It just so happens that I’m using a video to communicate to you right now. I get a lot of questions about developing or creating videos for business, and funnily enough, we were creating videos in our business a lot earlier than when we started publishing them publicly for you to see, like on YouTube. I’m going to talk a little about the power of using video in your business to achieve success in a few different areas.
Video is a great Marketing Tool
First of all, I want to talk about marketing… That’s the obvious one. We can use video in marketing. Video is a great way to convey a message like through YouTube, Vimeo, you can put them on your website. There’s so many things you can use video for. It could be customer testimonials for example, it could be an event, a demonstration video, a before and after. It just turns your marketing into a whole new beast that people are used to seeing. If you think about when the very first television show came to air, people are used to watching screens and have been watching screens for years and years and years.
The good thing about video is it’s not expensive now to own a device that will play video. In fact, pretty much any smartphone will play video. You can watch it on the bus, you can watch it at home, you can watch it on the toilet, just about anywhere you can watch a video. It’s a very, very powerful marketing tool.
Video is a great Team Training Tool
The second thing, and this is what I said we were using it before you ever saw it publicly, is for training, team training. It’s a great tool for training the team. One of the things that I would do in my business is I would record every training session that I would do. It was always done on video, and it didn’t matter what the quality was because it wasn’t going to be seen by the public, it just had to be good enough for the team to be able to watch.
So a new employee in my business today, for example, does a 30-day TEP, Training and Education Program. During that 30-days they would get hours and hours and hours of training that is consistently delivered because it is all on video. I’d say in the first 30 days maybe 10 of those days, if you were to compress it all into complete days, would just be watching video. That’s the power of video in business.
We can use video to leverage. Now I’m going to talk about quality shortly, it’s important to have good quality if it’s going out to the public, when you’re doing internal videos, they can be very simple. For example, say I was an ice cream vendor and I wanted to show people how to use my ice cream machine. I could record the entire video on an iPhone. I could just hold it up and my hand could be in there, you wouldn’t even have to see me. The audio’s going to be fine, the video’s going to be fine as long as it shows people what to do. I could be a photocopy technician and I want to train another one. Same thing. I could just hold an iPhone, I may have to put a torch on it as well or put the light on on the iPhone, but certainly I’m going to be able to train people very, very effectively by turning it into a video, putting that video on the cloud somewhere, and making it a click-able link so somebody can go and watch it. Things like Vimeo video for example, you can have a private channel where people can access it and watch a training video, and the public don’t have access. A great way to train the team!
Video is a great way to Communicate with your Customers
So number one, you could use it for marketing. Number two, you could use it for training your team. Number three, great way to communicate with your customers. I think that email, whilst it’s very effective and we use a lot of email, everyone’s doing it. Email is everywhere, and it floods our inbox. I probably get 60-80 messages a day in my inbox, I’m sure you do too. I know 60% of those maybe more, 80% of those are stuff I don’t really want to read. It would be easier if I could just click on a video and watch a video. Shoot a message out to your customers via video. Let them know of a special deal going on. Maybe it’s just to say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ But you can use it as a communication tool for your customers, and it makes it a lot more personable because you get to talk directly with the person. I think it’s a very powerful method of communication.
Now having said all of that, we spoke about marketing, team training, and communicating with your customers. The team training one, like I said, the quality doesn’t really need to be that great. Of course the better the quality the more they’re going to get out of it, the less frustrating it’s going to be to watch. But I know I’ve got videos from the early days when they were difficult to produce and we were making videos on a budget, and we would have a buzz all the way through for an hour. People are just going to have to put up with it. Like that tinnitus, the ringing in your ear that won’t stop. These poor people are doing their training and they have to listen to this buzz for an hour, probably can’t sleep at night. But it’s not as important as what’s going out public facing that’s for your customers and marketing.
Equipment needed to record Video
If you’re going to do video for YouTube or send video messages out to your customers, get the quality right. It doesn’t cost a lot these days. Your iPhone is a great HD video recorder. Most smartphones are as well, I’m saying iPhone but I shouldn’t say that, I’m not sponsored by Apple at all. So let’s just change that, let’s go smartphone. Most smartphones have adequate video capability to allow you to create a video that is of a high enough quality that it can compete with some of the most expensive cameras out there on a small screen. We’re talking about YouTube or something like that, not a big cinema screen, but definitely on a small screen.
If you’ve got a smartphone, you’ve got a great HD video device. To record audio of great quality, you can buy a Zoom audio recorder. I’ve got a Zoom H2N, under $200, the thing records amazing quality. It’s easy to sync your audio and video up. All you’ve got to do is download a program off the web that does it for you. Google ‘audio and video syncing,’ you’ll find a dozen applications you can download for $50, $100, it won’t be much at all. You’ve got great, fantastic, studio-quality audio with HD video. Put the two together, there you go.
Now if you’re doing a video like this, you’ll see that the lighting in here is very consistent. The background is black. This is a lighting kit I bought on eBay. I got it for about $300. So you don’t even need to spend a huge amount of money on a lighting kit. We’re using a DSLR for this video, talking about quality. This is a Sennheiser lapel microphone. It’s wireless. It’s also battery operated so we can take it anywhere. It was about $600, but it’s studio quality. I think they called it ‘news broadcast quality’ when I did the inquiry. But this $600 Sennheiser is going to last forever. You get nice, crisp, clear audio, and you don’t have to struggle to hear me. It makes the videos easy to watch.
If you are going to create marketing videos or videos to your clients to communicate with them, get the quality right. Don’t send out crappy stuff where the audio’s all yucky or the video quality’s yucky because people won’t watch it. Remember, it’s a representation of your company, a representation of you, so you want to get it right.
There’s the power of using video in your business
Hopefully that’s given you some insight and help into what you can do with video in your business. Remember, it’s not always about marketing, you can use it as a training tool. I think it’s a fantastic way to train a team in and a leveraged manner to save you a stack of time. If you want to work less hours and part of your day is always filled with having to show people how to do stuff, start videotaping it and putting it on their smartphones when they start working for you. Say, ‘Here’s a library of all the things, before you come and ask me, frequently asked questions video library on your phone. Watch that.’ They’re the type of things that you can do.
About the Author
Ben Fewtrell is a sought-after Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and trainer who has featured in Virgin’s Inflight Magazine and Entertainment Portal, SKY Business and “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”. He is also the host of the popular Business Brain Food Podcast where he interviews leading experts on anything and everything business.
