Video is a powerful tool for expressing your brand. It allows you to deliver a complete communication and ‘be there’ when you can’t be. Once a nice-to-have, today a video bio is an essential personal branding tool. With online Video accounting for 74% of all online activity, it’s a figure you can no longer ignore – video is a must. For more facts and figures on why video is so important in business marketing today, watch our video here.
To ensure the videos you produce for your business accurately represent your brand and enhance what you have to offer in the minds of your current and potential customers, we have put together our top tips.
Know Your Message and Take a Stand
A video bio is not a video resume listing your experience and credentials. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate your personality, point-of-view, beliefs, expertise and how you endeavor to deliver value.
Be Brief
Best practice is to create a video that remains within 60 seconds long. People are unlikely to watch until the end, so try and make sure the most important points are covered first. If you haven’t covered everything in the 60 seconds, you can cover it in your next post (i.e. Part 2). It’s a good idea to leave people wanting to come back to learn more.
Think Quality, Not Quantity
Invest in one high quality video bio with great content, perfect lighting and crisp sound over a series of less than stellar video postings. Your video says a lot about your brand – make it scream quality!
Dress Appropriately
Keep in mind your personal brand and stay relevant to your target audience. Bright colours, patterns or stripes will distract from your message, so try to avoid these. Plain, monotone colours will work best on screen.
Choose Your Backdrop Wisely
A professional, more personable approach, can be achieved with slight tweaks to the background of your video. What’s surrounding you in the shot? What you have behind you speaks about your brand. For example, a messy desk with stacks of books in the background might say more about who you are, than what you are talking about. An outdoor setting can be the perfect way to illustrate a relaxed approach but may prove difficult as surrounding noise is hard to control. Be aware of these elements, as they have the potential to distract the viewer away from your message.
Hire the Professionals
Make an investment in yourself, your career and/or your business, by investing in high quality video content. It could be staff bios or drone footage of your warehouse. A great showcase of your business or staff is an extremely effective marketing tool. An excellently produced video can be used on social media, your website, television commercials and more!
Maximise Video Distribution
Post your video to multiple video sites (i.e. YouTube and Vimeo), including your own website. Now that you’ve expended time and effort in producing your video bio, maximise the return on that investment by making sure it gets seen by those who need to know you and your business offering. Make it a video blog (aka VLOG) and promote it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Be sure that the sites to which you choose to post your video are targeting a relevant audience.
Smile!
… and be yourself. Often, I find clients will look back at the recording and be disappointed because they have been concentrating so hard that they come across as angry or nervous. Practice the script so it comes easily and you can inject your own personality. Video gives you the opportunity to show people the real you and allows you to build emotional connections with your viewers – make sure you take advantage of this.
At Chilli, our sister company Pepper Productions can help with everything to create a phenomenal video. From your script, what you wear, the location and help you to roll out over digital media. Visit the Pepper Productions website, call us or pop in for a coffee to find out how you can benefit from video.
