Video, as a component of a grander digital marketing strategy, can take on many different meanings in the growth marketing world. There are limitless ways to use video—and other visual content—to better engage and connect with audiences. That said, what works well for one industry may not work well for others.
Video marketing is highly contextual. The way your company utilizes video depends on where and how your audience receives content, their behaviors, their preferences, and your end-goal, whether that goal is broader reach or more sales.
While various factors affect how your company tackles video marketing, such as your in-house or outsourced production capabilities, marketing budget, and time, they shouldn’t hinder your ability to develop creative content.
Video content plays a significant role in today’s marketing world, and in the Professional Services space, it can be a huge differentiator between your brand and the competition.
1. Use Video to Humanize Your Brand
For Professional Service companies, video’s greatest strength lies in its ability to personalize—to add a human face and voice to a brand that might otherwise rely solely on whitepapers and case studies to provide value.
So many firms and agencies in this industry generate business through a sense of trust. Word-of-mouth, referrals, and even the slightest personal touch can go a long way in bringing on new clients. What many firms either don’t realize or don’t capitalize on is the power that video has in growing that trust.
Back to Tip #1: Humanizing a brand.
Professional Service companies can use video to build stronger relationships with their prospects and current clients by creating different types of videos:
- Individual team member highlights
- Video testimonials
- Videos to supplement email campaigns
- Social media videos
These videos are where you emphasize on brand differentiation and let your people—not your services or analytics—shine.
The best thing about these types of videos is that they can often be produced in-house, with the existing staff and facilities you have available. If an iPhone can shoot with 4K resolution, then you can shoot with 4K resolution.
2. Know Your Options
The scope of “video marketing” applies to much more than a great team or company culture video, and firms that stay ahead of the pack by using video throughout their sales cycle (providing video to the right person, at the right place, at the right time) can attest to that.
While a holistic video strategy is ideal, it’s often not feasible for Professional Service companies that don’t have a full-time video production team.
That said, there are key videos that Professional Service companies should prioritize over others. The videos your firm creates should depend on your goals and needs. For many in the industry, this comes down to sales.
Fortunately, sales are one area where video performs best; 1-on-1 videos for prospects or video voicemails can be empowering for your sales team. These videos allow them to skip the cold call by putting a face to a name. In a saturated market, this is an easy way to differentiate your firm right out of the gate.
3. Leverage Social Media Platforms
Video is a driving force for engagement, and there’s no better place to make a great first impression than on social media. Short-form videos, soundbites and brief service outlines have significant potential across platforms.
Professional Service companies don’t typically have exciting tech demo videos or product videos to fall back on when engaging new users and industry articles and blog posts can be limiting, especially in a competitive space. This presents the perfect opportunity to use video to create strong introductory content for new viewers.
Note that on most social media outlets, videos uploaded natively on the platform vastly outperform linked videos, such as those copied over from YouTube. In research conducted by Forbes, it was found that natively uploaded videos to Facebook (or those directly uploaded to Facebook) outperformed shared or linked videos by 10x.
4. Create Video Blogs and Build a Library
Video content relies on brand differentiation. In other words, differentiating your brand from competitors, other content on social media, and so on. However, Professional Service companies can also benefit by using video to differentiate their own content – Vlogs (video blogs) or videos within blogs, generate and keep visitors interested.
To get started, consider looking at your 10 highest performing blog posts and creating short video blogs (2:00-3:00) to accompany them. These videos can then be uploaded to social media (specifically YouTube), emails, and other digital channels. Companies can get a lot of mileage out of a single video blog, and that’s not something to overlook.
With enough video blog content, you can begin to create and even segment a video blog library, giving your prospects and existing clients a hub of content that’s both highly engaging and easy to digest.
5. Create Explainer Videos
It seems like every professional service company has one—a short, 1:30-3:00 animated video explaining their core services. The reason for that is that these types of videos work. They’re easy to digest, can run through major services in a simplified manner, and can be leveraged across different channels and mediums (email, social media, homepage) as a “company trailer.”
However, explainer videos aren’t easy to produce. For those in the Professional Service space, there are two main options for creating explainer videos:
- Use automated and templated video builders, or
- Hire an outside animator/agency to create a custom project
Both options come with their own strengths and weaknesses. Automated explainer videos are cheap to create, but the customization and branding potential can be very limiting. Custom explainer videos are more expensive to produce, but you’ll work directly with an animator or team to see the true vision come to life.
The biggest takeaway for Professional Service companies interested in using video marketing?
Prioritize sales and social media video content, and use video to make your message more tangible and engaging.
Need help with your video marketing strategies? Reach out to us today!
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