A day before the Social Media Marketing World 2020, I got a chance to grab an interview with George B Thomas of Impulse Creative. Together, we talked about the role of personalized videos when it comes to sales in business.
SchoolHouse Summary: Personalised videos are an essential part of International School Marketing, which enables us to showcase what the school has to offer for potential enrolees to consider immediate enrolment. This 1-1 interview with George B is an in-depth example of how to start making personalised videos and tap into peak engagement.
Below is a transcription of our interview:
Ben:
All right guys. I’m here with George B. Thomas. We’re here one day before Social Media Marketing World 2020 kicks off. And I wanted to grab George, you may have heard him on my podcast before if you listen to the podcast and we’re going to talk a little bit about the role of personalised video in sales in your business. So stick around and we’ll see what George has to say. G’day guys, I’m Ben Amos from Engage Video Marketing and on this channel we share tips, tricks and strategies to help you grow your audience with online video and I’ve got George B. Thomas here.
George:
Yeah, yeah. Hey, G’day mate. No? Anyway, George B. Thomas here. Just ready to rock and roll. Ready to talk about personalised video and excited to be here at social media marketing world with Ben. It’s going to be good times.
Ben:
Cool. George. Hey, for people who haven’t heard about you before, tell us what you do. What’s your story?
George:
Yeah, yeah. So George B. Thomas, I actually work for an agency called Impulse Creative. My specialty is HubSpot, which then leads into marketing automation, lead generation. But also then teaching people how to sell and market in this digital world that we’re in, which then led me down to the path of like the power of personalised video and kind of teaching people how to leverage that moving forward.
Ben:
Yeah, man, I’ve been hearing so much about personalised video I think over the last particularly 12 months. Yeah. It’s just become, I wouldn’t say buzzword, you know, but it’s something that I think a lot of people are interested in and exploring more, taking more seriously perhaps. What do you think is causing that?
George:
Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things that are causing the change in it being mainstream. One is there’s multiple tools that have been created over the last couple of years. You’ve got things like Go Video, you’ve got Wistia Soapbox, you’ve got Loom, BombBomb, and so there’s, there’s enough tool sets that you can kind of grab one what fits for you and start to use it. The other thing is there’s been this transition of just video actually being a thing. You know, in 2014, 15, 16, 17 they said video’s the next big thing. I really feel like it wasn’t until 2018, 2019 and now 2020 where really consumers are just like, no, that’s the way that I want to educate myself. That’s, I want to be entertained, I want to educate. I want to be able to see the micro-expressions of the people so I can my BS metre, right?
It’s either going to go way off or I’m going to start to know, like, and trust these people. And so on the business side of it, professionals are realising, man, I’m not getting face to face calls where I used to be able to shake somebody’s hand, see them face to face. There’s like that missing to the point where like they’re doing zoom videos but nobody’s doing video. They’re just calling in and you’re looking at a black screen, but you can take that back and if you start to leverage personalised videos and they see your face, they hear you. It’s just a more human experience and that’s really what us as consumers want is we want a more human experience.
Ben:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I mean we crave that humanity, right? Kind of somewhat. Unfortunately, over the years left us as we, as we become digital, without a doubt, and I think people want to do business with people, they don’t, right? It’s, that’s how it goes.
George:
That’s really how it works. It’s not B2B or B to C or B to G. It’s really P2P person to person. Yeah. At least if you’re doing it right, right in the non spammy way, in the human way, in the, I’m going to add value to your life and help you pass that hurdle that you may have way then. Yes, it’s, it’s P to P.
Ben:
Yeah. Cool. So let’s, let’s unpack some really clear examples. People that aren’t using personalised video right now in, in any way within their business, what are some easy kind of first ways to experiment with it using some of these tools that you mentioned before?
George:
Yeah. Well, introduce yourself. I mean, that’s the basic beginning of it. You know, I’ll give you an example. At sprockettalk.com we have people who sign up for our free membership on. The first thing we do is we send them a personalised video where it’s like, Hey, this is who I am. And thank you, Bobby, Jimmy, Susie for signing up for the free membership. By the way, if you have any questions about X, Y,Z , a, B, C, right? So it’s kind of like introducing yourself or almost pseudo onboarding in our case. But it could be just explaining a little bit about what you do, who you are, and why you’re passionate about that thing. Again, leaning into the more human side of this, because later you’ll have personalised videos where you can actually talk about the products and the services and kind of deep dive questions that they may have.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, I love it. And what would you say to people that maybe think, George, that’s cool, but it’s not particularly scalable, right? Like how do I do that for everyone?
George:
Well, the thing about that, I love that question because where you find the magic moments where you actually make the most revenue is when you focus on the things that feel that are unscalable. Because what you’re doing when you do the unscalable is you’re separating or differentiating yourself from your competition. If you’re doing everything your competition can do, who cares? Like then it comes down to just price. But if they’re like, wow, I talked to like Acme company over here and I never got a video. But these people, they obviously really care cause they’re passionate and I saw their face and they took time to do this. And here’s the thing too, like think about perception, right? Everybody’s perception of video is that it’s difficult that it takes time and these tools that I mentioned earlier in this video actually make it so it doesn’t take that much time. But still the perception of the consumer is, wow, they must’ve taken a lot of time to create this video for me. Now you’re, you’re just leaps and bounds ahead of where your competition is.
Ben:
Yeah. And the, I think the other thing that people push back on is that fear of being on camera. Right? So yeah, and that’s not true. You know, like it’s not easy. Like we’d done this before we get up, we turn, press, go. And no script. We’re just, we’re just going. But it’s a real fear. Right. I recognise that. So what would you say to people, like how, how do you get over that fear
George:
And just get over yourself? I mean, I know I make that. I know, I know I make it sound simple, but I mean at the end of the day, nobody cares about your hair, your nose, your eyes, your weight. Like they just don’t care about that. And if you don’t care about that, if you focus on what is the value I’m giving, what are the words that are coming out of my mouth, how are they going to impact that individual in the hurdle that they’re trying to past the product that they’re trying to buy, the information they’re trying to know. If that’s your focus, then it becomes very easy. Also, the other thing that really helped me is I don’t necessarily look at a camera as a camera anymore. I try to look at the camera and envision the people behind the camera and really act like I’m talking to a human being. And if you can kind of flip that switch in your mind, it becomes way easier. And the last thing I’ll say, Ben, is practise, practise, practise, practise. Your first one, five 50 they’re going to suck, but still do them because then once you get to the 50 50 to 55 57 then it’s going to be absolutely amazing.
Ben:
All right, George, thanks for that insight man. And I encourage you guys, if you’re watching and you haven’t played with any of these tools that we talked about, put links in the description below and we’re gonna. I want you to go and visit George’s site here – SprocketTalk.com and subscribe to George’s channel on YouTube cause he shares heaps of tonnes of stuff. Cool.
Click here to read this article on the Engage Video Marketing website.
Click here to read this article on the Engage Video Marketing website.
