For growing businesses, video marketing is a beneficial means of interacting with your target market and growing your brand. 81% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. How impressive is that! Whether your goal is to drive more traffic, educate buyers, or increase leads, video is one of the fastest and most effective ways to communicate with your audience. You don’t want to miss out on the huge advantages that come with video marketing, that’s why we want to provide you with 5 tips to create the perfect salon promo video! Check them out:
Create a Compelling Script
The first step to a compelling script for your promotional video is a strong introduction. Just like a teacher would tell a student writing a paper, you want an intro that grabs your viewers’ attention, much like what you’d tell a new client in your salon. This can seem overwhelming at first, so it’s always a good idea to start off with an outline before you dive in! The point of creating an outline or brief is so that you have an easily digestible outline that you can share with everyone involved in making the video and so you can see your ideas laid out visually.
In your outline (and overall video) make sure you include some information about your salon. Talk about your history, like when you opened or what made you want to open your salon. Go on to include personable information about your team, this always performs well with a business’s audience. Lastly, include general information about the services your salon is known for and provides.
Online booking is very popular among salons’ clients right now, as we’ve talked about in other blogs, so if you have online booking MAKE SURE it is in your promo video. Online booking can be a big selling point based on the convenience it provides your clients. Also make sure to mention how your clients can keep up with specials you may be running. If you’re running a timeless promo video, your video may not include a current special. If not, let people know where they can find future specials. This is another great opportunity to promote your website and social media as well!
This is all seems like a lot of information – and it kind of is! However, you want to make your points clear, precise and brief. Your promo video should be kept at around 2-3 minutes.
Show off your team with sneak-peaks and before-and-after
Time to show the personable side of your salon and show off those talented employees of yours! Within your video, show off your team with sneak-peaks of services they provide and customer interactions (like at checkout, check-in or during services). This will mostly likely include some b-roll footage. B-roll is the extra footage captured to enrich the story you’re telling and to have greater flexibility when editing. Instead of featuring only talking heads on video, you want to have other images you can cut away to that will add dimension to your story. This means it should be footage or photographs aside from your main video.
Before and after photos are also a great addition to your promo video! Like we’ve talked about in previous blogs, before and after photos and video can greatly influence potential clients to finally book that appointment because they get to see real live examples of your stylist’s work! Photographs or videos can easily be taken on your iPhone with a little editing after, easy!
Show off your salon
We know your b-roll should include sneak peaks of services and before and after’s, but you should also include your salon in your b-roll.
You put a lot of work into your salon and your salon atmosphere, use your promotional video as a chance to show off your clean, modern salon. Show the hair washing stations, the styling stations, the special tools you’ll use. Just how your salon atmosphere helps shape your brand, it also helps influence clients to check out your salon.
Showing off your salon doesn’t mean it has to be an expensive video shoot. Like we said earlier, if you’re on a budget you can use a late model smart phone. Just remember to edit your video and use only the best slips. That means you might have to take a few shots before your get the perfect one.
Choose the right music for your salon’s atmosphere
You might not think that choosing the right music is a big deal for your marketing video, but it is! So, check out these tips and choose wisely!
Background music affects how people perceive your video. It may help to carry your marketing promo video look unprofessional. That’s quite the opposite of what we want your salon promo video to be. You’ll want to start off by probably focusing on instrumental only music clips. You’ll most likely have your employees, customers or you are talking in the video and you don’t want there to be overlapping or distractions during those moments. A great tip we tend to find effective is to choose something that you might play in your salon and spa, the video is about promoting your workplace.
We also tend to find trying out various tracks before choosing on your final one. Start by building a playlist of possible choices and narrow it down as you begin editing the video. You can even get the opinions of others on your team if you’re having a hard time choosing the right one out of a few possible.
The music you choose for your video will embody your salons atmosphere for those who haven’t been there before, so chose wisely.
Promote your video
While producing and putting together your promotional video is amazing, don’t forget to actually promote the video itself online. That means more than just posting it on YouTube. You should share your video across all of the social channels your salon has. When it comes to your social channels it is also important to keep in mind that different platforms take different video lengths. For example, Twitter’s video length max is 140 seconds, but they recommend videos be 15 seconds or less. While LinkedIn’s maximum length for videos is 10 minutes but the network recommends that the ideal length depends on your objective. For brand awareness and consideration, LinkedIn says that a video under 30 seconds has a 200% lift in completion rates. All in all, the video you post on your website will most likely be a lot longer than most of the videos you post across your channels.
Promoting your video is quite important, so we want to take some time to really dive into where you should be posting and how you should be posting it on the specified platforms for your salon:
- Your videos should be no more than two minutes in length. Multiple studies have shown that for most videos, engagement tends to fall off sharply after the 2-minute mark.
- It is better to upload your video directly to Facebook rather than including a YouTube link, as Facebook’s algorithm tends to prioritize native video content. This is where platforms like Hootsuite or Sprout Social can help, as well.
- Your videos should be no more than 60 seconds in length, as that is the upper limit for what the platform will allow.
- Instagram is all about the visuals. Make sure your videos are visually stunning so they can easily grab the attention of viewers.
- Make sure to use plenty of relevant and trending hashtags to aide in the discovery of your videos as well.
- Twitter currently has a 30-second limit for video content.
- Consider using video on Twitter as a “teaser” to the full-length promo video you have on your website or YouTube.
YouTube
- A time of 2 minutes or around 2 minutes is recommended for optimal engagement.
- As you continue adding videos to your channel, you will accumulate an impressive catalog of visual assets that will be engaging and helpful to the audience you’re trying to reach.
Bonus: Don’t stop there, video is highly interacted with on social media; create a plan/schedule to produce other short promo videos for your social media marketing, highlighting your services, products, and team.
Video marketing is an effective but not highly talked about form of digital marketing and for many may seem like it would be too difficult or expensive to do… it’s not! With the use of your phone, some editing here and there and following the tips we gave you your promotional video will be bringing in business in no time! Plus, if you ever need help Blue Atlas is always here to give a hand. If you’re looking to launch a new promo video or any video marketing, give us a call and we’d be happy to help.
