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Written by: Christina Farrelly
You may have been considering video already.
Certainly incorporating video in your communication mix makes sense if you want your brand’s messages to really stick with your audience. So I was curious to understand how we could help clients with video given my experience in TV production. BlueChip allocates an ongoing professional budget to each team member so I used mine to find out how financial services marketers could make the most of video. Research by Insivia revealed that viewers retain 95% of a message that they have consumed in video, compared to a mere 10% retention of written text. This makes sense when you consider the countless studies proving that our brains are wired to learn from storytelling rather than reading facts, and that establishing a personal connection is vital to connecting with your audience. In fact, research conducted by Cisco projects that by 2022, 82% of all internet traffic (both business and consumer) will be derived from video content. It’s not a medium to be ignored. So, how can financial services marketers strategically leverage this digital trend to engage prospects and clients effectively? Based on what I learnt in formal training and my time working at Endamol Shine, here are the four key steps to developing and implementing a successful video marketing strategy.1 - Establish your business goal – Ask yourself, what’s the ideal outcome you’d like to achieve?
Like other business plans, you can’t create an effective strategy without outlining a specific goal for the campaign. In asking yourself what the number one desired outcome is from a marketing campaign, consider which stage of the customer journey you are looking to impact:- Lead generation
- Creating brand awareness/building a personal or brand reputation
- Conversion
2 – Use this goal to inform your video content
Lead generation The goal here is to create content that is useful and valuable to the audience you’re trying to attract i.e. your ideal client. By creating material that is useful and informative, you are establishing yourself as an expert in your niche. The audience may not need your help right now, but as you’ve already provided value and therefore built trust with them, you’ll be top of mind when they do need someone in the future. Creating brand awareness/building a personal or brand reputation The goal in this stage is to nurture the traffic that your lead gen work has delivered to your website. You want to introduce who you are, what you do, and what you can offer to the prospect. Ultimately, this stage is about communicating who you are as a business and your unique value proposition. Conversion In this final stage your aim is to build trust. Why should the potential client choose you over a competitor offering a seemingly similar product? The key here is to establish an emotional connection through storytelling. Buying is an emotional process justified with rational data. Video is the perfect medium for showcasing the humans that power your brand and with whom your target audience want to feel they have some sort of relationship. Video allows you to build those relationships at scale.3 - What does this content look like?
Lead generation The value-adding, educational video: These highly-engaging snippets should establish you as the expert in your field. It should:- Be under 1 minute in length
- Be educational not salesy – do not use first person, do not talk about your services or company with the exception of a call to action at the end e.g. “for more information please see our website”
- Have a simple structure related to an area of your expertise e.g. 3 key takeaways for advisors from the recent regulatory changes, minimise your downside risk by applying these 4 tips
- Include subtitles as viewers will often be watching on devices in public without the use of headphones
- Be part of the regular content you share on your social media platforms or eDMs – weekly is ideal
A LinkedIn post explaining why not to be clickbaity. This is affective because he is good talent – clear and engaging, it includes subtitles, is short and has a clear point, offers the viewer a useful tip, is not self-promotional.
Creating brand awareness/building a personal or brand reputation
The profile video: This is used to answer two questions – who are you and why should I buy from you?
It should:
- Be 1-1.5 minutes in length
- Not use first person language in the first paragraph
- Be professional and high-end in appearance to reflect your business standards
- Communicate your values through message, images, and quality of production e.g. integrity, attention to detail, people focus, etc.
- Explain your unique value proposition – what lifts you above your competitors?
- Briefly but clearly explain your services and why you want to solve problems for your clients
- Leave the clients wanting to learn more about you and the services or products you offer them
- Be anywhere from 5 – 20 minutes in length
- Be able to be repackaged as shorter clips which can be shared on social media and the content can atomised as a PDF cheat sheet to be downloadable, shared via eDM, or posted as a photo on social media
- Address key problems or questions your clients have
- Be helpful, not salesy
- Be 3 minutes or less in length
- Feel authentic and genuine
- Be shared across all channels in video form – attracting more views and interactions than a text post
- Be included as a link at the bottom of all traditional text releases
- Be between 2-5 minutes in length
- Showcase an ideal client of yours – the sort of client you’d like to clone!
- Focus on the client’s success and business, not your own
- Be professionally produced, just like the profile video
- Should be filmed at the client’s office/place of work
- Feel authentic (and therefore cannot be scripted)