Authenticity.
Is it a pointless marketing buzzword or a huge competitive advantage?
Hello and welcome to your video boosting tip of the week from Captain. Helping you plan, direct, and perfect smartphone video content to engage your client's audience and enhance their brand.
What would you do if I said to you…you need to be more authentic in your online presence. What you would do is roll your eyes and go…oh good, another cliche designed to get me to buy something. Ok fine - forget about you, now think of your clients.
Today’s question - Authenticity… is it something you can put to work and ultimately sell to your clients? Let’s find out…
Online, everyone looks the same
Right then. Have you ever had to choose between a set of suppliers. Solicitors, Web developers, builders? Online, they all look the same. They’re all saying the same stuff; they all say they’re passionate. The pictures or descriptions of their work, look the same as all their competitors.
So unless you have a word of mouth recommendation… how do you choose?
Well, pre-covid, you’d have a meeting. You sit down in a room and you have a chat, and you know what I’m talking about - in that moment, you know whether you want to work with someone in a matter of minutes.
The slick web copy, the grand status updates, it’s all gone, and suddenly it’s all about rapport, do they mean it, are they really passionate about what they do? Or are they just a workaday phoney?
Are they……….. Authentic?
That’s why authenticity is important in your clients’ online presence. Because that moment - that crucial, pivotal moment when a buyer makes an emotional decision rather than a rational one, that’s the moment the internet can rob your client of, if they let it. Which, obviously, is where you come in.
How can you capture that lightning-in-a bottle moment of what makes the client special, and put it to use online?
Well look, if you’re here, you already know that video is the single best way of bringing an offering to life online.
But user-generated video that is just rough enough to be noticeably DIY, and just slick enough in storytelling terms, can take things to a whole new level. It can be insanely effective in terms of instantly capturing authenticity, and building real trust with an audience in a way that slicker, more scripted, sales-y video can struggle with.
So what can you do to amp up the results of this video content even more?
Here are our tips for creating more authentic user-generated video.
Here are a few tips…
1. Focus on the customer’s journey, not the client’s
Aspirational instagram influencers have skewed the graph here; a lot of businesses can get caught up in telling their own stories because it can seem like the thing to do.
99% of the time, it’s not.
Focussing on what you clients can help their customers achieve is far more compelling than talking about what the colours in their logo signify. If they mean what they say - it’ll come across loud and clear that they are there to help.
2. Show some action
If a client’s talking about doing something, get some shots of them actually doing it. You don’t need me to tell you about show don’t tell, but in this instance, it does prove you’re for real.
The Captain app is especially useful there, as you can assign specific filming tasks to anyone with a phone.
3. Forget the features and benefits
UGC video should be used to win over hearts; the mind can get what it’s after on your website.
Keep it lean and light, and when the client’s talking about results, have them focus on emotional outcomes more than the factual ones.
Let their audience know that their feelings are understood, and they will connect with your clients in a more powerful way.
So there we go...
So there we go! Authenticity, pointless buzzword or competitive advantage?
I hope I’ve convinced you that it’s the latter - so make use of it.
Get it sold to your clients as a solid-gold way of setting them apart - they will love you for it.