Use Videos on Your Website to Increase Engagement With Prospective Clients or Customers

Your website is your home base for all your social media activity. As such, you want to optimize the engagement that takes place there between you and your prospective clients or customers.

Short videos can do this very powerfully. Your passion for your business or subject can be showcased by what you say about yourself and what you offer. (See, for example, the video on the home page of the WordPress website we did at www.merchantprocessingpros.net)

And an added advantage is that you can have your videos do double duty. Upload them to YouTube where they can be found through keyword searches. Then import the videos from YouTube into your website.

But if you're not a videographer, how do you get these videos?

First, of course, you can hire a videographer to do short videos in a studio setting or you can video yourself.

Or a second option, for another example of double duty, you can have a friend (or a videographer you hire) film you while you give a live presentation on your subject.

There are two main advantages of this second option:

1. Because the primary focus is on your talk, you won't have to worry so much about speaking to a camera. Instead you'll be speaking to a live audience and the camera will record you.

2. You have "raw" video that can be edited into short videos for different purposes.

Here's an example of how this works:



Yael and I gave a live presentation on using social media to look for a new job, and we had someone video this entire one-hour presentation.

The only instructions we gave the person was NOT to get the audience in the video. This is so we didn't need permission from anyone to put the video or segments of the video online.

Then Daniel Hall announced a contest as part of his Speakers Cruise Free program. In order to enter a person needed to provide a YouTube link to a short video demonstrating the ability to speak in front of a live audience. (The speech did not have to be on the subject submitted for the cruise talks.)

Yael and I decided that she was the best candidate of the two of us for this particular project. We watched our hour-long presentation to choose the segments of Yael speaking that we thought best represented interaction with a live audience.

Then Yael did an intro video segment to clarify what the short video represented. She edited the intro and the designated clips into a coherent video and then uploaded the video to YouTube. (You can see the result at http://goo.gl/SUiS6 — and we'd appreciate it if you "like" the video.)

And of course we still have the original video, so we can take segments from it for other purposes when the occasion arises.

In conclusion, speaking in front of a live audience is a good way to introduce yourself to prospective clients and customers. Combine this with creating a video of your presentation and you'll have additional engagement opportunities – ones that can be viewed around the world.

© 2011 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) is the co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic LLC.



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