Every year brings us new opportunities and challenges that help us grow and develop ourselves so that we always fit in the market as a business. The year 2020 brought us a new vision about the world we live in, and with that, more developed ways to communicate, such as videos. In the last 600 years, everything was centred around the written word and a lot of iterations have developed from there, but now there’s been a shifting of places and video types of files have taken control over everything.

If you look around, you're starting to see all these different iterations of it, whether it's a little video bubble on your website, or a video email, or a video business card. All those are iterations of taking the old model and transitioning to the new.
- David Jay

We know that change is not always easy and it can be hard to understand, but there are some directions we have that can drive you on your way to success, using video communication in 2021. Here are some useful steps that we will guide you through, in order to understand how to communicate effectively for your brand.

videos-marketing-communication-2021-marketiu-digital

Create a community

Video communication is all about closure within distance and trying to get in touch with people, by seeing your face, your emotions, and expressions through a display. The first thing you want to do at the beginning of your business or at the beginning of your new video strategy is to start building communities. One important thing you want to take into consideration is building online forums, where you can answer one question with a video and hundreds of people can benefit from it. This is how you can grow your business: create a community, listen, understand their problem, create solutions that solve the problem, and work on the business and scaling it. And by that, video communication will get you closer and closer to your community by simply seeing your face, instead of a text message that can be, sometimes, misunderstood.

When you have a video conversation, we can disagree on things, but actually have a civil dialogue. That just doesn't happen with text. Nowadays, everyone reads the text with this negative slant. But when I see you on video, I'm like: Oh, another human, a brother. I can chat with this guy, even if we don't agree on everything. And that's a good thing for society.
- David Jay

2. Get that community talk about you

We know that the first thought when wanting to grow our business organically, are paid acquisition channels. Instead of that, focus your attention on video testimonials and explore this area that can get you a lot more credibility within your community or customers. Not only it will help your service or product be seen, but it will make you feel good as well, because they remind you of the value that you added, of the contribution that your product brought them. One way of requesting video testimonials is asking them: Hey, would you mind if we got together and I recorded a video testimonial of you talking about what it's been like to work together, or what it's been like for you, using our product? Not everybody will want to do that, but some of them will do. And these people will sit down, and take a second to think about something nice to say about you.

When they record that video and they say those words, now you've trained them how to talk about you, how to refer you. And now, when they talk to their friends, all those barriers are broken down, they already know how to do it, they've practised it. Maybe three or four times, some will record once, and record again, and record again. And now they practice three times how to refer you. -David Jay

3. Adapt your strategy to the market

2020 brought many businesses to a place where they had to rethink their communication strategy and adapt to the new ways of being seen and in contact with their communities. This is a place where a lot of us will be present at some point and all we need to do is to adapt and wait for the wind at our backs. Think of your business as a seed: we plant a seed, and it remains underground for years, maybe it's growing, you don't even know sometimes. And then, you get to see a little bit of it, and then it grows, and grows, and grows some more. Patience is very important. Launch your business quickly and see how the market reacts to it because when you work really hard on one project, you think it’s the best and you might get this arrogance and pride, thinking that this is the best solution and you are not flexible.

One bad thing that happens in businesses is the lack of communication and moments of listening to the customers’ needs and problems, that you can easily overcome by taking more time talking to them, and a great way of doing that is through video testimonials.

Don’t be afraid of failing, because you don't have to be right in order to win. Make decisions quickly, which then gets to the market, because the market gives you feedback and then you can adjust from there.

And when we spend all our time in an office or in our cave, or in our garage, building a product, and not trying to understand what the customers' problem is, we get further and further away from a business. - David Jay

4. Ask feedback using a video

In order to get your business model clear and useful for everyone, feedback is a key point that you need to take into consideration. Identify your customers and send them emails and from those emails, you’ll be able to refine the business, but don’t stop there! This process is long and certainly continuous, which will bring you to the point where you’ll send video emails explaining the problems that you're trying to solve, and ask for feedback on it. Align with them as experts. Say: Hey, you're the expert in this industry, I would love to learn from you. I'm building this to try and solve problems that I think you have, would you take a look at this? For sure you’ll find people that will be willing to help you and as they take a look, they invest in it a little bit more, they give feedback and that gets them aligned with what you're trying to do and they will become your early evangelists.

Using videos in your business will create a human connection with your community because everyone is thirsty for it. Our human kind is depersonalized and when we get in contact with a brand, we want to see something familiar and friendly, aspects that video communication will help you gain.

Let's work together!

This article is inspired by the conversation Andrei Tiu and David Jay had on one of the episodes from Marketiu podcast - The Marketing Innovation Show.