Tip 14 – use a video on your sign-up page

I’m not really a marketing professional (I’m an educationalist and an E-learning specialist) but I know what stimulates my interest when I see it. So I’m always very interested in seeing promotional webpages, status updates, tweets or advertisements for Webinars.

I’ve seen a variety of approaches being used. Some are very much in the traditional marketing mold, for example:

• creating scarcity by claiming it’s the last chance to learn the secret
• pretending it’s possible to make money quickly with no effort
• using testimonials

If you sign up for the free Diigo links group, I post examples of the ones I find there.

However, it’s often very difficult to know what you’re going to get from the Webinar, however well it’s described on the page.

It can be very difficult to work out what’s in it for me?

Some time ago, however, I started to see some advertising pages with embedded videos – these really caught my interest.

Some of these pages have vof the actual presenter talking about the Webinar or even walking through a  screencast of what’s going to be covered. This helps me to make a really informed decision on whether or not to attend. Even if no webcam is used during the actual event I can ‘meet’ the presenter and get a sense of whether or not I can connect with her or him.

I was recently asked to recod a quick video introduction to a session I was hosting on the social web conferencing site, http://www.skilio.com. The 2 minute clip was shared via social media and even went a little bit viral – so it was very effective promotion for my later session.

As you probably know, you can record video these days straight onto YouTube with yor webcam and then embed the video with a few clicks into a web page or even just share the YouTube link itself, so there’s no need to spend lots of time and money unnecessarily.

Using video can help you make a personal connection with your potential audience rather than just asking them to read yet another set of bullet points on why they should attend your Webinar.

Video also gives you the chance to collect and analyse some extra data about views and relate these to attendees.

Of course, your use of video introductions to your Webinar depends on your audience and purpose. If your brand is all about high production values, you’ll need to create appropriate video content for this as well but you probably have the technlogy and set up to enable this anyway.

So why not…

…try adding video as a hook to draw your audience in – if nothing else it will help to spread the word about your organisation via social media. After all, YouTube is the second most commonly used search engine and Google search results currently place video content very prominently on results pages. Why not harness this power for your own promotion?

Creative Commons image credit: Joybot | Copyright music credit (used by permission): Mike Murphy