Have you ever heard of the term video SMS?
If you’re reading this article and have no idea what I’m talking about—good—you’re in luck.
I’m here to show you how sending personalized videos through text messages can mean BIG MONEY for your brand and business, allowing you to rapidly scale your operations, get more clients, and close more sales.
By the end of this article, you’ll be able to start doing video SMS marketing today—and bonus, you’ll be able to send personalized messages to your prospects for FREE.
And no, that’s not a typo.
Heck, if you want to skip this article and get started with a free account right now, go ahead.
However, for a step-by-step guide taking you from sign-up to sending out your first contact with a prospect, here’s the complete breakdown to growing your business with video SMS.
So, let’s take it from the top…
The Difference Between Video Marketing and Video SMS
Although you’ve likely heard of the term video marketing—the process of general digital marketing using video assets—where video SMS differs is in its execution.
As we stated above, video SMS is a form of marketing that takes video assets and distributes them to your prospects via SMS (text messages).
While video marketing is often distributed on social media channels such as YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, encompassing every kind of video type from ads to explainer videos, the problem with general video marketing is three-fold:
- It’s expensive (high barrier to entry)
- It’s hard to track
- It rarely inspires action
Here’s one example:
You’ve just clicked on a YouTube video and are served an ad. This a form of video marketing. The ad itself is highly produced, it looks great, and you can tell a lot of effort was put in to raise its quality.
And then you skip it.
Almost immediately, too.
And if you’re the person who created that ad, you’re left scratching your head if it even moved the needle in the head of your prospect—especially after tens of thousands have been spent and hundreds of hours have been poured into it.
Here’s another common scenario:
You’ve eschewed the high-production ad. You’re making a simple explainer video. You figure a well-made, helpful bit of content shared on your social media will expose your business’s brand, bring in more traffic, and get you more customers.
So, you record a video or two. Post at least once a week to sites like Facebook and YouTube, and then you wait.
And wait….
And wait…
Until you recognize that after three months of posting videos to social media once a week, you’ve got a grand total of 500 views combined. No one’s watching them—and worse, among the few that are, you have no idea who among them are coming to your website and becoming customers.
There’s no call-to-action on your videos and no click attribution. Your video is just another piece of free content on the Internet that will be consumed and ignored if you let it.
You need to set your video content up for success.
Video SMS is the answer.
The True Benefit of Video SMS
Again, video SMS is video marketing through text message, however, there are a few BIG differences separating the two:
Tracking – video SMS allows you to track whether your recipient opens or ignores your message, allowing you to refine and evolve your pitch.
Accessibility – a text message video doesn’t require a big budget, you can shoot a quick 30-second hello from your chair without even doing your hair.
Analytics – video SMS stores your video’s engagement data letting you know how many videos it’s gotten among your contacts.
As a result, video SMS can be boiled down into five steps:
And voila.
You’ve got video marketing made easy—and most importantly, made accountable.
With video SMS, whether you recording a $100,000 ad spot or you’ve just picked up your phone to shoot a quick 1-minute introduction, with a good video SMS platform (ahem), you can send a video to your prospects through text, email, and social media, determine if/when they view it and build in pre-recorded responses and CTAs to move them along the customer journey.
General video marketing, on the other hand, uses the “h&p” method—hope and pray.
What to Expect from Video SMS?
To be clear here, video marketing is the future.
Today’s consumers are watching more video than ever, and the media is being integrated into every nook and cranny of the Internet, from social media to video essays.
However, without the added benefit of tracking and analytics that come built into video SMS platforms like Dubb, video marketing alone is a method of spreading content without attribution.
Instead, here are four expectations every video marketing effort should be held to:
Tracking and Analytics
As we’ve said before, the fundamental difference between standard video marketing and video SMS is the fact that the latter is defined by its ability to track analytics. This means every time you send a personalized video to a prospect you’re trying to move along the funnel, you can actually see if your efforts are effective through your open rate.
Maybe your approach is off. Maybe you’ve got to fine-tune your pitch. Maybe it’ll take a few more touches for them to feel your personality and persistence.
Regardless of the reason, knowing what’s working and what’s not is paramount to accomplishing your goals—and by tracking the open rate, watch time, and CTA click-through rate, you’ll have the information needed to make the better decisions in reaching them.
CTA Options
There’s nothing worse than capturing the attention of a viewer, getting them interested, then neglecting to push them to the next step. That’s like approaching a woman for a date, charming her, then leaving without asking for her number—it’s a waste of time.
To ensure you’re moving things along in a direction best for your business, you need a video marketing platform (like Dubb), that comes with built-in CTA options right below your video.
Like this.
By explicitly calling out the next step—and making it easy to follow through—you can dramatically increase your videos response rate, allowing you to book more appointments, develop more contacts, and close more sales.
Branding Integration
This one’s simple:
Does your video marketing platform let you put your logo on it?
If you’re using a video platform like YouTube or Facebook the answer is no. Sure, you can have your logo in the video, but what about everything around it.
Heck, on YouTube, your video will be surrounded by other videos, ads, and products, which can lead to you incidentally bringing more business to your competitors than to yourself, ironically.
Instead, you need a platform that’s free from distractions; a single page that’s completely dedicated to your message with no other distractions to take your prospect’s focus.
Bulk/Automated Distribution
Again, when comparing video distribution platforms like Facebook and YouTube to a video marketing platform like Dubb, one of the key differences is the ability to distribute video content.
In both social media platforms’ cases, sharing a video from their websites’ creates a single link with few—if any—available tracking analytics.
Now, imagine copying and pasting that link into hundreds of emails and crossing your fingers that you’ll see a significant uptick in your view count—despite the fact you’ll have no idea who’s watched it.
Rather, if you want to be effective in video marketing, you’ll need a platform that allows you to send uniquely personalized video messages to thousands of your prospects and contacts, allowing you to track the open rate and view analytics down to the individual.
In this way, you’ll know exactly who opened your video message, how much they watched, and whether they clicked your CTA for the next steps.
And now, to our final point…
How to Scale Your Business Using Dubb Video SMS
Did you know that your prospects are 90% more likely to open a text message than an email?
That’s because it’s easy to ignore an email.
But a text? That could be someone important? It’s just too personal to ignore indefinitely.
Which is why video SMS marketing is the next big leap in telecommunications. Whether you own a business, work in sales, offer recruiting, or simply want to make a deeper impression with someone important, video SMS marketing—especially now, in its early stages—is exactly what you need to set yourself apart from the competition.
If you haven’t already, register for your free Dubb account here.
Once you’ve downloaded the desktop, mobile app, and chrome extension, watch the video below for a quick tutorial on video SMS.
Final Takeaways
Remember, tracking and evaluation, it’s impossible to improve your practices and grow—you need to know what’s working and what isn’t. Thankfully, using a video platform like Dubb that tracks your video outreach efforts and their results, you can adjust and refine your tactics as often as you need to on your way to crushing your goals.
If you’re ready to try video SMS for your business, click here to set up your free account.
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