If you haven’t began thinking about using video to promote yourself or your brand, you should. And fast.
Video has truly changed the social media game.
For one, we are visual creatures. Over 65% of the population are visual learners. But even more importantly, we are BUSY. We don’t have the time (or prioritize making the time) to always read long articles or captions or read everything on a website.
This begs the question: how do you adapt to the fast paced, short attention spanned consumer? Have you ever heard the old filmmaking adage: show, don’t tell. Well, instead of a lengthy description of your service, SHOW them everything you would have explained in that lengthy caption in a short video.
It’s also important to identify your audience (content marketing 101). Think about what YOU like to get out of videos. You want to laugh, you want to feel enlightened, learn, or feel motivated to take some sort of action. Your audience wants this to! So give the people what they want, right?
PROMOTION
This is a good starting point to give your fitness facility or wellness center a voice. For example, gym’s tend to appear cold and uninviting to someone who isn’t accustomed to going all of the time. When marketing your facility, the tone of this video should directly coordinate with the type of attitude you want people to have towards it. The lighting, music, people involved should all be picked strategically to help create the tone you want. If you’re promoting an intense video showcasing the hard working sweat drenched athletes at your crossfit gym, pick music that coordinates with the grit displayed in the video and put in the extra effort to make sure all the factors in your video are really working together.
It’s really not a bad idea to invest in someone with experience creating video content. This video represents your brand, so you want to ensure it’s as aesthetic and professional as possible.
TESTIMONIALS
Testimonials, reviews, customer feedback — these are worth their weight in gold when it comes to promoting your fitness brand. There is nothing quite like showcasing the real results your customers achieve while working out with you or utilizing your service. This does not need to be a huge production, but rather an authentic real recording of someone explaining how you have actually impacted them. Yes, of course someone can just write a testimonial, but seeing someone’s face and hearing their tone of voice and emotion while talking about this is so much more powerful.
Try this: If you are a personal trainer, ask someone to record video of their before physique and their after physique and give them a discount on your training if they agree to let you share their results and a video of their testimony. So they get a discount, and you get to advertise the real raw results you can help someone achieve. Win, win. Another bonus of getting your clients involved via video is they are likely to share it on social media with friends and family. BOOM! Free marketing for you!
HOW-TO
Fitness how-to videos are a dime a dozen these days, but it’s because they work (Fitness Blender built their entire fitness empire on free instructional videos). Utilizing video is an interesting and intriguing way to help answer any outstanding questions you feel people have about the product or service you’re offering. Even more, when you put out informative videos and information without always asking for reimbursement, people tend to feel more comfortable investing in you. It may help drive home the point that you actually care about your consumer and not just what’s in their wallet.
Take the popular personal trainer and business owner, Katy Hearn, for example. While online training is extremely trendy right now, she is perhaps one of the most successful online trainers. She has dominated the social media fitness industry over the last 3 years and is still going strong. One of the things that really differentiates Katy’s training method from the rest of the oversaturated population of online training was her clever use of video. Online training can be very impersonal and monotonous. It’s difficult to connect with your audience and you can only describe types of workouts in so many words.
Seeing this as an issue, Katy came up with the idea to utilize a separate instagram page where she she just posted videos of how to do the workouts she includes in her training plans. When you purchase her plan, every single workout has a hashtag next to it along the lines of this: #khinsertworkouthere. So if it’s a front squat, it would say something like #khfrontsquat.
When you search this hashtag on instagram, it pops up a video of her doing the workout herself with cues and tips on performing it correctly. She has provided over 350 informative “how-to” exercises on this Instagram. She is likely confident giving out this much free information because she is aware that her transparent business model will actually help her gain and maintain clients.
Katy is a great example of an innovative way to use video for your business. You don’t always have to have the most aesthetic or creative content. Sometimes you just need to have good intentions and provide helpful information.
It’s hopefully pretty obvious the power that utilizing video can do for you and your company. It’s a perfect way to set the tone for your brand because you can better control how consumers perceive your message. When you just utilize written text, words and meanings may get misconstrued. Video is also a great way to promote your successes with real testimonials and it is a perfect platform to provide clear, informative content.
While you should be using video, you DON’T need to know how. Let us help you figure out the perfect videos for your company and work together to create just the right video marketing tactics.
OK AND… ACTION!