AMHF 0072 – How to Use Live Video as an Aviation Marketing & Sales Tool

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Video has always been great for aviation marketing, but some recent changes in social media have made live video an even more interesting opportunity. We talk about some of the tactics to add this to your marketing mix.

 

Transcript –  Live Video for Aviation Marketing

Paula Williams: Welcome to aviation marketing hanger playing, episode number 72. Live Video for Marketing. I’m Paula Williams.

John Williams: I’m John Williams.

Paula Williams: And we’re ABCI, and ABCI’s mission is.

John Williams: To help all you ladies and gentlemen out there in the aviation world sell more services and products.

Paula Williams: Absolutely, so you probably have either tried or have thought about using live video for marketing.

And if you run across questions or comments or would like to share an adventure or misadventure or anything else, use the hashtag #AvGeekMarketing, that’s A-V GeekMarketing. And we’ll find that and reply to you. You can also leave comments on our blog because we love to hear what experiences you’ve had.

This is a new thing, a lot of people are trying it with different and varied experiences, right?

John Williams: [LAUGH] Yes.

Paula Williams: Absolutely. Okay, so the big ideas from this episode are that live video is a fantastic way to connect with your audience. It can also be kind of intimidating.

For some of us to get started but the numbers do justify summoning the courage to at least test it for your company, right?

John Williams: It’s intimidating not just because you have to watch yourself and listen to yourself talk but the first time you have to put a process together to get it out there is interesting.

Paula Williams: Exactly, so a lot of us feel a little weird about seeing ourselves on video or hearing our own voices, me included. But it is worth, the numbers definitely do justify the anxiety or insecurity or whatever else you want to call the process that we go through. So, let’s talk about some of the things that have changed recently.

You may have noticed if you’re a Facebook user, that there is a tab that comes up at the bottom of Facebook on mobile especially, that goes just to videos. So they’re making videos a whole lot more visible than they used to be. Also, whenever any of your contacts is broadcasting a live video, it shows up on your feed automatically as a very small window in the lower left hand corner.

So this is our new in the last few weeks.

John Williams: That’s right-hand corner.

Paula Williams: Lower right-hand corner, excuse me. This is not reversed. Sometimes things are reversed on a camera, this is not. The lower right hand corner of your Facebook feed, you’ll notice a little box with moving faces or whatever.

And that’s live videos that you’re contacts are actually broadcasting right now. So those are two ways that Facebook is really putting a lot of emphasis on video, and the reason is because they want to make ad revenue from live video. They want to be the next TV station in the world, right.

John Williams: They’ve actually stated that as their objective.

Paula Williams: Right, in fact they’re commissioning some live video content from different content providers that should really position them as being more the way people access video.

John Williams: And Google is also heavily, into video.

Paula Williams: Right, exactly. So this is actually a really good way to connect with an audience that also happens to be very visual.

Aviation people like to see how things work. They love to see airplanes. They love to see things flying. They love to see parts work together. They love to see all those things. And it used to be YouTube. And if you look up aviation videos on YouTube, or even avionics demonstrations on YouTube, any of those things, you’re going to find a ton of video.

And it used to be mainly YouTube that was the channel for that. But now you’ve got Facebook Live, you’ve got Instagram Live, you’ve got Periscope, you’ve got lots of other media by which people can produce video.

John Williams: And for those that don’t know what they’re doing and put it on their website which is a very bad idea but it will work.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm, absolutely.

John Williams: It really degrades your website.

Paula Williams: Right. So you really want to host your videos some place that is fast enough to support video. And a lot of these places are built for that purpose. So, you can use these things as a third party, often without paying anything.

Get them to host your video and then still embed it in your website. So then you get the advantage of having it on your website and not slowing down your web server.

John Williams: Exactly.

Paula Williams: Okay, cool. So why video?

John Williams: [LAUGH] Why not?

Paula Williams: Why not? [LAUGH] There’s actually some really good statistics on this and you’ll find different statistics in different places just like anything else.

But I think it all leads to, and our experience kind of supports, maybe not these precise numbers, but something pretty close. A video in an email, if you say, video enclosed or video, colon, and then the subject line of your email, you’re going to get a lot more people opening that email.

So a video in an email can lead to a 2 to 300 increase in click-through rate. Well, before I was talking about open rate. You put it in the subject line, people know there’s a video there, they’re more likely to open the email. And once they open the email they’re a lot more likely to interact with that email if there’s a video embedded in it.

Also including a video on a landing page can increase your conversion by up to 80%. So, once again if you’re selling a product or service and you have a video that maybe answers some questions or shows a video view or product demonstration or something like that that explains the product, you’re a lot more likely to get that page to convert to the next step in your sales process.

And this is not just retail. 96% of business to business organizations use video in some capacity in their marketing campaigns of which 37% report-

John Williams: 73%.

Paula Williams: 73%, excuse me, dyslexia rears its ugly head. 73% report positive results to their ROI.

John Williams: And all the are saying that video is going to be the next big deal as far as everything on the Internet.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

John Williams: So, get ahead of the game.

Paula Williams: Yeah, absolutely. So what can you do with video?

John Williams: A number of things.

Paula Williams: Right.

John Williams: You can show off your new hangar. Your office and your demonstrations, so forth.

Paula Williams: Right, you can interview your team members so that people feel like they’re familiar with them.

John Williams: Become a talking head.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Become a talking head. Build your own authority, credibility and expertise, we call that ACE, authority, credibility, and expertise, get it? By being the person that comments on the news or comments on the developments in your area of expertise.

John Williams: It’s an exponential take on a guy who, talking to a group of people in a meeting, and if he’s up there on the whiteboard writing, he’s in control.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: He’s the expert.

Paula Williams: Absolutely, and I’ve had a whole lot of people tell me when they call our company, I’ve seen what you said about x, y, or z and therefore I want to talk about how that can work for my company. And that happened because they either saw one of our videos or heard our podcast.

And either way you’re positioning yourself so that people know this is something that you’re familiar with, this is something that you work with and so on.

John Williams: Yeah.

Paula Williams: So, let’s talk about a few things that you can do to get the most from video. Now, Facebook Live Video is the one thing that we’ve kind of been hinging this report, or is actually the reason that we decided to do this podcast today, is because of these recent changes in Facebook Live Video.

And it’s pretty easy to do. In fact, when you go to Facebook, and we’ll put in the show notes for this episode how to do this, there’s a pretty simple tutorial on Facebook. It’s just a question of simply clicking a button when you go to your company page.

And instead of posting an update you can broadcast a live video just by click a button.

Paula Williams: Right now it’s only done on mobile devices. So you can only do this from your iPhone or iPad. But they’re rolling it out gradually so you can do it from your desktop which might make it easier if you’re used to doing, GoToMeetings and other kinds of things where you have a webcam set up on your computer.

John Williams: You don’t have to balance your iPhone on something. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Right, right now you have to get some kind of an easel or tripod,

Paula Williams: And set your phone on it so that your camera’s at the right level and everything else. So some of the things you want to be concerned about are making sure that you have good audio.

I use our good microphone for that or Shure S55.

John Williams: So did they ever get the backwards thing on the printing figured out?

Paula Williams: No, I don’t think so. If you hold something up while you’re talking on your Facebook live using your iPhone camera It will look like the print is backwards so if I hold up a book or something like that people have to read it backwards cuz it does the mirror thing.

That’s kind of funny. There are a few little quirks about it but the other interesting thing is that people are looking for, these don’t have to be studio produced in order to be effective.

John Williams: Right.

Paula Williams: People are looking for authenticity. They’re looking for somebody real. That’s talking about real subjects and offering real information.

So don’t be afraid of doing this. I’d suggest doing maybe three of them on a particular topic. You can think up some kind of a presentation that takes five minutes, ten minutes that explains a key concept and just try it maybe for a series of three.

John Williams: And most printers, when you go to print something, to hold up, if you just click on a little box, says print in reverse-

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] That’s true.

John Williams: Do that right away [LAUGH].

Paula Williams: Yeah, exactly, if you use things that you hold up, visual aids. If not, don’t worry about that. Just talk for five minutes, ten minutes about a particular topic and do a series of three or a series of five.

See what it does for your numbers. And then decide what to do from there. But to get the most from those Facebook Live videos, right after you record it it gives you the option to download that to your phone. And once you do that you have the video file, it’s an MP4 file, that you can then publish to YouTube to get an additional audience.

So, publish it to your YouTube channel. You can burn it to a CD for a direct mail package that you send to your prospects. You can put that live video on Instagram. There’s lots of things that you can do with that video file to make that really worth the time [CROSSTALK] .

John Williams: The more things you do, the bigger bang you get for the buck.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So if you feel like, I don’t have a lot of time to do marketing, Facebook Live video is a great way to simply kind of extemporaneously talk about your area of expertise. You want to be a little bit organized and have a clue about what you want to talk about.

Maybe make a slide or two or an outline for yourself so you feel comfortable. But, once you have that video, then you can get a lot out of that. Not only will it be published on Facebook, you can also publish it in all these other places. Now to take that a step even further than that, you can take that Facebook Live video, you can use a program like, iMovie or something like that and save out the audio and use it for a podcast.

You can take that file and have a transcript made of what you just said and use that as a blog post. A lot of people feel like they don’t have time to write. But if you can talk about your key topic, and just follow an outline, then you have a pretty good transcript after the fact that you can use as a blog post without spending a ton of money.

John Williams: Sure and once you’ve got this process put together, you can follow the same thing every time you do one. And you’ve got all the magic stuff that’s going to give you good return on your investment.

Paula Williams: Right. And the third thing you can do with it is you can take stills from that video and create social media ads.

Have your talking head with a line underneath it that leads back to the original video that people can click on, and then put that on Twitter, you can put that on LinkedIn, you can put that on other social media where you happen to have an audience and get more bang for the buck.

Now this is a really great way to use, like sometimes we have a client that has a very busy CEO. Somebody that is a great talker, that is very engaging and is their very best sales person. And, this person is an absolute rock star but they just don’t have a lot of time.

So what you can do is build the outline for them, put it in front of them, have them talk for five or ten minutes. Do that as a Facebook Live video, or as any other video file. And then use that video every possible way you can to make the most out of that person’s time, right?

John Williams: Absolutely.

Paula Williams: Right, okay. So that’s one way that we make the most out of some of our client’s time who are very busy rock stars, right?

John Williams: Mm-hm.

Paula Williams: So to show you what this does to your numbers, this is a page from our Facebook Insights. And you can see some of these posts that got the biggest reach were my head [LAUGH] .

You know, just standing there talking. These very simple videos are not much to produce and we put a whole lot more into some of the other ads that we do, that we don’t get the bang for the buck that we do for these video ads. So some of these have gone really, really well.

Gotten a lot of engagement, got a lot of people talking and reacting to those videos. So next steps, if you feel uncomfortable about any of this. That is the reason that we are putting together a workshop in August at Sundance. Sundance, Utah the spiritual home of the Sundance Film Festival.

And Robert Redford’s pet project is this beautiful place in the mountains near where we live. And what we’re going to do is get together some aviation sales and marketing professionals who need to learn, including us, to become better storytellers. And we’re going to work on our storytelling skills for three days in the mountains at Sundance.

And what better place to do it, right?

John Williams: Exactly.

Paula Williams: Yeah, and we’re going to eat fabulous food, and we’re going to ride horses, and we’re going to hang out in the mountains, and hang out in front of camp fires and all kinds of fun things. But, mostly, the biggest advantage of going, is that you’re going to go home much more confident and skilled story teller.

John Williams: With a video.

Paula Williams: With a video. That you can use for all of these purposes that we’ve talked about. And then you’re going to feel really comfortable getting on Facebook video or Periscope, or any of these other things, or even just producing videos for your website even if you’re using YouTube or some of the, doesn’t matter what tools you’re using.

Storytelling have always been the way the best salespeople do their thing, right?

John Williams: Yes.

Paula Williams: Okay. All right, so big ideas from this episode once again is Live Video is a fantastic way to connect with your audience. It can be intimidating, aka, scary to get started.

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: We have yet yet to get John on a Facebook Live but we will do that sometime in the new future I think.

John Williams: You’re dreaming.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] I am not dreaming.

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: I think we’ll manage this sometime. But the numbers do justify summoning the courage and that’s why we’re going to get you to do it right?

John Williams: We’ll see.

Paula Williams: We’ll see, okay. So go sell more stuff.

John Williams: America needs the business.

Paula Williams: Zig Ziglar, right. And subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Stitcher, or Google Play. And make sure that you leave us a rating and let us know what experience you’ve had with video.

I know some of you guys have been experimenting with it. Some of you guys are really advanced and have done some really cool things with live video. So we’d love to hear about what you’ve done, how its worked for you. If you’ve had disasters or anything else, don’t be shy.

[LAUGH] Feel free to share. We’re all friends here right?

John Williams: Exactly.

Paula Williams: Absolutely. Have a great afternoon and we will see you next Monday.

John Williams: Ciao.

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