It is a crucial time to engage your business in the area of professional production and video making. It should be your goal to maximise your marketing strategy. Given the pace and direction that video marketing is heading, ignoring this opportunity is ignoring future success for your organisation. Consumers expect to see video content as part of any transaction that they make.
Social media and online video are here to stay, and the marketing opportunities they afford businesses are expanding. However, convincing your manager or any other stakeholder that video is the key to success, is complicated and fraught with hurdles.
Understand Who Your Key Stakeholders Are
One of the biggest hurdles in selling video marketing to any stakeholder is knowing who those stakeholders are. Identifying whom you will pitch your video marketing solution is crucial and will vary depending on the size and structure of your organisation. Furthermore, knowing how each stakeholder works at both a practical and emotional level will allow you to target your message.
Some organisations have never used video as a marketing tool before, and this may meet the barriers of cost and change. Professional video marketing does have a relative value associated with it. However, the return on investment far outweighs upfront pain.
Let Your Data Support Your Sales Pitch
Data is king in terms of understanding how everything we do relates to our business purpose. Employing the use of video marketing allows for a significant amount of analytical data to be available. Therefore, to improve your ability to engage and win over stakeholders, use data to show how video marketing improves business outcomes. Show how video enhances brand awareness, customer loyalty, sales conversions and traffic to your site or business. Show how competitor’s results have improved through the use of video marketing. Furthermore, use video to showcase this data as a means to emphasise its effectiveness in engaging a target audience.
Harness the Emotional Stakes of Video Marketing
A golden rule of marketing anything is to appeal to a person’s emotions, and the same is true in selling video marketing to stakeholders. Decision making, at any level, requires emotional inputs and considerations. Therefore, understanding and pitching to each stakeholder involve an understanding of what they desire to make change possible. Convince them their needs will be met through convincing arguments. Further to this, demonstrate what your actual customers are seeking and how this relates to the overall marketing strategy. Identifying gains and what is at stake is also a great way to meet stakeholders emotional needs to implement change.
Know the Possible Objections
Using your team’s marketing prowess, anticipate the potential roadblocks to your overall pitch. Ask how will each stakeholder likely react to what you are proposing. Demonstrate the use of video a game-changer for the future success of the business? Pull apart every possible argument and be ready with both data and responses to emotive objections to breach any gaps in your plan. If a key stakeholder is Finance, then prepare supporting data and success stories about ROI, cost benefits and future projections of success.
Your Customers Need Your Video Marketing Skills to Help Share Their Vision
Your customers are demanding that you employ professional video marketing strategies and applications. They want to know more about your products, services and brand through video. Therefore, it is your responsibility to ensure that your business can meet those needs in a way that market leaders are embracing.
To stay ahead of the game, you need to engage your management and other key stakeholders. Then provide them with the incentives necessary to implement what may at first be a difficult change for them. Your customers will thank you through brand ambassadorship and higher levels of business outcomes.
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