Have you ever thought of making a promotional video for your small business? Video sales letters can be more interesting, more dynamic and more emotional than standard sales letters. Often, promotional videos letters simply out-convert traditional sales letters, too.

In this post I’ll share some tips to improve the conversion rate of your videos.

Talk to an avatar

Don’t just talk to your audience or a demographic. Instead, visualize a single person and talk to her. This person is your ideal customer, sometimes known in marketing as an avatar.

This person doesn’t have to be real and it’s okay if you’ve never met them. Let’s say you sell a parenting product. Your average audience member is 35, has two kids and is a college graduate. You might create someone who fits that profile perfectly and call her ‘Jane’.

Whenever you create a sales video, look into the camera as if you were talking to Jane and you talk to her as if you were face to face. This creates a strong sense of connection.

Describe the problem

Start your promotional videos off by selling the pain of the problem. Talk about how you’ve been there, how it felt and the impact it had. Talk about how other people have the same problem and how it affects their lives, too.

Don’t just give the facts, make sure you connect emotionally, for example by describing the pain and frustration you experienced.  You want people watching your video to really feel a connection with you and the problem.

Present the solution

The next step is to present the solution. Emotions are essential at this stage, too. You need to make sure you get across your enthusiasm in your voice and your body language, and if you’re not used to making videos you’ll probably need to ramp up your energy levels much higher than you would in real life. That said, you don’t want to go so far that you look or sound insincere, so it can be very helpful to have a friend or colleague watch the recording and give feedback.

Excitement transfers from person to person much more easily over video than in text. Your aim here is for your enthusiasm to be infectious and for your viewers to catch it!

At the same time, you need to present the solution in a logical way, laying out the benefits and not just the features. Describe how your avatar’s life will be better once she has your product. Will she sleep better at night? Feel more confident? Be able to relax now that she knows her child is happy? This is different from the features of the product for example, that it’s a 30 day course or is suitable for children aged 3 to 5.

Give the proof

Just getting people excited about a solution isn’t enough. You need evidence, too. This can be in the form of statistics, testimonials from happy customers, video demonstrations or even before and after photos. Your proof should remove any remaining doubt your customer has that this is the right product for her.

Finally, the call to action

It’s easy to forget this, but it’s essential to let people know exactly what you want them to do. This can be as simple as ‘Click to buy now’ or ‘Pick up the phone and call [number]’.

This doesn’t have to be hard!

If you’ve not made many – or any – videos before, the above could sound quite daunting. Don’t worry though, this doesn’t need to be hard. Here’s an example of a video sales letter I made for a Udemy course:

It’s just a minute long and it’s a screencast recording of me narrating a PowerPoint slideshow. I didn’t even need to do my make up!

A couple of things to note, though. Where this promotional video originally appeared there was a ‘join the course’ button immediately below the video, so I used a subtle call to action in the video itself. And if I made it again I would make sure I added some testimonials from some of my students. But despite all this it did convert and your video could easily do the same, even if it’s fairly basic.

What’s most important is that you include all the steps above and that your video and audio quality is reasonably good – no shaking cameras, bad lighting or crackly audio. Everything else can be improved with practice.

What are you waiting for? Go and make that video!

If you’d like to cut down the amount of time you spend recording and editing videos, you might like to consider using PLR content? You can find out more about the PLR I produce on this page.