I have a special gift for you today
Americans spend about 11 hours a day, every day, staring at screens.
We spend more time staring at screens than we do working, eating, reading, playing sports, working out and even sleeping. Screen watching has become our number one activity. We are a nation of Olympic Class screen watchers.
What has driven this, more than anything else, is your phone. Your phone is not really a phone. It is a portable screen.
Just look around you. People walking down the street are staring at their phones. People in restaurants are staring at their phones. Your family in your own home are staring at their phones.
If you have a business and you want to reach your clients, then you have to on those screens. In the old days, you might buy an ad in the local newspaper. People used to read the paper on the subway. Have you ever seen anyone doing that? They are looking at their phones.
And if you are going to be on those screens on phones, then you had better be in video. Video is the way we communicate on screens. Of those 11 hours spent staring at a screen every day, eight of them are spent watching video.
It used to be that video production was both complex and expensive. This is no longer the case. Those same phones that put a screen in the palm of your hand have also put a broadcast quality video camera, edit software and a veritable broadcastiing system there as well. In fact, the video power of your phone would have cost you about $10 million only a decade ago. Today, it is nearly free.
Now what are you going to do with all that extraordinay power? Here are five great ways to use video to grow your business:
- Customer Testimonial Videos : TripAdvisor, Yelp and Zagat, among others, have a lot of traction in the online world because they don’t present ‘expert’ opinions. Instead, they present the opinions of people just like your customers. People trust other people’s suggestions and experiences.
- The Grand Tour: These are small self-contained videos that show how someone has used your brand or your product to solve a previously intractable problem. This kind of video can be extremely effective in driving sales.
- The Process Video: Nothing sells a product or a service better than showing someone ‘how what you do works, and it works well’. I am going to show how to shoot great videos that take any project from zero to finished – it’s the same basis as every home remodeling or make over show on TV, except you can do it now on your phone.
- Going Live: Going live is powerful. It is exciting. It carries a sense of something really special happening. (Just look at how frequently news carries the Breaking News banner – even when it isn’t). Going live gets the adrenalin going. Going Live used to cost a fortune. Now, you can do it on your phone for nothing.
- Personal Messages: How many times have you had the feeling that ‘if I could only talk directly to my customer, one-to-one, I am sure I could get them to buy my product or services? Well, through the miracle of smartphone screens and video, you can. What is more intimate than you speaking directly to your viewer/client, eye to eye, as they hold you in the palm of their hand – literally.
At TheVJ.com, I you can learn how to use your smartphone to do this and much more.
