Helping your Customers by using Video Promotion

Are you and your business missing an opportunity by not using video promotion? This short piece below is directly related to a recent Vivid blog about using video promotion to answer questions, but includes my own personal real world experience.

Car seat pre-conversion

Car seat post-conversion

My Experience

Please picture the scene, I am un-boxing my child’s car seat. My lounge is now more cardboard and shrink-wrap than an actual usable relaxing area. I reach for the instructions, so that I can convert the car seat’s size to one appropriate for my four year old girl. I start to read the instructions and quickly find myself frustrated by my inability to understand what to do. Nothing I am reading makes sense to me and the accompanying drawn images are not enough for me to rely on. I quickly stop this pointless task and do what every other person does next, I open my laptop to search the internet. I am hoping to find a relevant video on YouTube.

YouTube is there to Help

I navigate to the manufacturers sites to see a series of videos. Great, this should be quick and easy. I watch a simple but slickly produced video on how to put the car seat into the car. Ok that was helpful, but what I really wanted to know is how to convert the car seat to an age appropriate setting. Scanning through their other videos brought further disappointment. It seemed there was no demonstration on how to do this complex (for me) seat conversion.

Missing an Opportunity

Why would a company do this? Why would they miss out on helping their new customers and making the whole post sales process so much easier? It turns out that the only video I could find, was a mother who had taken the time to produce a poorly shot but extremely useful video. I managed to get the child seat converted but it was not the company that had helped me but a random stranger. This overly long prologue leads me to the point of the blog. My impression of the company is that they manufacture high quality products that will keep my child safe. It would appear that they do not assist the consumer (me) once they have made their purchase. I had to rely on someone else’s endeavour to answer my question. This is where in my opinion, the company is missing an opportunity. An opportunity to cement a favourable relationship with their customers.

Someone Else Controls your Message

What they have done is place a key company’s message about their product in the hands of a mother without even a tripod. This mother could obviously see how frustrated other people were with the lack of information and took it upon herself to help. As we all know, all messages should be controlled by your company and for a small cost of a simple video commission, this problem could of been avoided.

What Vivid did Next

We then took it upon ourselves to shoot a simple video, to help people in a similar situation. The video was extremely quick to film and edit and we hope that people find it useful. It does not have to be a costly and grand video production commission. A lot of the most watched and helpful videos are someone in their bedroom talking about what make-up they like. Of course the powers that be, insist I extol the virtues of using a high quality video production company to really complement your company’s brand image.

What to do Next

I believe that the company should produce additional videos that clearly demonstrate how to change the car seat over. Also for any pre-sales questions a simple presenter led series of Q&A videos would facilitate the consumer to make a purchase. They could then use these video assets to provide a comprehensive pre and after sales service. This could also carry on to market their products for future purchases and any recommendations to colleagues, friends and family. So I ask you, is there an element of your pre or post sales process that has not been taken into account? If there is, what communication tool would provide the correct information (it does not have to be video, but it helps) to the customer?

Benefits of Video Q&A videos

Here is a selection of the benefits available:

1. Simply answers customers questions and provides a more positive impression
2. Can be used pre and post sale
3. Demonstrates your authority
4. Can be used on website and numerous other video sites like Youtube
5. Puts customers at ease with their purchase
6. Can you be used in both on and offline promotional channels.

If there is any questions or ideas you may have, we are here to help. Why not give a member of the Vivid team a call on 0161 477 2404 or leave a comment below. To find out more about our video production offering please click on Vivid’s video production page. To read more blogs about different aspects of video promotion, please click on our video promotion blog.