Christine Gritmon, Social Media Strategist, Coach & Entrepreneur

I'm Christine. And I help small businesses, especially teeny tiny little local mom-and-pop businesses, figure out social media. I'm going to be talking about how you can use video differently depending on what stage of interaction with your company people are. So you might want to use video differently around people who don't know who you are or what you do versus people who you already have in your orbit a little bit and who you're just trying to push towards becoming an actual customer. And then of course not forgetting the people who are customers, making sure that you continue to delight them which can also be done with video. When people don't know who you are or what you do, your branding is especially important, just kind of the initial impression that you give, being memorable, being appealing, creating a feeling and an overall impression. Not so much giving them actual content or value necessarily, though you can always do that, it's never a bad idea, but the initial points of contact really need to establish you and your brand so that you become familiar to people. And then once you're familiar to them, it's worth giving them more value, more content because they know who you are, they're going to connect it to your brand, you need however many brand touches in order to really make an impression. And so once you're into several brand touches, you want to make sure that you tie it back to the initial brand impression, but you also can give them a bit more because it's a more valuable contact at that point. They already know who you are, they probably know what you do, and they've chosen to some degree to continue consuming your content, whether they've actively opted in via an email opt-in or something like that, or even just through Facebook targeting, you know that they have consumed your content, they have clicked on your link, they have watched your video, you know who's choosing to engage, and you know that those are the people to really deliver your most valuable messages to. Then once people are deciding whether or not to become actual customers, to give you their money instead of just consuming your content for free, you really want to make sure that you're delivering the right content to those people at the right time because that's your really valuable stuff, that's your webinars, that's your exclusive lives. You want to make sure that you are delivering valuable content that actually takes something from you and delivering it to the people who have already proven that they're very interested, they really are interested in what you have to say, they're on that journey with you, they're in, they just need to kind of take that leap. And then of course once they have taken that leap, you don't want to forget the customers who are either active customers or past customers, you want to keep them happy, you want to show that their value to you doesn't end when you first get their money, and you want them to tell their friends, you want them to bring other people in because no marketing message you could possibly create is as powerful as testimonials from other people. Video is really good to use for a few reasons. First of all, the major social media platforms want you to use video, and they encourage this by giving video greater reach. So your content is already going to go farther organically just by very nature of it being video because the algorithms are programmed to favor video. Another reason video is very effective is because it creates an immediacy, seeing a human being talking, seeing a moving image, first of all moving images capture the eye, so they're going to stop that scroll, they're going to stand out in the feed. Yes there's a lot of video, but people are still responding to it. And then there's the immediacy, if it's a person talking to you, we're naturally hardwired to respond to human faces, to eye contact. If you can get a person in that video, so much the better. If you can present that opportunity, that branding, that service, anything with a person, it's going to get you a lot farther, and the best way to do that is video. People almost feel rude looking away from video of people talking because it feels like there's a person talking to you, you know? So you feel a little weird just going on paths. A webinar is a really good way to make sure that people are serious about working with you. First of all, they've gone through this whole webinar, they've gone through this whole course. They're already showing some degree of investment. There's a cognitive dissonance there, like they sort of are disagreeing with the message they've already put out there if they say, no this person isn't worth my time after a webinar. But then also there's the fact that you are giving them something of value. Especially if it's a free webinar as a taster for a larger course, that's perfect because you are showing that your content has value. I've gone into free webinars before where people sort of got me in their web with enough ads and emails and I said, okay, you know what, it's free. I'll log on to their free webinar. I'll probably get enough value out of this webinar that I can just tune out the whole hard selling know they're going to give me at the end. And then at the end I've totally bought their course because the webinar was of so much value to me that I said if this was valuable, I can only imagine what the stuff I pay for is going to be. So even though I know how to play that game, I know how to run it, it still works because they're not trying to con me. They're trying to give me something of value. They just want me to pay for the larger level of value. But you know what, if they're bringing the value, why wouldn't I give them my money? My main tip regarding getting into video is to just do it. People worry so much they say, oh, I can't afford a video crew. You have a smartphone. It's much better and you're going to get much more valuable videos for your business if you do hire somebody. But if you're just dipping your toe in and if you're a teeny tiny business of the sort that I usually deal with, just do something. Live video, even though people are terrified of live video because they think, oh goodness, what if I screw up? Live video has the biggest measure of forgiveness built in because everyone's scared of live video. So if you do a live video, people know it's live. People know you're not going to be perfectly polished. In fact, they almost trust it as a little more genuine and easy to connect to if it's not perfect and polished, if it's just a person talking to you. So I feel like live video is probably a good way to get started if you aren't sure if you're willing to invest in a video strategy. That being said, I think that once people do dip their toe in with video, whether it's live or on a smartphone or if they hire a low budget video company, I think once they see how much video does for them and their engagement, they'll realize that it is a part of their marketing strategy, absolutely worth investing both time and money into. Well, two things that are growing exponentially, especially in this past year, are the power of video and the power of custom conversations, messenger bots, things of that nature. So I really think customized video is definitely where all of this is heading. People aren't going to want to watch your pre-recorded canned video message if they know that customized conversational video messages based on their end of the conversation and replying to it are possible. So I think that customized video, working video into that chat bot strategy or something of that nature is really going to become huge. I also feel like the rise of virtual reality and augmented reality, if you asked me a year ago, I never would have thought that it would be where it is today. I would never have thought that the technology, the early adopters, it's not even just the early adopters anymore. It's everywhere now. So I would be shocked a year ago to hear myself sitting here today and saying that getting into augmented and virtual reality to personalize those conversations more, I would have thought that sounded crazy. Like, what are we, the Jetsons? But now I really think that next year, having someone be able to sit virtually in a room with you to a much more immediate level than we can do now is absolutely going to be in the frontier. I think all of it, video, augmented reality, virtual reality, all of it comes down to people wanting to bring that immediacy back. We've had kind of a curve where people used to have to interact, then computers in the digital age made us have to interact less. People are craving that interaction again. I think it's coming back in a big way. And I think that using technology to facilitate those interactions on a broader and more intimate in a lot of ways scale because it's responsive to the needs of the consumer is really going to be something that companies that succeed are going to have invested in. One big thing is you really have to have a solid internalized sense of your brand, who your brand is. Because the fact that those conversations are going to be happening means that you need to be able to respond in an on-brand way in much more direct conversation. So you're not going to be able to rely as much on the pre-canned branding messages. You're going to need to be able to improvise on-brand. So that's going to be a challenge that marketers are really going to need. Making sure that their brand message and their brand values and all of those things are so internalized that they can converse in an on-brand manner. Just putting things out there and not responding, not having it be a two-way conversation between brand and consumer is not going to fly anymore. Another thing that brands are really going to need, that marketers are really going to need in the future, is confidence in being a brand ambassador. People want to deal with people to a far greater degree. And video has facilitated this. Previously a brand could be kind of this faceless behemoth. That doesn't fly anymore. People want that personal interaction. They want to see people who are part of your brand. It gives them a greater sense of connection to your brand because they're helping a person. And there's a person who believes in this brand. They trust that a little bit more than just canned messages coming out. So people at all levels of brands are going to have to be comfortable with the fact that they sort of represent that brand out in the real world. The return to personalization is really going to put a lot more pressure on people to be able to back it up.