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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Women in Sales Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales on April 12, 2021. It featured sales leader Viveka von Rosen from Vengreso.]
Register for the May 7 IES Women in Sales Leadership Forum here.
Find Viveka on LinkedIn here.
VIV’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “When you share video posts on LinkedIn, you get engagement there. You get people commenting, and that gives you an opportunity to start a conversation. Video can absolutely help to drive leads back to your website, back to your calendar link. Basically, whatever you want to share with people. And it’s a great way to tap into new audiences, especially on LinkedIn. Because think about it, you share a post, it happens to get a lot of visibility. Someone, maybe a POC, a Point of Contact at one of your named accounts sees that video and starts multi-threading it through their buying community. To where you’re suddenly in front of, not really, but your video is in front of seven out of the nine members of the buying committee. And that has built that KLT (know, like, trust).”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Viveka von Rosen: What I want to talk about today is you, mostly as B2B sales leaders, B2B sales professionals, business owners.
You probably know that video is important, and you’re probably like, yes, and my marketing team can take care of that, if you’ve got a marketing team. But I want you to understand how important video is for B2B sales professionals, i.e., you. And why you really might start considering adding more video into your social selling, and in particular, on LinkedIn.
Because as B2B and as sales professionals, LinkedIn is kind of still where it’s at. Especially with how things have changed with the pandemic. LinkedIn views have gone up, I think probably all of you have noticed. Raise your hand if you’ve noticed that your LinkedIn views have gone up.
We’re not doing conferences and trade shows, or even site visits right now, and so it’s really important that we get that networking in. And one of the best places for business networking, of course, is LinkedIn.
And what’s really interesting is, I don’t know if you saw the McKinsey article back at the end of 2020.But they interviewed a bunch of high-end B2B buyers. 50,000 + price range B2B buyers. And they were like, you know what? I think we’re going to stick with the way things are right now. Even when things open up, even now with the vaccine. I think I’ve got like two live events booked for later on in the year.
Even with that going on, B2B buyers are like I like working out of my basement office in my stretchy pants. [Laughs] I’m not so sure I want to start jumping on airplanes again and traveling two or three weeks out of the month. So B2B buying and selling is going to remain virtual, I think, for a long time to come.
So it’s really important that we make sure as we are engaging on social, that we get that video aspect to it. Because LinkedIn is black and white. Well, it’s color because you get your background images and everything. But there’s not a lot of who you are in your LinkedIn profile and in your engagement because it’s mostly text-based.
Except for the fact, of course, that we have all of these new video options too. So that’s really what I want to talk about today, how to build your brand using video. How to build more credibility using video. And, in fact, how to build your business with video. Does that sound good? Should we move forward?
Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely. I am super excited about this because there are aspects of video that I would like to incorporate into my profile about the leadership forum and even use pieces of testimonials. I’m really looking forward to this.
Viveka von Rosen: Awesome. And we’ll take a look at your profile, and we’ll brainstorm some ideas, and that’s what I want the people in the audience to be doing too. I’ll be showing obviously examples from my profile, but I want you to be thinking about okay, how can I do something like this on my profile?
And I get that a lot of people are uncomfortable with the camera. But the fact is back in the day, when we were meeting people face to face, we’re not walking into their offices with paper bags on our heads, right? [Laughs] I mean, some days I felt like it, but we were dressed. We had done our hair, we’d done our makeup, those of us who are female, and some men.
But we were dressed, and we would take the time, and we would do our research, and we would go into the appointment. But what’s weird is somehow with Zoom, and working in our offices, and sometimes being dressed and sometimes not. And sometimes turning on the camera, and sometimes not, we’ve gotten a little bit lazy around video.
Around being seen, I guess, and what I want people to realize is yes, you might have to make the effort of getting dressed that day. And it’s a lot less comfortable, I get it, talking to a camera as opposed to talking really to Gina across the desk. But you can get into the practice of that, and that’s really all I want you to do.
I wanted you to take who you were, your personality, your charisma back in the day when we used to meet people face to face. And just take that and put it on LinkedIn in a way that will build that KLT factor, that know, like and trust factor. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today, and different ways to do it.
Gina Stracuzzi: Awesome.
Viveka von Rosen: Obviously, we know video was hot before COVID, and it’s hotter now because it is. It’s one of the few ways that we can actually give people a sense of who we are. And I have a feeling this statistic was back in like 2020, that they were saying in 2022, experts believed that video consumption was going to go up to 82%.But I think it’s probably going to be even higher than that next year.
But still, that’s four times as much video is going to be seen. Four times as much as just web browsing and email. For those of us in the B2B sales role, video isn’t just for our marketing teams. It’s not that we can’t get our marketing teams to help us out and create great video that we can share. But we need to be creating our own video. And it’s not that you have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on like a video studio.
You can use your phone, you can use some very basic equipment. What’s most important is that people see us and start to engage with us. And another fact is 90% of customers say that video helps them make buying decisions.
Gina Stracuzzi: Really? That’s pretty high.
Viveka von Rosen: Right? I thought so too. We know about Yelp, and we know about referrals and recommendations, and those are all very great ways of getting conversations with our clients. But if our buyers are using video to help them make decisions, then we need to make sure that we have that video out there for them. And again, most of this video that’s being consumed, your marketing team’s going to create.
Maybe they might ask you to share it in a post. But there are some places where you’ll be able to create your own video, And we’ll talk about some different types of video that you can create. That you’ll be able to share that is more meaningful, actually, to your buyer. Now another stat here, 59% of senior executives say they’d rather watch video than read text. Isn’t that crazy?
Gina Stracuzzi: Yes. And it’s a little scary, to be honest because I think our ability to read and focus on anything is just diminishing at a crazy pace. So while it’s good for purposes of this discussion, it’s also a little scary too.
Viveka von Rosen: It really is. And things like the rise of Tik-Tok. Back in the day, i.e., 2019, we thought Snapchat, that’s for kids. Who’s ever going to Snapchat? Videos that disappear, 10-second videos? That has no use case whatsoever in the B2B business world. And then yet here comes Tik-Tok that makes an entire social network. We all know what happened, it just exploded. And a lot of B2B people are starting to use Tik-Tok. Now, my husband still just watches it, he says for stock tips, I don’t know. I think it’s for the cute girls dancing.
Gina Stracuzzi: Now that’s one thing I haven’t heard about, stock tips on Tik-Tok. I think I’d be a little leery [laughs].
Viveka von Rosen: Right? But it’s just to say, again, raise your hand if you had totally discounted Tik-Tok as a possible B2B forum for your sales engagement. And yet, it’s super popular. And again, it’s probably just because of the video aspect of it and people craving that. Even if it’s someone else on a screen that you actually don’t have any relation to whatsoever, we still crave that type of engagement, and so Tik-Tok is serving that.
But again, I get that most people on this call are not going to be on Tik-Tok, or interested in Tik-Tok, which is why we’re going to be talking about LinkedIn here. But the reason we want to use social video is it is, as I’ve mentioned earlier, a great way to build your brand. A great way to give people a sense of who you are. A great way to build credibility that you actually know what you’re talking about. A great way to build that KLT, that know, like, and trust factor. A great way to create that engagement.\
When you share, say, video posts on LinkedIn, you get engagement there. You get people commenting, and that gives you an opportunity to start a conversation. Video can absolutely help to drive leads back to your website, back to your calendar link. Basically, whatever you want to share with people. And it’s a great way to tap into new audiences, especially on LinkedIn.
Because think about it, you share a post, it happens to get a lot of visibility. Someone, maybe a POC, a Point of Contact at one of your named accounts sees that video and starts multi-threading it through their buying community. To where you’re suddenly in front of, not really, but your video is in front of seven out of the nine members of the buying committee. And that has built that KLT.
Now they know you. Hopefully, they like you because they like what you’ve shared, the content that you’ve shared. And they begin to trust you enough that now you can start to have those meetings, close those deals, and shorten that timeline too between first conversation and signed contract. So the ability to use video – actually the last strategy that I’m going to share with you.
But you can absolutely take something that your marketing department has created if you have a marketing department. And then take that, and then share it with your POC through private messaging or even through a video on private messaging. And now you’ve utilized great video content that you didn’t have to create.
But then you’ve used video in order to share that, and that builds that sense of familiarity with you, with your buyers and your buying committee. So it’s a really cool way to taproot into those named accounts and start to build visibility amongst the buying committee.
Gina Stracuzzi: Absolutely. It’s what you were saying there a minute ago. I was thinking about what it takes sometimes to get in front of seven people. Now you might get a meeting, and you have one, maybe two of that committee. And then you have to hope for another one or hope they share the right things with the right tone and enthusiasm to their counterparts. Whereas a video that you’re in total control, and it can get in front of a lot of people much faster.
Viveka von Rosen: Exactly.
Gina Stracuzzi: I love that.
Viveka von Rosen: That multi-threading is really powerful when it comes to engagement using social. Yes, it’s one of the best ways we’ve had. We’ve had phenomenal success, and actually, I’ll tell that story a little bit later.
Gina Stracuzzi: Okay.
Viveka von Rosen: The first thing we want to talk about is simply building your brand on LinkedIn with video. There are a couple of places where it’s not going to take a whole lot of effort, but that you can really create an impact using video. The first is called video cover stories. So these are brand new on LinkedIn.
So when you go to your LinkedIn profile, you will know that you have a video cover story, that’s it right there, but I want to show you where it is. You’ll know you have a video cover story if on your profile, either on mobile or desktop, you see either an orange circle or an orange plus sign. If you’re online right now, go ahead and open up your LinkedIn app on your phone or open up a browser page, and just let me know in chat if you have a little orange plus sign. And what this allows you to do is create what’s called a video cover story.
So three seconds of video are going to show, and then when people click on your picture, it will open up to the video cover story, which is 20 seconds. So mine is basically saying, “Hey, Viveka von Rosen here. Are you having, or is your team having difficulty creating conversations on LinkedIn? We can help.” That’s basically all this says.
But it’s a little ad, so #1, it lets people know how to say my name correctly [laughs]. They have an audio version of that, too, by the way. But it also gives people a really quick commercial. And once you have it, and you go to other people’s profiles, I call it the Harry Potter effect. You see their picture, but then all of a sudden, you see this movement.
And it’s really arresting, it’s really going to grab people’s attention. So not everyone has it yet. I’m hoping it rolls out to everyone shortly. I will tell you right now it’s much easier to create your video cover story on your mobile device than it is recording yourself on your computer, etc. You can literally just do it on your mobile device and upload it right into your LinkedIn profile. But it is a super cool new feature, it’s not even a week old. Again, look for that orange.
Gina Stracuzzi: You heard it here first, folks, just so it’s known [laughs].
Viveka von Rosen: Yes. You look for that orange plus sign on your profile. Your video has to be less than 20 seconds. I had one that was 21, I had to redo it and redo it and get it down to 20 seconds. Only the first three seconds are going to show. You’re going to want to tell people who you are. “Hey, this is Viveka von Rosen, Chief Visibility Officer with Vengreso.” Tell people how you help them and who you help. “We help B2B sales teams create more quality and qualified conversations on LinkedIn.”
And so that’s what we do, but for you, think about obviously your name and your company name. But then they don’t really care about that. They want to know who you help, do you help people like them, and how do you help them. So that’s what you want to use, that’s a formula that you want to use when you end up getting this very cool new feature.
And the video auto plays. Like I said, when people go to your profile for the first time, they’re going to see your picture, and then they’re going to see these three seconds of video. And they’re going to know to click on the orange ring because only people who have it can see it. So once they have it, they’ll be like, oh okay, let me see what Gina has to say, let me see what Fred has to say.
Now I’m probably going to be one and done-ish with this. Maybe if we have a new product or a new thing that’s coming out, I might update it. But some people are using this to give 20-second tips and changing it out every single day. So there’s a few things to think about with that.
Gina Stracuzzi: Okay. We have a question from Rachel, she wants to know, “The orange plus is on your profile page. Question, what about a blue one? A blue plus sign, or is that just for stories?”
Viveka von Rosen: If it’s right here around your picture, the only plus signs I’ve seen is orange. But if it’s a blue plus sign, either you don’t have a picture yet, which means add a picture. But click on it and see if you get the prompts to create that video. I’ve only seen the orange one, but hey, this is LinkedIn, and it could literally have changed last night at 2:15 in the morning. So, Rachel, you let me know. You click on it, and you let me know.
Gina Stracuzzi: And Shelley just added, “Very cool tip.”
Viveka von Rosen: Yes. Thank you, Shelly, I love this, I’m hoping everyone gets it really soon. And I get that salespeople, we’re not necessarily used to creating video. But I would show you how many takes I did, and I’m used to doing video. But just do it, because when it’s done, it’s such a differentiator from everybody else out there who’s not on this training, who doesn’t know what it is, and who isn’t going to be making the use of it.
Gina Stracuzzi: And as you pointed out, this is here to stay. We either get comfortable with it and get over ourselves or train leaves without us.
Viveka von Rosen: Yes, exactly. Now the second cool thing that you can use for branding yourself, and you can use your marketing team’s video if you want to. But there’s this cool little section called your featured section. It used to be the media that was attached to your summary or your about section. Now it has its own area. And so you can absolutely pin any posts that have video or share a link to a video, or even upload a super short video into this featured section. And you can see it really stands out.
This is just a still picture, obviously. This is a GIF in an article, and then this is actually the video talking about cover stories, in fact. I don’t like the thumbnail, I wish we had a different thumbnail. But you can pop that video there too. And then what I would be thinking of as a salesperson, we were working with- I don’t know if I’m allowed to say who the client is, so I won’t.
But we were working with an insurance company and teaching them selling with video. That’s one of the training that we offer. They were thinking outside the box, and a lot of them using the platform called OneMob created little video introductions to who they were, and who they helped, and how they helped them. And of course, there’s not really a limit if you’ve got a video. Well, 10 minutes. So you can definitely do a little introduction video to who you are and put it right in that featured section. And that’s really powerful.
To feature content, you just click on the add section button on your profile, choose the drop-down on featured, and then just simply either promote a post that you already have or share a link or upload some media. It’s really quite easy to do. I’ll just show you the one that I did and just come here to my post and activity. So if you already have, like I said, an article which is a long-form post, or a shared post with the video in it, you can just go to your activity and then sort by posts.
And then, when you find the post that you want to share to your profile, you just come to the three dots on the top right-hand side, and you add it to feature. Obviously, it’s already there, but you would just pin to feature or add to feature. So you can go through and look at all of the content you’ve already shared. And if there’s anything in there that you think is going to be particularly useful for your audience, by all means, just grab the top three dots and you would be able to pin it to your post.
Gina Stracuzzi: That’s awesome.
Viveka von Rosen: It’s really cool, really easy, and it really helps with that branding. All right, are we ready for the next step? Building credibility.
Gina Stracuzzi: Yes, I am.
Viveka von Rosen: All right. And I felt like we should have done this in reverse order, but I wanted to cover the branding piece first. Of course, you can always share a link to a post. You can always share a link to a YouTube video, you can always share a link to a Vimeo video. But you can also upload native video. Uploading native video on LinkedIn is simply an mp4 or a .mov file. In order to upload it, you just go to your homepage, go to where you share an update, and you’re going to click on either the video icon on your desktop or your mobile device. And I’m going to show you how to do this.
You’re going to upload your video, and you can actually upload 4k video for those of you who do that. As long as it’s under 5 GB, you’re good to go. The video has to be at least three seconds long, or it’s going to be a GIF if it’s less than three seconds long. And a maximum of ten minutes.
The reason you might consider uploading a video as opposed to just sharing a link is the video will actually auto play, and you get better analytics, and the algorithm likes it more. Because, of course, LinkedIn wants to keep you on there as long as possible. We’ve got this on our YouTube channel too. I could certainly share a link to this video, but by uploading the video, it will auto play when you scroll through your timeline, and my video shows up.
Or if you go to my activity, it’ll auto play. But also, you get great analytics, which you are not going to get on just sharing a link. These are the links you get here with the regular, but if you upload a video, you also see how many minutes of video time, how many minutes that people watch that video. How many people watched it over the lifetime or recently. That’s really powerful to see how long people are actually watching your video. That’s a cool analytic.
Plus, you get to see what you would see on any post. Who’s your audience? What companies are watching it? My own company, well, that’s good. But here we go, that’s cool, LinkedIn is watching this. The company, LinkedIn, is watching my video, that’s good. And several of our clients are also watching the video, that’s also good. I’m targeting the right people. Salespeople, founders, marketing specialists, so that’s good, I’m on track. And I’m targeting the US, which is where our buyers are. So those are really great analytics.
Gina Stracuzzi: Are those analytics available to everyone, or is that a premium feature?
Viveka von Rosen: No, that’s available to everyone. The trick is uploading that video. And so you might go okay, well I’m not in marketing, what kind of video do you expect me to create here? You can interview someone. You could interview a client on Zoom, download that Zoom recording, and then upload it as a native video. You can interview a client, get a testimonial that way. This is actually an event that I spoke at a couple of years ago. I did a little video to kind of let people know about that event.
So if you’re going to be speaking at an event, or even visiting an event, back in the day when we did events [laughs], you could certainly share that. You could showcase your product or your service. You could talk about a favorite influencer you have in your particular industry. I actually got a job, this has nothing to do with LinkedIn particularly. But I love a product called No Foods, it’s like non-GMO, gluten-free, organic. And I was just talking about how great the product was.
Now I did it on LinkedIn. They saw that, reached out to me, and I ended up working with them, helping them with their LinkedIn strategy. And that was just basically a non-business product report. So think about different ways that you can create video, and then upload that video to LinkedIn. And then another thing is, anytime you’re sharing a post, whether it’s a video, a link, whatever, make sure to make use of this description section.
On LinkedIn, they care about something called dwell time. The longer someone stays on your post, the more likely LinkedIn is to share it out to a bigger audience. And that’s why we like video, because if they’re going to sit there and watch a three-minute video or two-minute video, or probably not, but a ten-minute video.
That’s a lot of dwell time, and LinkedIn’s going okay, people are actually not just flipping through, they’re actually sticking and watching this. And it’ll get you more visibility and more engagement. Which marketing likes, but you should like too because that might lead to inbound leads.
So when you are creating that video or sharing that video, you’ve got up to 1300 characters. Not words that would be a full-on blog post, but 1300 characters including any kind of hashtags or @ mentions of individuals. Here’s our friend Brynne, as a matter of fact. I would recommend creating a clever hashtag for tracking. On company pages, you can see your videos.
But on LinkedIn itself, they don’t have a separate section where you can save your videos. So we do something called #Vengresovids, and then when I do a search on Vengresovids, I can see all the videos that I and the rest of my team have shared on LinkedIn.
So think about, even if it’s #Ginavids, #Reneevids. Think of a hashtag, it doesn’t have to be that clever, that you can use so that you can track your videos in the future. Add emojis to attract the human eye, and always add a call to action. You always want to drive people to share something in comments below. “Let me know what you think in comments below. Share your example of a video in comments below.”
You always want to add a CTA to inspire action because that’s the other thing LinkedIn likes. If it sees that content, and it sees people engaging on that content, LinkedIn’s a lot more likely to share that with other people.
Gina Stracuzzi: That’s such half the battle, it is getting them to recognize it. We do have a question. Hillary would like to know if you have a preference for Vimeo.
Viveka von Rosen: Vimeo, YouTube. Okay, so again, I don’t know that this is necessarily true. But I recently heard that LinkedIn did purchase a portion of Vimeo. Or I guess Microsoft bought a portion of Vimeo. My guess is that because they own it, they might be a little bit more likely to promote it. Honestly, we use Vimeo for our course videos, and then we use YouTube for our marketing.
I don’t know that there’s necessarily a better platform. It really just depends on what you’re using it for. But Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, also owns a portion of Vimeo, so maybe that would be better. I don’t think it really matters as far as sharing links.
Gina Stracuzzi: Okay. She mentions Loom, which I’ve never heard of myself.
Viveka von Rosen: Loom is another good one. Loom is neat, and I think Loom videos work. Loom comes with its own editing suite, and it’s got some really cool different features and ways that you can use it. So Loom is another one. I’m 90% sure that the link would work on LinkedIn. So if you’ve got Loom, and you’re comfortable using Loom, sure, why not?
But again, I would recommend once you’ve used the Loom editing suite, and you’ve created your great video, download it as an mp4 or .mov and then upload it into LinkedIn as a raw native video. Because it will get you that much more visibility because of the algorithm. It will auto play, which it won’t if it’s just a link, and you get the better analytics. So once you’ve created your video on whatever platform, download it and then re-upload it as opposed to just sharing a link.
Gina Stracuzzi: Perfect.
Viveka von Rosen: Another cool feature, and I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on it. A, because we’re running out of time. But B, because not everyone has it or even can get it is LinkedIn Live. I love it, and the only reason I got it is because I was literally doing a course on LinkedIn, for LinkedIn, on LinkedIn learning, and they had to give it to me because I was demonstrating live. And that’s the only reason I got it.
LinkedIn Live is a live show, it’s live video, it’s live interviews. You can do it whenever you want, but you do have to apply for it and LinkedIn is not just giving it out willy-nilly. And by the way, you can apply for it more than once. My highest recommendation if you want to get a LinkedIn Live is apply for it multiple times. But the cool thing about a live is it is a live show. It really gives people a sense of who you are.
In fact, like a webinar, right? It would be exactly what we’re doing right now, but it would be live on LinkedIn. And people in the audience can ask you questions, and it generates a whole bunch of visibility, and also follows on LinkedIn. I went from about 32,000 followers, I’m up to almost 50,000 followers since I started doing LinkedIn live.
Now there’s probably other contributors there too, but I think LinkedIn live is a really big part of that. So if you want to get LinkedIn live, you have to apply for it. Literally just Google “Apply for LinkedIn Live.” And the Google results will give you the link that you need in order to apply for it. Like I said, apply more than once. If you don’t get it, in a couple of weeks, apply for it again. You have a better chance of getting LinkedIn live if you’re already doing live streaming on other platforms. On Facebook, on YouTube, on Periscope, for Twitter, on Instagram.
So if you are doing live streaming already, when you fill out the application, grab the links to those lives. You’re going to have to use a third-party app like Zoom or Restream. I myself use StreamYard. because it has a whole lot of branding features. So you can see I’ve got some branding there. This is our new little video that we play at the beginning. Once I get into the interview with my guest, what you’ll see is some branding around both of our heads. We’ve got the logo there.
But you can see even live here, you can see all the branding opportunity there. So again, Live is not available for everybody. And it’s a big-time commitment, you need to be super consistent with it and think of it more like a TV show. But if it is in your sales strategy to be that thought leader, to be that industry leader, then this might be something that you want to invest some time in.
And like I said, it’s on LinkedIn, right? Twitter’s great, Facebook’s great, Instagram’s great, you can get live on that for free, anyone can do it. This would be a huge differentiator for the very few of you on this call who would actually be interested in doing something like that. But I just wanted to let you know that was out there as an option.
Gina Stracuzzi: I should definitely think about it.
Viveka von Rosen: Yes, you should definitely think about it, Gina. I mean, I know with Zoom, you can push out. I am not sure if you can do that with GoToWebinar, but if you could, there’s no reason why we couldn’t be like pushing this show out, right? To Live. And Gina, you already have the podcast, you already have the shows. There’s no reason for someone like you not to be doing lives. Because really, the people who are doing it and doing it well, it’s really helping them position themselves, but grow their business for sure.
Gina Stracuzzi: We’ll have a little side meeting on that [laughs].
Viveka von Rosen: We’ll have a side meeting about that after. The final thing which any one of you can do is video messaging. It’s easiest to do on your mobile device. You can do it on your desktop, it’s way easier to do on your mobile device. When you go into your mobile device and you start a message, you’re going to see that you have the ability there to add video to your message. So what I am talking about is sending video in your private messages.
Once you are one-on-one with someone, once you’ve connected to them, you can send them video messages. Most of us just send text messages, some of us have figured out that you can leave voice messages. Video messages take it to a whole other level. So let me show you the different things that you can do, and then I’ll give you a use case that we use that was very successful.
So yes, you want to do it from your mobile device, it’s just way easier. You could potentially use a third-party app and just share the link to that app. As I mentioned, we use OneMob, it’s a video email tool that allows you to put landing pages and resources on your landing page. And people can jump into those resources. You can track who’s seeing what, so it’s really powerful, and I’ll show you one in just a second. BombBomb is a great tool, Videolicious is a great tool. There are a ton of great email video apps out there, from cheap to expensive. I believe you can actually create a video message via Loom.
So great tools that you might want to use, but you can just do it natively too. You can just shoot your video on your cell phone and share it via a message. A couple words of advice, this is just a few of the things that we teach in our selling with video course. If there’s going to be a play button, some of them have them, some of them don’t. If there’s going to be a play button, 99% of the people will shoot their video, and they’ll be centered on the screen.
So when they share the video, guess what happens? There’s a play button right over their nose. When you start your video, start off on the side, give a little wave, and then move in as you talk. That will get rid of what we call play button nose. So that’s one thing to be aware of when you’re sending those videos.
Make sure that you use what we call our PVC methodology. We’ve got a whole playbook called the PVC methodology, which is you always want to personalize your video. “Hey, Gina.” And then you want to add value. “I created this video just for you. In it, I’ve got this great playbook called PVC methodology. It’s increased our close rate by 28%.” I’m totally making that up, but anyway. “Make sure to click on the link to watch the video.” and then the C is a call to action. “And let me know what you think about the PVC methodology. Please hit reply and let me know what you think about our PVC methodology.”
You’re not going to ask for the meeting yet. This is the huge mistake people make. They get on LinkedIn, they get an invitation to connect, or they send an invitation to connect, and it’s accepted. And then the next thing you know, you’re getting the sales pitch, right? “Hey Gina, we haven’t met yet. But I totally want you to buy my services, let’s set up a meeting.” That’s what most people are doing. I say that somewhat ironically, but take a look at your inbox right now. I’m sure none of you are guilty of that.
But my guess is if you went into your LinkedIn inbox, or quite frankly your email inbox, you would see a slew of those messages from people that invited you to connect, you accepted, and the next thing you know there’s a sales pitch. Buy me a freaking drink first, right? [Laughs]
And then another key thing that we teach is keep those videos under 60 seconds. You’re just introducing yourself to them, you’re just sharing some helpful, useful information. Maybe letting them know what that link is that you’re sharing with them. But you’re not spilling your guts and describing your product or your service. Start the conversation and then move into that.
Here’s the OneMob, anyone who invites me to connect, I send them a OneMob. Now, these are people who are part of our program, so, “I’m so glad you’re a part of our program.” And then the video is actually talking about our new software, which is free, you guys should totally check it out. It’s called FlyMSG, it’s auto text expander. And this is a little video and you see I’m off to the side. You’ll see it’s 49 seconds, I start off camera. I customize it to not the individual, but I do say, “Thanks for being one of our clients, thanks for being one of our learners.” And then I go on to talk about our software and checking it out. So there is no reason why you can’t be doing the same thing on your messaging.
You literally would just go to your messaging on your cell phone, because it’s easier. You can do it on desktop, but it’s easier on your cell phone. And then you would come in, and you would click on your picture here, where you would find a video on your phone that you just shot that you would then share. You would find the video in your library that you would then just share with your audience. And here’s an example, here’s someone who invited me to connect. I totally dropped the ball, but when I finally saw one month later that I hadn’t accepted his invitation, I sent him my little video. He sent me one back. And then we started a little conversation here. So it’s a great way to start those conversations on LinkedIn.
All right, now I have shared an enormous amount of content. You know, or maybe you don’t know, about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. I hope you took notes. So of the notes, you took, please put two things into action of what I shared with you. The little video that you can do on your profile, or featuring content on your profile, or creating native videos on your profile. Or applying for Live or private messaging, let us know in chat two things that you’re going to do.
If you take action today, you’re not going to forget that strategy. But if you don’t take action, a week from now, you will have totally wasted your time because you would have forgotten 75% of what I taught you. And a month from now, you’ll have forgotten 80% of what I taught you. So let me know in chat at least two things that you’re going to do from what I have talked about today. And that will help you retain it. And then, of course, please feel free to email me, reach out to me on LinkedIn, whatever. I know I ran over, I’m sorry.
Gina Stracuzzi: That’s okay, nobody left, so that’s always good. Kelly said, “What you’re not saying is how long these really take to do to get them running. I love videos, but it takes me forever to prep them.”
Viveka von Rosen: Yes. And it will take a while to get started on any video, a 20-second video, a 5-minute video. Ironically, the longer videos I do, like the interviews, probably take less prep time. So if you’re thinking about doing an interview or getting a testimonial, all the time it takes is really the time it takes to interview the individual.
If you have a marketing team, what I’ll do is I’ll take my video, send it off to my marketing team, and they’ll clean it up. But honestly, folks, done is better than perfect. I would rather see a slightly unedited, maybe there’s a cough, maybe you see the finger coming to turn off the video at the end. I’d rather see that and have you guys do it than not have you do video at all. So realistically and understanding, I do a lot of videos, but that little video cover story, well, first of all, I did it the wrong way the first time. It’s supposed to be horizontal, I did it vertical. So I had to redo that once, twice, and then I found a really cool filter that allowed me to blur the background. So then I did it three times.
But then I found out that the blurred background, it did something else. I can’t remember what, but it meant that the video wouldn’t work, so I did it four times. And then it was 21 seconds, so then I had to do it two more times in order to get it to 19 seconds. So I think I did that one particular video like eight times for a 20-second video [laughs]. And that whole thing maybe took me about 40 minutes.
One of the native videos that I showed today on how to do video cover stories, that one probably I wrote the script. Sometimes I use scripts, sometimes I don’t. I wrote the script, the whole thing to shoot, the video is like two and a half minutes long. And I had to do it three times because my dog kept barking. So that probably took again about 40 minutes. The advertisement for Content Marketing World, that was one take and then I sent it off to Content Marketing world, and they did all the editing.
So it really depends. We write scripts, that’s one of the things that we teach in our training. We write scripts for our learners for LinkedIn reply messages. If you just read the script, it’s going to take you 22 seconds. And then it maybe takes you another five minutes to upload and add some editing features on OneMob and maybe minutes to build the page. But once you have it, you have it, and you can keep using it over and over again. You might just one-off a response on a video message, and that would just be immediate.
So it really depends on the quality of the editing and the production quality. But I would say better to have one and not worry about it not being perfect than worry like oh, I got to send it off to some marketing company who’s going to charge me a thousand dollars to make it look good. No, just authentically, you, that’s what we want.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo