Tips On Using Videos to Connect With More Ideal Customers

Video continues to grow as one of the most powerful tools for connecting to more prospective customers and to connect more deeply with your existing customers.

Here are a few statistics about video that should make you sit up and take notice:

• YouTube is the world’s second largest social media site, with 800 million unique monthly visitors, and the second largest search engine. {YouTube.com}
• About 46% of people say they’d be more likely to seek out information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video. {Blog.Eloqua.com}
• More than 60% of consumers will spend at least two minutes watching a video that educates them about a product they plan to purchase, and 37% will watch three for more than three minutes. {MarketingCharts.com, 2012}

Now think about the single biggest competitive advantage that boutique businesses have ~ the power to connect on a personal, emotional level with our customers. What better way to make a personal connection online with our customers and prospective customers than with video?

Here are some ways you can use video to make your marketing efforts more effective:

Introduce Yourself

Create a short video of yourself and each of your key team members, introducing yourselves and add it to the About Us page on your website.

Team members of Salutations, a retail stationery company, tried their efforts here – answering the question, “What do I love about working at Salutations?”on video. Check these out here: Valentine’s Day blog post

Share the Love

Ask a few of your ideal customers if they mind if you video tape them while they get the first glimpse of their purchase as you deliver it to them.

What better testimonial could you share than capturing the smile that spreads across the face of a customer? Make sure you time your videos right for your unique business / audience.

Heard it Through the Grape-Vine

Have you heard about Vine? Vine was recently introduced by Twitter and has created quite a buzz already. It is an app that allows you to capture 6-second videos and easily share them on social media.

As a way to check out Vine, check out this short video on Facebook with a fun blurb.

Where the Magic Happens 

Create a behind-the-scenes look of the inside of your boutique, your team at work, or a product being created by shooting a quick video and sharing it on your blog or social media.

With so many free and inexpensive tools available today, you can create a video and post it online in minutes {literally}. You can use a video camera built into your laptop, a Flip video camera, or an iPhone, iPad or other device and then upload it to YouTube and ~ voila! ~ you’ve created a video. Or use the new Vine app to make it even easier. You can then add those videos to your website, your blog, and your Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter accounts. In this way, you can quickly begin connecting with your customers on a whole new level.

What do you think? How many ways can you think of to use the power of video in marketing your boutique? Please let us know by leaving a comment below.

Article contributed by Holly Bretschneider,  President & Founder of BoutiqueProfits.com and President & Chief Style Officer of Salutations, an award-winning stationery and invitation boutique with two locations in Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina. Recognized as the 2011 Trendy Stationer of the Year by Stationery Trends magazine in the first year the award was created, Bretschneider opened her first boutique in 2002.