Finally, rather than sending over a video file and walking away, we will work with you to ensure that your videos are properly being implemented to ensure real results.
Click below to schedule a call and see how we can help create some videos that will get you more projects.
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