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Businesses having Success with Video Marketing on Solopreneur Success Strategies

RevZilla: Founded in 2007, RevZilla Motorsports is a premium in-store and online shopping experience for motorcycle lovers who are looking for helmets, gear, motorcycle jacket and other accessories.

Anthony Bucci says “YouTube connects us with our customers. We use our own voice—not a corporate one—and our customers love us for that.”
They use product guide videos, safety tips videos and knowledge driven videos of their services. These videos have consistently increased their subscriptions, customer loyalty and repeat customers.
What they did is launch a dedicated video channel with TrueView ad campaign to guide their new and old customers. They increased their traffic from videos and landed them on their e-commerce website. Also they focused on customer loyalty.
They get 7 million views on their branded channel. With YouTube promotion videos, RevZilla tripled their subscriber base in just a few months. And they achieved 50% growth in their revenue.
Rokenbok: Rokenbok is high end robotic toys and construction Systems Company. When the economy shifted they needed new ways to reach their customers and demonstrate how to operate Rokenbok toys.

Eichen says, “YouTube is becoming our most important vehicle for advertising, we have transformed ourselves into a classic toy store with only sales online.”
They started uploading on YouTube using TrueView in search engine and display ads. The aim of Rokenbok was to find new platforms to demonstrate its toys, build relationships with customers and drive sales with their online e-commerce website.
They built a YouTube channel with videos based on fun and education to target families. They targeted the key demographics of viewers who search for construction and train related videos. They focused on a consistent message to build a relationship with the customers and viewers.
Their results are pretty great, YouTube became the number one source of traffic for Rokenbok as 50% of customers came from YouTube.
American Airlines: American air recently launched a documentary style video series on YouTube named “Behind the Scene” to answer the questions of its customers like “Where does a bag go after it’s checked?”, “What’s involved in taking delivery of a new plane?” and “Why do airfares change so much?” etc.

The creative manager of Social Marketing Jon bird said that “Airlines are massive organizations but American Airlines is the world largest airlines organization. There are some messages that are tough to convey, but the ability to create videos can help to make them easier understood”.
These videos are not the traditional advertisement to use for visitors booking a flight with American Airlines.
The goal of these videos is not lead generation, these videos are built to increase brand awareness of American Airlines as a responsive and transparent brand.
The Home Depot: Home depot stands out in their niche market because they publish relevant content for their brand. They know that free educational video content established Home Depot as a trusted brand.

They can promote their products and services and sell them with “product placement” instead of pitching them in videos or commercial style pitching.
Home depot humanizes its faceless corporation. Home depot includes their employees in their advertisement campaign.
Home depot makes its tutorials simple with straight talking and employees who wear an orange apron and work in their stores to make it more personal.
Ibis: When Accor, Europe’s largest hotels operator decided to launch its IBIS brand again, it turned to YouTube videos to get a lift in viewers. More than 100 videos are created by Ibis hotels and many of them have more than a million views.

Ibis videos are short and they use old standby videos of cute baby animals to make audiences watch. Ibis uses videos to increase its brand awareness and promote its products and services.

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Limiting Beliefs about Money and Work on Mindset Monday

Another key area of life where limiting beliefs hurt entrepreneurs is money and finances. These ideas usually originate within the family through the things that parents say to their children.

Common limiting beliefs include things like:

“Money is the root of all evil”
“People with money cheated to get it”
“There is never enough money”
“You have to sacrifice if you want to buy (enter any item here)”
“We’ll never be able to retire”

These limiting beliefs express feelings of guilt, hopelessness, or scarcity about money. Obviously, these are feelings that are not useful for an entrepreneur.

Work

Early educational experiences can also play a part in shaping limiting beliefs about what ‘work’ is. The current education system in most countries focuses on learning whatever is needed to pass an exam. It doesn’t train children to become adult entrepreneurs, freelance workers, or small business owners. As society changes, there is a lag in the education system, which is still following the old model.

This old model involves working for a set period of time doing tasks assigned to you by a boss. For this work, you receive a check for an agreed-upon amount. Through obeying your boss, working hard, and producing value to the company, you may then be allowed a better position or higher pay.

This model fundamentally clashes with the entrepreneur mindset. In this model, workers are rewarded for obedience and their ability to minimize risk. Accepting risks and taking on challenges, however, are key to success as an entrepreneur.

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Many marketers fail to understand their customers

Many online marketers make basic mistakes because they simply fail to understand their customers.
If you can put yourself in your customers’ shoes, it’s easy to understand what they want and how to deliver it to them.
When you empathize with them, you can create a marketing message that resonates with them and shows that you’re a responsive business that cares about their customers.
Understanding What Your Customers Want
When you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you quickly understand what they’re looking for.
If you’re a restaurant owner, imagine what you’d expect if you were looking for a meal.
You’d want the shop to be visible, clean, and friendly, and to offer something others don’t.
Each online niche has certain characteristics that its customers look for.
Don’t only think about what they want, but also what your customers don’t want. There is always risk involved in making purchases, especially when a customer chooses a new shop for the first time.
If you can imagine your customers’ fears and concerns, you can address them before your customers have a chance to worry or object.
Shut up and Listen
One of the biggest mistakes marketers can make is to assume.
In order to really understand your customers, you need hard data that they provide themselves.
Listen to customer feedback about your company, as well as the conversations they have online.
You can learn about people’s thoughts and feelings through blogs, blog comments, forum postings, and social media sites.
Even better, you can solicit the specific data you need by directly asking them to take a few minutes to give you feedback.
Online surveys are incredibly easy to conduct these days, and there are free tools, such as Survey Monkey, which make it a no-brainer.
Questions to Consider
Think about any company you deal with on a regular basis, and analyze your feelings about that company.
Then, try to discover why you feel that way. A few questions to ask yourself are:
What do you like or dislike about them?
What makes you want to go back and do business with them again?
Is their image friendly and professional?
Can you easily get what you want from them, and are interactions with them smooth and seamless?
What does the company do when you’re not satisfied with their products or services?
Through these questions, you can understand as a customer what makes a business’s service good or not.

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Video Marketing Benefits for your Offline or Online Businss

Brand Reputation: People prefer to do business with those they trust. Video helps prospects get to know you much more easily than ordinary words can, and once they get to know you, they’ll hopefully learn to like and trust you, as well.

Low cost: Video marketing is cheaper than other methods of advertising. When you compare the cost of video with the value, you will find the expense is minimum and the results are better. You have to create it once then it can be viewed anytime and as many times as your audience may want.

Apart from the crowd: Video marketing is easier and more affordable

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What is the source of your Limiting Beliefs

What is the source of your Limiting Beliefs on Mindset Monday
Limiting beliefs come from an actual place in your lifetime experience. Entrepreneurs often fail because they cling to limiting beliefs they’ve been conditioned to hold.

Limiting beliefs come from experience, and they can often come from very early life experience. They can even come from early childhood education. Generally speaking, society doesn’t raise children to become adults who think like entrepreneurs. In order to fit into society as adults, we are conditioned to think in more fixed mindset terms, especially as they relate to intelligence, money, and authority.

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You can spread your messages just by podcasting!

I have been spreading my Solopreneur Success Strategies podcast through Libsyn (libsyn.com) using their RSS feed which can be sent to a variety of destinations.

I have a podcast feed at iHeart Radio

I have a podcast at iTunes

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/solopreneur-success-strategies/id1120757762

I have a podcast website at Libsyn

http://janegardner.libsyn.com/podcast

I have a podcast on Soundcloud

I have a podcast at Google Play for Android phones

Listen on Google Play Music

Go see what a Google Play Podcast looks like here!

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No More Used Car Salesman

In recent years, the Internet has changed the world of marketing. Marketers can no longer use the same techniques today that worked yesterday. The attitudes and behavior patterns of your customer have changed, and to be successful you have to change with them.

Don’t Believe the Hype

Over the last few decades, consumers have endured a flood of sales and marketing material. They’ve been inundated with ads everywhere they turn, and each marketer tries to shout over the others for their attention. As a result, people have tuned out. They don’t believe in exaggerated language or hype anymore.

No More Used Car Salesmen

The online versions of used car salesmen have gotten a bad rap because of their hard-sell tactics. These tactics make them look like opportunists out to make a quick buck with little regard for their customers’ best interests. Consumers are no longer responsive to this approach. They’re smarter shoppers today, and they understand when they’re being manipulated.

Today’s Marketing Is about Relationships

The salespeople of the past saw a customer as a way to make a quick sale. The marketer of today needs to build relationships. The goal is for the customer to see you as a trusted friend and a valuable source of information. People want to feel like part of the brands they love, rather than just a number in a company’s marketing game.

The key to building relationships well is to focus on your customers’ needs. Listen closely to them and understand their problems and desires. You can then offer the products and services that customers are already actively seeking, rather than trying to convince them to buy products they never wanted in the first place.

Content Marketing

The way savvy marketers reach their audience online today is through content marketing. Customers are looking online for information, and you can be there to provide it. You build your expertise by providing answers and become, in customers’ eyes, an authority in your niche. This engenders trust and builds relationships. The resulting sale is a natural outgrowth of the relationship. Prospective customers visit your site because they know you’re offering what they want.

Two-Way Communication

Older marketing channels like television and print media went one way – from the marketer to the customer. Today’s communication goes both ways. It’s just as much about listening to your customers as talking, and in fact, probably more so.

Customers today are proactive in going out and finding what they want. Internet users aren’t passive like TV watchers. If you’ve listened well, you can create and provide them with the information they’re looking for, before anyone else.

Making It about Them

Today’s marketing is even more customer-focused than that of the past. It’s not enough for your website or marketing materials to boast about your company’s successes. Marketers have to emphasize tangible results their customers will get from the product or service and back them up with evidence supporting their claims. If you do your homework and know your target market well, it’s not hard at all to do this effectively. Offer what they need and invite them to join the dialog.

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What an Online Marketing Video can do for your Business

What an Online Marketing Video Can do For Your Business
Online video marketing has become the latest epidemic when it comes to marketing tools. In fact, it has gone viral. If you haven’t given online marketing videos a try yet, you should, as there are plenty of benefits you can enjoy and increased sales are one of them. Let’s look at what your video should accomplish for you.
It Should Introduce You
A video is a powerful tool that allows you to present a polished you. You can polish your online marketing presentation and then create a flawless delivery that puts in you in the best light with your potential customer.
Establish That You are an Expert in Your Field
When you create your online marketing video you should focus on showing your viewers your expertise. This is much easier to do with a video than text content. Adding videos that establish you as an expert to your website, blog and/or email marketing can be highly beneficial.

Maximize Your SEO Benefits
In the past, as far as SEO was concerned, videos were actually a liability. But that is not that case any longer. Today, videos are more than fifty times more likely to be on the first page of a surfer’s search.

There are three main ways a marketing video can give you a major SEO boost.
1. There is far less competition with video compared to text content. There are millions of text pages competing for the top SEO ranking, but only thousands of video pages competing for the same space.
2. Videos are ranked much quicker than text content. It takes hours for videos to get ranked and weeks for text to get ranked. That also gives video the ability to be very current.
3. Videos often go viral. It is much more likely that a person will share a video than text. This is especially true when you put together a really good video.
Online video marketing is affordable, requires only a webcam, a microphone, and a good script to begin to enjoy the benefits. Take some time to fine tune your message and make it easy to understand. That way you’ll enjoy the greatest benefit.
Online marketing videos are the hottest tool business owners have at their fingertips. In today’s online environment a video is far more likely to lead to a sale than even the best text content.

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Your Inner Critic that you can learn to control on Mindset Monday

Once you can recognize the inner critic, you can learn to control it. The way that you interpret challenges, obstacles, or criticism that you face is up to you. But this is the most challenging step for most people. It is difficult to reframe the voice when you have well-grooved patterns.
The way to think about reframing is to imagine giving advice to a friend.
Naturally, you would never use a harsh, critical voice when trying to help a friend.
If you would never do this with a friend, why are you doing it with yourself?
We are generally harsher on ourselves than we are with others, so instead of talking to yourself, imagine that you’re giving advice to a good friend.
Now, imagine that you’re giving them advice and reframe the negative statement that was made
After reframing comes action.
What challenges can you take on in order to foster and nurture a growth mindset?
What challenges have you been avoiding?
Choose a challenge and try it again, but this time, turn your fixed mindset around.
Find a work-related or personal task that you’ve either been shying away from doing or that you feel you’ve failed at.
For example, perhaps you always put work first and your eating habits are not the best. How can you challenge yourself to create better eating habits?
Maybe there is a skill you’ve been wanting to learn such as cooking but the idea of trying again gives you a sense of anxiety.
There might be an important client you’ve been meaning to contact but shying away from.
Start with one challenge, and you can then apply it to the next challenge once you have success with the first.

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Reframe your Inner Critic on Mindset Monday

Your “inner critic.”
You most likely know this voice, even though you may never have identified it as an “inner critic.” The first step is to identify that voice and identify the times when you hear it. These are situations where you are brought back to a fixed rather than a growth mindset.
To do this, you simply need to practice awareness. Start by identifying the voice when you hear it. Next, try to remember what event preceded those negative thoughts.
It’s a bit like trying to identify what is causing a stomach ache.
You have to go back and try to remember what you ate just before.
If you’re not sure you’ve identified your inner critic yet, try looking for cues. For example, look for times when you find that you’re doubting yourself, saying something like, “Can I really do this?” Or be aware of when you’re focusing on failure rather than success; for example, where you’re worrying about what will happen if you fail at something.
A good place to look for your fixed mindset voice is any time you’re trying something new or challenging. These are the most common situations where this negative voice arises.
Now let’s reframe these thoughts.
Once you can recognize the voice, you can learn to control it.
The way that you interpret challenges, obstacles, or criticism that you face is up to you. But this is the most challenging step for most people.
It is difficult to reframe the voice when you have well-grooved patterns.
The way to think about reframing is to imagine giving advice to a friend.
Naturally, you would never use a harsh, critical voice when trying to help a friend.
If you would never do this with a friend, why are you doing it with yourself?
We are generally harsher on ourselves than we are with others, so instead of talking to yourself, imagine that you’re giving advice to a good friend.
Take each statement that your inner voice gives you and imagine if it were a friend, your partner, or a family member who was saying it to themselves. Now, imagine that you’re giving them advice and reframe the negative statement that was made.
For example
“Are you sure you can do that? You don’t have the right skills to take that on.” BECOMES “I’m not sure I can do it, but I can learn with practice and effort. ”
“What if I fail? I’ll be a failure” BECOMES “All successful people have failures. I can learn from my failure.”
“She’s a natural at business. Besides, her family runs a business. I could never be as good as her.” BECOMES “She’s successful in her business, and I can learn from her.”
For example, some Intelligence examples
“I can’t do that. I’m not smart enough to take that on.” BECOMES “I’m not sure I can do it, but I can learn with practice and effort.”
“She’s a natural at business. Besides, she has an MBA. I could never be as good as her.” BECOMES “She’s successful in her business, and I can learn from her.”
After reframing comes action.
What challenges can you take on in order to foster and nurture a growth mindset?
What challenges have you been avoiding? More next week
To learn techniques to have a success mindset, go to http://jgtips.com/smindset.