YouTube the sales tool
You can’t have not noticed the rise of YouTube. From nothing 10 years ago to 2 billion views a day now. On average humans watch 15mins a day of YouTube content and a recent Forbes survey showed that 75% of senior decision makers in business are watching more video to inform their decisions than every before. Why?
Why do humans prefer to watch a video than read text? For surely its not in doubt is it. I would rather watch a short 3 min video about a company than read 3 mins of webpages. More people would rather watch a 90 min movie than spend 8 hours reading the book.
And that’s the first reason we should all be using video as a sales tool, you can impart more information in 3 mins of video than you will ever get in 3 mins of written content and decision makers don’t have the time to read for hours to make a choice. When we are coaching bid teams we counsel them against believing that the audience for their pitch have read the RFP, some will have but it’s a minority, who has the time to ready a 100 page proposal. They glance through it, look at the costs and maybe a few pictures and then turn up to your presentation ready to make a decision.
So it’s faster, its also more effective. Video requires the use of two separate areas of the brain; it processes information simultaneously on different modes, Sight and Sound or Phonetics and Vision. It reduces the effort needed to assimilate information and therefore is a significantly more effective communication tool, which is why we all want to go and present rather than call a client
So why aren’t we using it more
Apart from viral marketing (Look at the Tippex Bear advert on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8CFMPpzjBc ) there is very little corporate sales making it to the platform. That may be the problem, YouTube isn’t really the right platform for corporate. It’s not secure, it’s not controllable and unless your careful once your content is up, they own it! But even more reliable, more secure video platforms like Kulu Valley (the guys Apple use) don’t really get used for sales pitches.
The answer lies in the fact that YouTube content works because its amateur in nature. Kids, webcams and PC video editing, its cheap, quick and easy to create content if you don’t care about what it says about your brand. But if you do then it’s far from cheap, definitely not quick and often as complex as hell.
Until now! We decided to build a TV studio at our offices so that we could produce videos of client’s presentations quickly and easily but as we did the research we found that technically it isn’t easy to do. I thought that a good camera and a large plasma screen would work but it doesn’t, something about lights resolution, exposure but for whatever the reason it’s a non-starter. So we looked at green screen technology but while it delivers a good video, it’s amazingly difficult to use; looking at things that are not there, is counter intuitive and takes practice. We found that a 20 min video needed a day in the studio and at least 2 days in post production (sooo expensive!) to get a reasonable result.
Then we found Sight Deck!
OMG! Its fantastic, just a screen and projector, step in front give your presentation as normal and stream the result to the web. No post-production, no retakes, no hassel but OMG!
It’s the future though; once you’ve used it you want it. The content is professional, slick and takes minutes to record, it is everything you need to make great content.
We think its about making great presentations better.. take a great PowerPoint and broadcast it to the world..
See mine here https://www.youtube.com/user/m62net
