How to do a why-buy video — Profit Wise Book

Your most profitable marketing medium is your website. With a little imagination and enough effort, you can generate sales at a modest cost. Not only do most people buy things directly online, they also start researching and selecting items they will buy from brick-and-mortar stores. Beyond the obvious basics, a good website showcases your products in an appealing way and tells the story about why someone should choose your business over another.

Take a look at yours—does it compel prospective customers to do business with you instead of a competitor? Does it speak to them rationally and emotionally? I’m frequently surprised at how little effort many companies invest in their websites. Perhaps business owners are just too overwhelmed with all their other responsibilities to focus on acquiring more customers. I remember what that burden felt like.

If upgrading your whole website seems impossible, then just do this one thing that will make it a lot more personal and appealing—hire a videographer to film a video at your store that captures the key reasons to choose you. Even if you already have good text and photos, many customers prefer to watch a video.

You can see ours by clicking on the video still image at the top of this page.

Recommendations:

Hire a professional. You’re unlikely to produce a good video by yourself. We found a small, local firm through Thumbtack and they charged us $2,000. Depending on your revenue stream, that might sound like a lot of money, but it’s worth it. And unlike other marketing expenditures that run once and disappear forever, this “evergreen content” can live on your website for years (until it eventually becomes dated).
To extend the usable life of the video, try to avoid anything that dates it, such as seasonal decorations, piles of snow, or references to particular products and promotions.
Ask your videographer to make it authentic rather than sales-y. Include as many of your team members as possible; many will appreciate the attention and will be eager to share it with their friends and family. We thought our video celebrated the team so effectively that we debuted it at our annual team appreciation party.
Keep it short. When potential viewers look at the run time, they might skip watching altogether if they need to make too large of a time commitment. Three minutes is probably ideal, but if you have a lot of compelling material you can stretch to no longer than five. We edited ours down to 5:01. You be the judge of whether we went too long.
Brand your introductory footage with your logo, trademarks, or signage. You want customers to remember your company.
Focus the content on the benefits to the customer of doing business with you, not bragging about how great you are. Team members talking about the business are more credible than owners and managers. Plus, your customers will actually meet those front-line people.
After its done, get all the mileage you can out of it.
- Put in on various pages of your website to increase the likelihood that customers will come across it: product pages, contact page, about us page, etc.
- Post it on your social media pages.
- Link to it from all your company email account signatures. Example: “See our special team in action.”
- Include the link in when you send promotional batch emails to your customers.