George B Thomas, Impulse Creative

My name is George B. Thomas, I am an inbound evangelist for Impulse Creative. So we're an agency that works with HubSpot or people who wanna use HubSpot. We've got the normal agency side that does branding web development custom code creation But we also have a learn side, which is more of what I do, which is the consulting, teaching people how to use HubSpot, doing one and two day workshops on HubSpot or even video marketing. So my talk title was Seven Video Tactics to Help Sales Close More Deals. I actually lied though because I gave them 10, which was fun because we always have to over deliver, right? But we talked about the real why of why using video now, why it's important. And then I gave them 10 ways that they can use video in their sales marketing and service funnel because a lot of people will just talk about the type of video that you can create. They don't really talk about where you should be using that video to make the process easier. So let's talk about the why because most of the time when somebody says, well, why video? It's usually a stat, right? Somebody will be like, well, 80% of internet traffic is going to be video based by 2019 or 2020. And that just doesn't move anybody. They're like, yeah, okay. So it's a stat, thanks. So I really talked about five ways that you should be or why you should be using video to get the audience to understand why you'd want to use the 10 tactics. So the first one that I talk about is humanizing your brand, your personal brand and the corporate brand and how that you can go on video. They immediately start to see your face. They hear your voice. They see the nonverbal communication that happens with your hands and your face. That's how as humans, we start to trust people. And so you can gain a ton of trust by humanizing your brand. The other thing that I talked about is how you can disarm leads because you can use video like case studies or testimonials and allow other people to talk about you instead of talking about yourself because nobody likes that person that always talks about themselves. So let other people do it for you. I talked about how you can educate the consumer through the buyer's journey. I also talk about how you should use video to evoke some emotional response because people buy out of emotion, whether it's they or not buy actually. But if like they love the product or they feel joy or they're relieved because they see the solution to their problem, that's an emotion. And so many times we can use that with video. So so far we've humanized, we've educated, we've evoked emotion, we've disarmed. And probably one of the most important ones that I love is simplifying the complex. There are so many things that we think are simple because we deal with it one year, two years, ten years, we get so close to it, but we don't realize that our visitors, leads and customers, it's not simple for them or else they wouldn't have the problem and they wouldn't need the solution that we have. So those are the five real whys from a human standpoint of why you would do video. The tactics, I'll give you as many as I can remember because there are 10 of them. I start at the beginning and work my way through the whole funnel. And so if you're not using videos for prospecting, you should definitely do that because it's an easy way to get in front of them and personalize the video with their name, the company. And while you're doing this prospecting, you're also looking for a connecting point. So you might want to say, hey, I see that your business has grown and you've moved into a new location or hey, I see that you like old classic cars. I like old classic cars too. Or hey, I see that you went to school at a certain place. It's connecting and it's personalizing. But after the prospecting, what I think of is the follow ups in the process. So now they connect with you. You can follow up and you could send a long, you know, five paragraph email that nobody ever reads or you could send a video and a short little two lines saying, hey, just watch the video. It explains everything. And in this, you can educate them. You can also activate them to the next place you want them to go. And again, they start to see your face for another time. I also talked about how you should use it on your homepage. And this could be background video. A lot of people are already doing that. But I talked about hero videos and helper videos because what people need to realize in business is your job, the homepage of your website, its job is to get people to page two. And so many people are relying on links or buttons to do that. But you could replace some of that with a video. And then at the end of the video, have a CTA in where they're looking. You've got their attention that then takes them to the page that you want them to go to. Right. So that's three ways you can do this. I also start to think about the landing pages and thank you pages, the conversion points. Now everybody is talking about how to do it on landing pages, but nobody's really talking about how you can use video on thank you pages to again, personalize it with their name, give them the next direction that you want them to take and really give that emotional, heartfelt, human feeling that would happen there. So landing pages and thank you pages. But I also really kind of spun it in one part and I let the audience know that they could also change any page to their website to a lead conversion place using video CTAs. Now not a lot of people are talking about this, but we've used technologies like 23 to create these video CTAs. And what it is is you might be on a blog article that is like nine reasons you have the wrong video host. We might have a teaser video by the way to educate them and tease them into the blog. They might read that blog article and at the bottom it'll say something like, so do you have the right video host? And you're as a consumer like, I don't know, do I have the right video host? And so you click that button immediately. You put a collector or a form in there. They fill it out and now they can watch the piece of content there. Everybody needs to realize that's a great user experience because you bypass the landing page, you bypass the thank you page. It was just, I want to know, here's the content, man, we're ready to go. And then I'm going to give you two more that I think people really need to think about. One is meetings. So all of our meetings at Impulse Creative, they're video. We want to see the other people's face because we want to know if they're paying attention, if they're engaged. We want to see those body, nonverbal communications. You get to know them better versus looking at a phone icon or some other silly icon instead of their face. And it really engages in a human way, even though you might be thousands of miles away. And then I package these together, proposals and contracts. Because again, proposals and contracts can get super not simple. And so if you have videos in those, then you can kind of walk people through what you're actually talking about. And what's nice, a lot of times when you're doing business, it's a researcher that's getting this information and then it's handing it over to like the leader of the company. And they're trying to say the words that you said in the sales process. But trust me, they're jacking it up. They're not doing a good job. So if it's video, then you're actually getting FaceTime with that leader, even though you're not getting FaceTime with that leader. So those are some ways that they can use video in the whole process. Hey, video is awesome. If you follow those 10 things, and if you build those videos, there's going to be some that will be super personalized. So you'll only like use them once. Or if you do business with like three Chris's or four Ben's, maybe you actually can reuse them, right? So you have that little bank. But there's going to be enough that it's going to actually also make you scalable as a human being like the proposal and contract videos. They can go in 10, 20, 50 proposals and contracts. And you didn't have to have that conversation over and over and over again. Even in the follow ups, it's going to optimize your time because again, you can hit record, say what you got to say, throw it right in the email, send it off and you're done. And now you got more time to golf or play with your kids or do whatever you want to do. Well, first of all, they have to have the belief in themselves that they can do this, right? And so you have to have a mindset of, hey, video is the future. It's not a tactic. It's not a strategy. It's not a way to communicate. Once you get over that hurdle, you have to figure out some gear. And it's really if you already have gear, use that. Don't question what it is. Just start doing it. If you want to build up as you move forward, sure you can. But like say, for instance, all of my sales type videos that I do and even some of our production videos, we're using a very cheap like HD or 4k webcam, very inexpensive microphone. And it's really not about the gear. It's about the content. So have the mindset, get some type of gear and then just start creating them. That's really the best way to get started. My buddy Brian Fanzo says, just press the damn button. And it's true. Like you just got to get over yourself and realize this is going to pay in spades. Like it's just going to be a great thing. The webinars, first of all, I love when people say something's going to die or it's dead. You know, webinars are dead. No, they're not the way that we used to do them might be. So now what people are realizing is consumers, us, UI, we love authenticity. We love to be able to just see things that don't feel like they're that scripted. And so when I think about webinars in the future, I think about having a slide deck that might have a couple of slides. I think about us showing our face a lot of the time. I think of 50% of the webinar being like a live Q&A. So there's that interaction. So having a platform that will allow your attendees to ask questions or chat amongst themselves and actually see some of the things that might happen in that banter back and forth between the people on your webinar and pull into those nuggets. And here's the thing, making the webinars super relevant to the thing that they're trying to learn or the problem that they're trying to solve is going to be super amazing. Here's the other piece. It does come back to being scalable. So if you create a webinar, a lot of companies will create a webinar and it'll just go away. They'll throw it away or it'll be in some hard drive somewhere. And what they need to realize is they can take that webinar, they can put it in their video gallery that is hopefully filterable by webinars, tutorials, interviews. And people can put gates, lead conversion gates on those webinars and then be able to generate leads on content that they created a month ago, three months ago, six months ago. And if it gets to where it's old or needs updated, so you do another webinar and then you replace it and you move forward. But that's the thing, relevant and making sure that you're using it again and again and again for lead conversion. So I don't have a crystal ball. So this is a very difficult question. But what I immediately think of is I think marketers, sales reps, everybody in business, what their focus is going to be as we move forward and they realize that video really communicate that will be around long, longer than we think right now. People say, well, in four years, five years, what are we going to do? Well, I don't know. Maybe we'll be able to teleport to where they are and actually have a conversation. I don't see that coming. So it's going to be video, right? When I think past that, though, I think about it then comes about process, right? How do you do it where you don't have to spend time setting up tripods, putting up cameras, focusing on light? How do you do it where you don't have to focus on two hours worth of editing and it has to be perfect? How do you focus on it where you can hit it and publish it to multiple places in minutes instead of 30 minutes or an hour? How do you squeeze every ounce of time to be able to create it? The reason I think this is going to happen over three or five years is because it's the way that people have been doing it, i.e. myself, for two or three years that we're thinking right now. I can literally create a video and have it published to the internet in a 20 to 30 minute time frame and I'm done. And that's where businesses are going to go. They're going to realize it doesn't take a ton of time and it doesn't have to be expensive. Going past that, I'll give you one of the crystal ball moments. I think the augmented reality and virtual reality are going to get super interesting I don't know how that goes for business and how that goes for platforms like 23 or that people are in the video space, but it's very much a cousin of what we're kind of doing now. I'm super excited to be on the forefront and kind of see where we're going to go with it. I haven't figured out how to take a messenger or a Snapchat filter and really turn it into a ton of business, but maybe there is somebody out there that has. If I have like a cat ears, I haven't seen the ROI of cat ears yet.