Emotional Marketing: How to Supercharge Your Results

If you’re a marketer who’s done any dabbling in video, you likely already know all about how important emotion is in your video marketing. Throw in some awww-worthy puppies or use some slapstick Three Stooges humor and you’ve got it made. If you can get your viewers laughing or crying, you’ve probably hit the jackpot, right?

Turns out, emotional marketing is a little more complicated. But don’t sweat – at Viewtopia, the world’s best video marketing summit, Chris Harmon of boutique consultancy firm theBATstudio gave a great talk on what’s really involved in emotional marketing, and how to take it to the next level to develop a real and lasting connection with your audience.

So what’s really involved? Even if you couldn’t be at Viewtopia in person, we’ve got you covered with exactly what you need to know! Here are 6 key points from Chris’s talk:

1. Empathy can have a significant impact on the success of video marketing

Marketers know that emotion in marketing is key. But it goes deeper than that; you don’t just want to settle for any old emotion. You need to create empathy! Empathy, as Chris puts it, lets your audience know that you understand who they are, and you feel their emotions and connect with them. Essentially, you understand and share your potential customers’ feelings.

Video is the perfect medium to express empathy – you can display emotion so much easier than in other formats, and elicit it in your audience. When they see what you’re feeling, they’re likely to feel the same. It’s science.

If you can go beyond just trying to make someone laugh to discovering their emotions, and then empathizing with them through your video, you’re more likely to hold your audience’s attention, speak to their needs and desires, and get better results. It’s a must that you get your company (and your execs) on board with moving beyond talking about “speeds and feeds”, as Chris says, and stop jabbering about your product to instead focus on how you will solve your audience’s problem. You need to show them that you can either alleviate their pain, or increase their sex appeal (a.k.a. give them something they really want). If you want to learn more about the secrets to emotional marketing videos, check out this post!

2. Learn to understand and empathize with your customer through their mindset

To create empathy in our videos, first we have to understand how our employees are feeling. Chris talks about the five steps that help you get to the bottom of it all:

• Customer voice – The customer voice is what a business “thinks” its customers believe. Many companies start – and stop – here when trying to understand and relate to their customers. It’s not fully effective because perception does not always equal reality.
• Reported activities – Through interactions with you, (also considered reported activities), your customers are telling you to some degree what they feel about you. (e.g. If they visit your website and bounce quickly, they’re telling you about their lack of interest and engagement with you.)
• Observed behavior – You can get a better, more honest impression of what your customers truly feel if you go where your customers are and watch them.
• Feelings and emotions – What are the emotions people are going through as they engage in behaviors with you? (e.g. looking at your website). Try to engage with them based on what they would be feeling during different actions.
• Pain/Pleasure – Remember that people think in terms of how they can avoid pain, and how they can gain pleasure. If you can tune your message so it answers those questions and provides the feelings your customers are looking for, they’ll have a stronger connection with you.

 

3. Demonstrate empathy through your content

When you know what your potential customers are feeling (and what they want to feel), you don’t need to force product-heavy messages onto your audience. When theBATstudio worked to create videos for Oracle Eloqua, they didn’t just create a bunch of product videos from their point of view.

Instead, they had Eloqua customers do the talking. Why? Because they felt the same things, went through the same struggles, and wanted to feel the same emotions and achieve similar things that potential customers do. That meant that potential customers could empathize with the customers and the customer-centric storytelling much better than they would relate to any brand-constructed message. These customer stories, which are still available on their website, achieve a great level of success because the key is to create a message that isn’t about you, but rather what you do for others.

4. Create an ongoing narrative

You can try to create a funny video over here for this campaign, and a tear-jerker over there for that landing page. But you know what’s a better idea? Creating an ongoing narrative that brings your viewers through a journey. This helps them connect deeper and deeper to your message (and you) as they are swept into your story. That’s what theBATstudio did with Lenovo when they created the “Users Happen” campaign. Watch the three videos in the campaign series to experience the continuous story for yourself:

Now, to create an ongoing narrative, you don’t need to have the same actors, set, or specific situation. In this case, Lenovo introduces a problem to relate to their IT audience, sets up a worse problem to create empathy and let IT people know that Lenovo really understands their ongoing pain, and in the final video, the IT workers are positioned as the heroes that solve problems and save the day. The narrative doesn’t focus on “speeds and feeds”, but rather on the hero’s journey, bringing the audience through a relatable and emotional narrative that ends with them as the star. The campaign, which helped potential users understand the ruggedness and reliability of Lenovo products, was a success: 85% of viewers watched the videos all the way through, and the campaign brought in 2,318 MQLs and $10 million in revenue!

5. Connect video engagement to business drivers

One of the key takeaways Chris emphasized in his talk? That you must connect the dots between your audience’s engagement with your videos, and your results. It’s not enough to create funny videos and have people watch them. As marketers know, just because someone watches a video doesn’t mean they’re willing or even interested in buying – they may just want to be entertained.

Look at your metrics to determine not just views, but how long people are watching, which videos they’re watching, what the click-through rates are, and more. While video is becoming more and more accessible to everyone, it’s still not as cheap to produce as a whitepaper or infographic. So if you can prove how your video marketing is impacting your business results, including MQLs and closed deals, then you’ll reach greater success.

6. Your video marketing can positively impact you – and your customers

One of the most interesting parts of Chris’s talk proved the full impact of video marketing. Working for the company that built the most powerful video marketing platform, I already knew how much it can do for businesses, and the impressive results companies can get when they use video. But when you create videos to educate your audiences and sell to customers, are you thinking about what those videos can do for your customers? I’m not talking about the direct impact of your video and your product on your customers’ business.

Chris shared an anecdote about how theBATstudio had worked with Oracle Eloqua on creating videos about how their customers are having great success with Eloqua. They were personal and created empathy because the viewers would relate to what the customers on camera were saying (see point 3). But the really interesting thing?  Almost 80% of the customers who were in the videos went on to become VP or CMO of marketing in their company or at another company within a year! What does this suggest? Possibly that video marketing helps you establish so much empathy that, if you’re on camera and talking passionately about what you believe in, you can build trust and credibility in your professional role. Video marketing clearly has an amazing impact not only on your own business, but on your customers’ lives!

Interesting, huh? If you went to Viewtopia this year, what was the most interesting thing you learned? If you didn’t get to go, there’s always next year, and in the meantime, check back on the blog or the Viewtopia hub for more takeaways from the best video marketing summit!

The post Emotional Marketing: How to Supercharge Your Results appeared first on Vidyard.

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Where the Action Is: Foregrounding Your Site’s Best Content

How do you organize your website? If you’re like many bloggers, you might have a landing page with a series of orderly category links, or maybe your home page just links to clips of the most recent posts in chronological order.

Both of these structures are very popular, but they aren’t necessarily the smartest ways to organize your website. Rather, why not welcome readers with the highest quality content and most popular posts your site has to offer? You wouldn’t go to an empty museum or visit the zoo to look at empty cages. It’s why people go zip lining in rainforests – zip lines run through the most active parts of the rainforest, the canopy. That’s where all the action is.

The same goes for your blog; by positioning your best material at the front of your blog, you encourage readers to engage fully and dig deeper. But first, of course, you need to identify what your top content is.

Check Your Stats

The easiest way to determine what content performs best on your site is by checking your page analytics. Google Analytics offers plenty of tools to help you do this effectively.

Make sure that when you look at your numbers, you aren’t just checking for the greatest number of page hits. In some cases, repeat edits or other insider activity can cause the page activity to jump. Luckily, with Google Analytics you can exclude specific tracking information – any hits resulting from editors or other specified users. You want to isolate page hits that come from external readers.

Make Time a Factor

It’s also important to use your common sense when determining what your top performing posts are. For example, a post from a year ago that has more comments or views than a post from two weeks ago isn’t necessarily a more popular post. Rather, an older post should have more views and activity.

When you select your most popular content, you should consider two different factors. Either you want to target those posts that show the greatest amount of initial engagement – the most views or comments in the three days, for example – or the posts with the greatest recent activity. It’s possible for older posts to experience renewed relevance or for them to be evergreen, attracting readers all the time.

Focus on Value

Depending on the kind of blog you run, your most important content isn’t always your most interesting. Maybe it’s an introduction to technical terms or background on your site that all readers should be familiar with. Although this content might not register as many hits via search or get as many comments as more interesting material, you may still want to foreground these foundational posts, or at least offer a roundup of these background posts on your landing page.

Ultimately, when organizing your site, you need to exercise your expertise – you know what’s in your blog’s complete archives, what information people find helpful, what they find interesting, and what posts are generally passed over. By helping your readers identify both the useful and the engaging in equal measure, you demonstrate a further degree of commitment to your audience.

Your blog isn’t just a platform, but a conversation, and curating your front page posts enhances your site beyond what the numbers can measure.

Original post: Where the Action Is: Foregrounding Your Site’s Best Content

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How Fear Held Me Back from Reaching My Potential

How Fear Held Me Back from Reaching My Potential

Episode: 288

Today’s episode is a deviation from what I’ve been doing for the last few months.

There’s no interview, and it’s not all about blogging, business, social media or any of the usual topics.

While I do talk about business, I get into something much deeper – fear, and how it has held me back for too long.

I share some struggles that I’ve been dealing with since starting my business. These are struggles that have only intensified over time.

And the truth is this – I’ve allowed fear to cripple my progress.

This is one episode where the show notes won’t be as detailed as I normally have them. Why? Because in order to fully grasp what I’m trying to share, you have to listen to it.

So go ahead and listen, and then leave me a comment.

Warning: This episode is different from my other episodes. While I do talk about business, I also go into the spiritual realm.

I talk about God, Christianity, my purpose, etc. If you don’t want to hear any of that, this may not be the episode for you.

Question: If fear were not a part of your life, what would you do differently?

The post How Fear Held Me Back from Reaching My Potential appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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3 Sales Emails Proven to Boost Reply Rates by 8x

If you’re like most sales reps, you know how hard it is to stand out and get noticed. The average prospect receives more than 100 emails a day, and you have just 8 seconds to get their attention. So how can sales emails cut through all the noise, increase click-through rates by 5x and send open-to-reply rates soaring by over 8x? Keep reading…

At Vidyard, we’ve been obsessing over how to reach our prospective customers in a way that not only grabs their attention and elicits a response, but also puts the ‘human’ back in selling. Automation tools and the rise of AI in selling, have made it incredibly easy to reach masses of prospective customers with seemingly hyper-personalized outreach. Inevitably, buyers have become numb to these so-called “personalized” emails, which is why our team at Vidyard has chosen to use video in order to connect with our leads via email.

Since our team began prospecting with video, we’ve seen our click-through-rates surge by 5x, and our open-to-reply rates jump to 25%.

Here are three easy ways you can use video for higher impact in prospecting and selling:

1. Webcam Selfie Videos

The first video email that’s going to help you stand out is a webcam selfie video. This sales email allows you to speak to your prospect directly. Think of this as a “video voicemail”, allowing you to put a face to your email and clearly articulate why you’re attempting to reach the recipient of your email.

Check out Heba’s webcam selfie video:

When coaching SDRs on how to create and send these videos, focus on the importance of authenticity and being genuine. Best practice is to not overly script these videos so that they don’t come across as robotic. Plus, people can tell if you’re reading – which immediately sucks the personal nature out of the video. Jot down a few key points, take one dry run and then go for it!

Pro Tips:

• Keep it short (60-90 seconds). The number of people who sit through a video greater than 90 seconds drops to just 37%.
• Use a pair of headphones with a built-in-mic to improve the audio quality of your video
• Set your laptop up in a windowsill to get better, more natural lighting on your face

2. Screen Capture Videos

Need to share more than your pretty face? No problem, share your screen in a sales email to capture attention and communicate more information.

Dave’s is a great example:

With tools like ViewedIt, you can quickly create, send, and track screen capture videos directly within your browser. Here are a couple ideas to help you use this approach to stand out and get noticed in inboxes:

• LinkedIn Profile: Craft a video walkthrough of your prospect’s LinkedIn profile, highlighting key aspects of their accomplishments that compelled you to reach out to them.
• Owned Content: Walk through their website or an article they wrote to show them that you’ve taken the time to research how you would be able to add value to their role or company.
• Product Tour: Capture a guided tour of your product or service created specifically for the prospective customer. Include their name, company, or logo in the demo to help them envision using your product.

The key here is finding the right thumbnail image or splash screen to include in your email. The thumbnail image can make all the difference as to whether or not your prospects click play on the video that you’ve made just for them. Better their LinkedIn profile or website than your product or website. Remember, this is about them, not you.

Just think: if you opened an email and your own LinkedIn profile was staring back at you, wouldn’t you be interested to hear what that video had to say about you?

Pro Tips:

• Start with a compelling thumbnail image that will capture the recipient’s attention by showing them the video is custom just for them
• Have all your tabs set up and loaded ahead of time so as not to waste precious time loading pages in your video
• Be mindful of what’s in your inbox if you’re showing your email (sensitive company data, customer names or email addresses), or what notifications might pop up if you’re sharing your whole screen.  

3. Recap and Repurpose Content

After you’ve connected with a prospective customer, sending a video call summary can be easier and more effective than typing up a long email.

Record a personalized thank you message that will help build rapport by putting a face to the voice your prospective customer just spoke with over the phone.

If you have multiple points to cover, put them on a slide and capture your screen on video to help keep the conversation focused.

This is also a great opportunity to re-purpose existing video content from marketing and sales enablement like customer testimonials, product overviews or how-to content. Jenn shows how she does this in the following example:

You can curate the best video content to help keep the deal moving forward, and personalize it to the prospect by recording a custom introduction video. The end result is a highly personalized follow up that leverages the best assets you have to offer – all in just a few seconds.

Pro Tip:

• Content without context is meaningless! Be sure to add context to the videos you’ve attached. Explain how they are applicable to the prospective customer and how they tie back to your recent conversation. This will make off-the-shelf video content feel super personalized and custom.

The post 3 Sales Emails Proven to Boost Reply Rates by 8x appeared first on Vidyard.

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Nothing Breaks Barriers Like Trust: Wise Words from Yotam Dor

When you ask someone what they wanted to be when they grew up, chances are the answer you get doesn’t exactly line up with their current day-to-day. But for Notch Video’s Director of Community, Yotam Dor, his career isn’t too far off.

Having spent his childhood making stop-motion animated videos with his parents Hi8 camcorder, Yotam followed his video aspirations straight to post-secondary education. “After completing my masters in film and TV at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I was hired by SCAD to run the Research & Development centre they just launched. Getting that position at the centre was like a mini MBA,” Dor told me in an interview. He stayed at SCAD for two years before returning to Toronto. While he didn’t have a position lined up, Dor took advantage of the opportunity to build a network.

“I scheduled hundreds of coffees and met with everyone in film, TV and advertising,  even though everything in those traditional mediums felt a bit confined — especially after seeing the big world of R&D.” Eventually Dor met up with the team at Notch Video, and joined on as one of their earliest employees. “I wanted to do something that broke through the clutter, and I got really lucky to land at Notch Video at the incubation stage. And I was able to help build it from the ground up with some very talented people.”

Dor now wears many hats at Notch Video, working with new customers on business development all the way to serving as executive producer on larger projects. He also works closely with Notch’s network of over 800 freelancers, spread out across the entire country.

To find out more about the world of video production, and learn how companies and agencies can work more closely together, check out these videos from the rest of our interview:

What’s your favorite part of working in video production?

When I started making stop-motion videos with my parents Hi-8 Camcorder, I thought I was going to be an animator, and I treated video like an art. More of a one-person endeavor. Once technology got a bit more democratized though, with non-linear editing systems, I started making movies that required multiple roles, and I got the collaboration bug. So today I would say my favorite part of working in video production is the collaborative environment. Because making videos is such a team sport, you really have to build the right teams for every project. Every once in a while, I’ll grab my cellphone and go into the field and shoot a mobile video just to scratch that itch, but for the most part it’s collaboration that makes me feel really fulfilled.

How has video evolved since you started at Notch Video?

We started Notch Video as a reaction to a broken system. When we started Notch over four years ago, we saw that there was this massive opportunity to create video content for digital channels. At the time, there were no such things as social videos or micro-content, so the spectrum was TV on one end, viral videos on the other, and nothing in between. Client expectations were all about eyeballs. Currently I feel the scrutiny on video and video data is less about views and more about engagement and conversion, but that’s all very early days.

Are there any industries that you see missing out on video?

It really feels to me like almost every industry is using video these days, which we think is great! But there’s this amazing development in the B2B video world that we get really excited about.

There’s an awakening that business and customers are made of — shockingly — people. And that people want to watch engaging stories. I feel it certainly came around when Van Damme’s Epic Split video for Volvo came out and it’s continuing with everything that GE is making. So I’m excited by the potential to see more exciting B2B content, because that’s an exciting area to create content in!

How can businesses and agencies work together better?

Businesses and agencies need to build trust on both sides. If there’s this sentiment that one side is smarter or better you just lose trust. The strongest client relationships are forged over many years by delivering time and time again.

And there’s always going to be better tools, stronger workflows, and all those things. But trust building takes so much time to build, and moments to lose. Nothing breaks barriers like trust.

The post Nothing Breaks Barriers Like Trust: Wise Words from Yotam Dor appeared first on Vidyard.

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How to Use a Blog to Sell Your Products Online

If you’ve ever thought about making money online, then you might have considered starting a blog or setting up your own eCommerce store. You don’t have to choose one or the other. They can both work hand-in-hand to help you make money online. Here’s a brief overview of how a blog can help you sell your online products.

Use it as a Marketing Tool

Blogging is primarily a marketing tool. The statistics show that:

• Business that blog get 67 percent more leads than those that don’t.
• Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI.
• Companies that blog see 97 percent more links to their website.

While you won’t make money directly off writing blog posts, the practice does boost overall profit by driving more traffic to your website. Blogging for eCommerce websites means there are more ways for people to enter your site. With more links back to your content, a greater database of keywords, and continuously updated content, you’ll also see higher search engine rankings, which will drive even more traffic to your site to improve your chances of converting leads and making sales.

Aside from traffic generation, blogging also helps you attract the right customer. Through helpful articles aimed at solving your ideal customer’s needs, you’ll bring in the type of people who are most likely to buy from you. The more you get noticed and build your authority through blogging, the more trust people will have in your site, and the more they’ll buy from you. Blogs are among the top five trusted sources online, giving you a chance to build relationships with long-time customers and build your brand.

The key to using a blog as a marketing tool is context. This is what draws the line between content and commerce. You want to choose topics that appeal to your target audience but can also be linked back to your product offerings.

Use it to Build Your Email List

Marketing experts agree that email lists are one of the most valuable marketing tools today. Expert Neil Patel says, “Out of all the channels I tested as a marketer, email continually outperforms most of them.” The stats show that:

• You’re six times more likely to get a click-through from email than from a tweet.
• Email is 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers than social media.
• Email marketing drives more conversions than search and social.

Here’s a good list of most popular email marketing services you can use. But how do you attract people to your email list? It all starts when you launch your blog. When you attract people to your content and they want more from you, they’ll sign up for your email list. It’s particularly helpful to offer a lead magnet, or a gift, to new subscribers. For example, you might offer a discount off their first purchase or a free gift when they sign up for your newsletter.

Once you have them on your mailing list, you can share deals, discounts, and more from your shop that you think will interest them. It gives you a direct line of communication to the people most interested in your products. And it works.

Offer Your Products as a Solution to Readers’ Problems

Blogging is not a direct sales platform. It is about offering useful information to your readers to build a relationship with them. However, you can organically mention and link to your products if it applies to the content. It’s not unusual to see calls-to-action in the last paragraph of a blog post offering your products as a solution. The key is to work with it in a way that comes across as useful, not as a sales pitch. Here are three ideas on how to incorporate this strategy.

1. Include a call to action. Let’s say you sell yoga products and videos. You could write a post on yoga poses for flexibility. At the end, you could mention using a yoga strap help you ease into the poses if you have tense muscles or are recovering from an injury. (Make sure to link to your yoga strap.) Your product is not the focus of the article, but it is mentioned as a solution to your readers’ problems.

2. Write a product roundup post. Here, you’ll mention several of your own products to drive people to your sales pages. But again, it has to be useful to the reader. For example, an online clothing retailer might write about “10 Trendy New Fashions Coming This Spring.” A few of their products will make the list, but it’s more about educating their readers and making useful fashion suggestions than trying to sell to them.

3. Highlight how to use your products. These posts can be in a tutorial format, which would work well if you’re selling phones or computers, for example, but it’s not limited to that. A clothing retailer, for instance, could write a post on five different ways to wear scarves, using one of their products as an example.

You don’t have to use this technique in every blog post Again, your blog is about building a relationship. Focus on that first and then on sales. The sales will come as you show your customers you care.

Tell Stories With Your Products

A great way to drive web traffic and sales is to use real-life stories to highlight what your products can do. A retailer selling hiking, camping, and survival gear could start a blog series detailing one of their team member’s adventures out in the backcountry. The blog posts would focus on the adventure and offer useful tips and advice for people wanting to travel themselves. However, each post would mention some of the products the blogger used on his travels—and yes, they’d be the exact same ones the retailer is selling.

The same could be done for retailers selling culinary products, in which they’d highlight a cook’s experiences in the kitchen using the products on their site. A company selling smartphones could have a team member blog about the camera tricks they used while on a recent snowboarding trip. A cosmetics company could blog about different customers’ experiences with their products.

Notice how all these examples tell a real story coming from a real person all while keeping the conversation on the company’s products. This helps create a more personal connection with your readers, and ideally it will provide them with tips and advice they can apply to their own lives.

Again, not every blog post you write has to follow this story-telling format. Consider using this tactic as a blogging segment with a set time frame for featuring each story. If you can tell a story in multiple blog posts, it encourages readers to come back for more.

With these ideas in mind, you can build an eCommerce site and blog that complement each other and boost your bottom line. Are you ready to get starting selling online? Then the first step is to set up your website. With the WordPress software, you’ll have everything you need to make a WordPress WooCommerce store and set up a blog on the same site. What will you sell, and what kind of blog posts will you write to help you make money online?

Original post: How to Use a Blog to Sell Your Products Online

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Authentic Marketing is More Than a Myth: The Right Way to do Real People Campaigns

We all hear the same buzzwords in every meeting we sit down in. We all say the same buzzwords, including them in our PowerPoint presentations and word clouds. But in this industry, I think we can all agree that sure, ‘authentic’ has become a buzzword we all know we’re supposed to say – but is anyone actually doing authentic marketing?

The idea that ‘real people’ supposedly equals authenticity is one I hear a lot in this line of work – the idea that content should include a specific demographic because “Look, there’s your key to seemingly-genuine content!” But it doesn’t necessarily have to be about finding a real family simply because that’s another box you want to tick off. It’s about finding a real family because they have a story to tell. Because they already have the creative to help drive your campaign. So you want to launch a real people campaign? Here are the top 3 things to keep in mind:

1. Find the stories that matter

Quakers 2015 spot The Recital resonated with me to the point that I continue to reference it a full year later. Why? Because the people in it told a story I wanted to watch unfold. I myself am a working dad. I get the struggles of work/life balance. This story struck a chord with me because it’s 100% relatable and real – not just the people, but the story too:

How to use this for your own videos: Like I said above, think about yourself as a consumer – what resonates with you? Find the stories that resonate because they are powerful stories, not because there’s a hyper-relevant current event that you should probably force a story line around. Talk to people. Cold call. Fall down every hashtag rabbit hole you can find and build your narrative around the characters you stumble upon.

2. Let the characters speak for themselves

It’s obvious when this isn’t the case — when the brand speaks for that ‘real person’. When you see that text on your screen proclaiming that this isn’t a set up, that ‘these are real people, not actors’ and then listen to some clearly scripted brand plug come out of their mouth while the product sits conveniently — and obviously — on screen.

So what’s the solution? Let the people speak for themselves. The power of Pedigree’s ‘Dark to Light’ campaign, for example, isn’t in the fact that a brand is showing us a real person, saying “Look at us! We’re an authentic brand!” The audience is moved because this is a human being letting us in on her life.

She has a story to tell – and this video empowers us to actually hear it.

On the same token, Jack Daniels’ Our Town is a cool example of a campaign built completely around the people and the tone they evoke. This is the tone that seemingly guides the creative; it feels natural, entertaining and is fun to watch.

How to use this for your own videos: Once you’ve found your story (see above), bring this character into the equation as early as possible so their story can help guide the ebbs and flows of the narrative. It’s much more challenging (and far less effective) to do it the other way around. Audiences are getting smarter and smarter. The ‘these are real people’ captions on a screen don’t cut it anymore. Audiences need to believe this is a genuine story they’re watching unfold, so don’t tell them with some text and forced narrative. Show them with a story they can believe in.

3. Understand that ‘real people’ aren’t actors

I mean, actors might go to 3+ callbacks a week. They know the drill. The average Joe might not even know what a callback is, and likely doesn’t want to go to an audition or callback in the middle of their workday for the chance of maybe being in a commercial. The entire process has to be different, and it isn’t about fitting real people into a mold you’ve previously developed. It’s about digging for the stories your brand wants to tell and and allowing a little flexibility to let them unfold.

How to use this for your own videos: Be flexible. Understand that timelines might be different, that headshots aren’t a thing, and that having a script you want ‘real people’ to read from might not translate into the most believable commercial. To put it bluntly, most people aren’t good at acting – so don’t get them to act in a commercial.

That’s the biggest takeaway here in my opinion, because ultimately the key to these kinds of campaigns doesn’t lie in finding a real person. It lies in finding the right person. And it’s about letting that person be exactly what you hired them to be: authentically themselves.

The post Authentic Marketing is More Than a Myth: The Right Way to do Real People Campaigns appeared first on Vidyard.

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