Making videos to promote sales can be a daunting task. One of the things you learn about humanity is that everyone has different tastes. The difficulty in appealing to people is summed up nicely by The Journal of The Association for Psychological Science where they say,
The problem is – and everything from fluctuations in the stock market to decisions between saving for retirement or purchasing a lottery ticket or a shirt on the sale rack shows it – people just aren’t rational.
Because of the irrationality of people’s choices in what they like, it would be impossible to make a video that appeals to everyone. However, here are a few tips that can help your sales figures grow by simply using old marketing techniques together with the new technology of online video.
Use Campaigns
Back in the days of print ads, campaigns could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Luckily, online video is free to produce, upload and share around. Creating an ad campaign based around a particular theme or trend is a good way to get your videos noticed and at the same time generate an interest in your product. Advertising’s effect on a vast number of people with differing tastes can be described very aptly by Jose Fernandez-Cavia who says of advertising,
It is without a doubt a discipline dealing with so many variables that any reductionist theory or model rarely reaches a satisfactory level of exactness or predictability.
Campaigns help to mitigate the taste factor when it comes to individual tastes from different people by allowing you to cover multiple bases with your ads.
Include a Call to Action
Internet SEO writers are familiar with the call to action. It is the bread and butter of SEO writing, and is usually the best way to engage the reader to do something. Usually included at the end of a piece, the call to action typically addresses the listener or viewer and invites them to do something that will benefit them. Good calls to action include signing up for your mailing list or newsletter, or visiting your blog or another video that is part of your campaign. Alternatively, some hosting sites (such as YouTube) include annotations and many marketers find that annotations at the end of a video make for a very good interactive call to action.
Don’t Pitch Your Sale
One thing that many people have become wary of is someone shilling a sale’s pitch. The well-practiced art of pitching a sale went out with the door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen of the fifties. To ensure that your video stands head and shoulders above the rest, do the one thing they won’t be expecting you to. Don’t ask them to buy anything. Sounds a bit counterproductive, I am aware, but using the video, you can easily make a case visually for why the individual needs the product you’re selling in their lives. The advantages of being able to have a video to assist your sales marketing comes from the fact that many people have to “see to believe”. The video allows them to do just that while at the same time saving a thousand words by simply giving them the picture.
Over time, you’ll realize that these sales techniques are not simply for online video marketing, but can be expanded to a number of print and media niches as well. All of them espouse the basics of marketing theory while at the same time retain a practical method of delivery that results in the closing of a sale. When it comes to a sales video, the numbers that matter the most would be the amount of sales it closes. Using these methods it would be extremely easy to increase that important number.