Video Creation For Business Advertising – Why?

So you have decided to create a video to promote your home staging business. Good for you. That’s a good idea. But before you begin, be sure that you are clear about your video’s purpose?

Here’s a list of goals you might want your video to achieve:

• To build your website’s viewership – to encourage viewers to check out your website or blog. This would be appropriate if you are training other home stagers or are providing some sort of ongoing newsletter for realtors or others in the hopes of building referrals in the future.
• Another purpose would be to capture a lead – You can directly ask for a lead or opt in your video.  Simply draw attention to a opt-in form located adjacent to your video, and explain what visitors can expect to receive when they sign up. You might offer them a free ebook of 7 tips to do before they call their Realtor or some other useful advice.
• To build brand awareness. To promote yourself in the community as a service provider or interested community member. This is frankly my least favorite approach, but may be worthwhile in some circumstances where you are producing video of area events and promoting them on local community non profit or non commercial channels. In this case you are doing a community service, and adding a tag line of some sort saying produced as a Community Service by ABC Homestaging.
• To make a direct sale – This is where I tend to focus my attention, but it’s not the only way to do things. Here the goal is not to get them to look at your web site or remember you name, it’s to call you to bid their project.

It’s a funny thing. People do what they are told.

If you want them to call you, it’s a good idea to not only put your phone number passively at the end of your video, but you want to tell them to do so.

If you have a reason to add urgency or scarcity to the call to action, all the better. But if the video is going to be on YouTube for months and months and call in the next three days urgency ploy is probably not going to be effective so don’t hurt yourself by creating false urgency or scarcity.