- Selling yourself is a really tricky thing.
It's challenging because essentially,
it's the task of selling the intangible,
promoting the service and abilities of a person.
Not only that, but it can really be hard to figure out
how to come across with the right tone and energy.
You can't just make a video about
how absolutely amazing you are,
or it will definitely turn off a large segment of viewers.
You need to connect with your audience,
and relate to them in ways that draw them in
without rubbing them the wrong way.
And finding this balance comes down largely
to the substance and style that you choose
to depict in the video.
Let's talk about this.
Before making a self-promotional video,
it's important to figure out why you're making it.
Is it primarily to attract new customers,
to increase existing customer engagement,
to offer brand awareness, to educate,
to inspire, to drive traffic and sales?
Each of these purposes comes with different approaches
that you can take in the video.
If you want to focus on multiple goals,
it's actually, often a good idea to make multiple videos.
That's because the more ideas you try to fit
into a short video, the more you may
confuse your audience.
In most cases, simpler is better.
Once you're aware of your main motivations,
and have a strategy on how you want to focus
the video's message, you need to figure out
the specific direction or approach that you want to take.
Now in the previous movie, I talked about
figuring out the what.
And here I just want to expand on that a bit
by talking not only about the content,
but also the approach and the style.
Maybe you want to take a narrative approach,
where you use story telling to help demonstrate
key concepts.
Or, you may want to explore a problem-solution format,
perhaps showing how you're able to solve problems
in a unique way.
You might also make a testimonial video,
where customers or clients provide engaging sound bytes
to help promote.
Or, you may want to put together an endorsement-based video
where a highly influential person or celebrity
does the job of selling another person.
Or, you may take a more informative approach,
or an entertainment approach or a commercial approach.
You've seen each of these tactics hundreds of times,
and you probably have some opinions about what you think
works better than others.
But, as we said before,
it's not only what you think works best,
it's also about what your target audience
is going to relate to.
After nailing down the general approach or approaches
that you want to take, you need to laser focus
on what you want your tone to be.
This is your character, your attitude,
how you want your audience to feel.
The same person can create different
self-promotional videos with drastically different tones,
but generally, the tone should go hand-in-hand
with your goal and your approach,
so that everything is working together
to represent you in the best way possible.
So let's break this down.
Here again, are just some of the goals and approaches
that we've mentioned thus far.
These should look familiar.
We just saw this list.
And here's a different list, which shows
quite a few different tones that you can take
with your video.
And generally, you might have a good idea
which way to go.
For just one example:
if your goal is to attract new customers,
and your approach is to adopt a problem/solution format,
you may want to try a tone that is instructive
or conversational or maybe motivational,
but depending on your target audience and your brand,
you may have some room to be humorous or entertaining
or even artsy.
You can also experiment with combining multiple tones.
That's where it gets really interesting;
figuring out what tone fits you is really where
self-promotional messaging gets fun.
Before we move on, I want to go back to Banks,
and talk to her about some of these concepts,
and see where she sees herself
in terms of some of these concepts surrounding
the substance of what she wants for this video.
Banks, there are so many different types of ways
that you can promote yourself.
You know, there is a standard video resume where you know,
someone basically just very dryly reads their resume.
That's not what we want here.
- Excellent.
- There are some very engaging and humorous approaches,
and so before we kind of delve into that style,
and kind of what you want you know,
visually and aesthetically out of this,
let's start with a little bit more bare bones
and talk about what content-wise,
you would like to see in this video.
What is it about yourself, your practice,
and your philosophy, that you want to show the world?
- I think, it's such an overused word,
but I'm going to use it anyway.
I think I really want it to feel authentic.
What I don't want, I'll start with that,
is I don't want it to feel sales-y.
I'm not selling anything.
I really am offering a valuable service to my clients,
and I want my clients or anyone seeing this
to take away from it that I am their fiercest advocate,
that I really care about their being successful,
and respect them and land with where they are
as a human being on this planet, professionally,
personally, and know that there's a lot that's already
really great about that, and let's honor that,
and if there are places that I can be of supportive
or be of service to them, to help them optimize and
again, help successful people be more successful.
That's really important to me,
so in terms of the pillars of my philosophy,
you know I really, confident, powerful, smart and fun.
That's how I want people to feel when they see this.
The fun piece is huge for me because
I kind of have a quirky personality and I think
we do laugh a lot when I work with my clients and
they cry sometimes and sometimes none of those things happen
but the piece around having it be,
much more than sitting in an office and just
talking into a camera, like be creative,
be visually interesting, but at the end of the day
be sort of consummately professional,
because that's really sort of where I live.
I think.
- Yes, absolutely.
I think that everything you just said,
really boils down to you being supportive.
I love that you said I'm your fiercest advocate.
And so everything, all the language, all the visuals,
the message that we convey, should really have that
as its foundation.
- Terrific, yeah!
- And you have mentioned this, four pillars of
your philosophy several times.
You are confident, powerful, smart, fun.
I think we could have fun with that.
I think that we can- - Cool!
- Can take it, take your cue and have fun with that.
And as we start to talk about how we represent that
in video form, let's think that over, because
I think that can really rise to the surface and sort of
define the structure, and we'll talk about that
structure a little bit- - Cool, can I
clarify one thing really quickly about the fun piece?
- Yeah.
- Which I really loved, and it's also really important
to me that while fun is there, that it's not just fun.
It's that we can have fun doing
really, really important work.
But it's taking all of those business and legal
and leadership and professional skills,
and focusing them in service to my clients,
and creating success and having some fun while we're at it.
It's the most important work there is,
and we're not breakin' rocks, you know,
we can have a good time while we're doing it.
- Well, I think that fun is definitely going to
rise to the top in terms of how this video comes together.
I think it's going to be the absolute opposite
from a dry video resume of reading off your qualifications
and background.
So let's really dig in creatively and
figure out how we can you know, get that
in the most engaging video form that we possibly can.
- [Banks] Awesome, I'm in.
- I think Banks has a lot of confidence
and a lot of great ideas of what she wants for this video.
And these four pillars of her coaching philosophy
keep coming to the forefront.
And I think it's slowly becoming very clear,
that they will likely be very important
in how we make this video.
So things are coming together in terms of
substance and approach.
I was also interested to know what she thought
in terms of her style and visual aesthetic.
Let's hear what she has to say about that.
So I think we have, generally a good idea of
the content that you want to convey,
but I'm interested about the aesthetic and the style
that you want to kind of define the look of this video.
Can you talk about the style that maybe you've
already defined in your website,
any other creative works that you've done.
What should I know, before going into this,
that you know, you've already established yourself,
in terms of your visual, your aesthetic, your brand?
- It's important to me that it's visually clean.
There's not a lot of clutter, because my job is
to break through the clutter, for my clients,
and so if I have a cluttery thing,
it doesn't make a lot of sense.
That one of my colors, actually it's funny,
is pretty much this.
It's kind of a grayish, slate, blue
that I use as kind of a through line on my website.
And I did quite a bit of research into that,
into colors, and how they attach to emotion,
and how they make you feel, and this color blue
is calming and it helps create clarity and
so I thought that was, not only is blue my favorite color,
but I thought that was a nice connection
with the work that I do.
So, if you look at my website, you'll notice that
this color is the bottom band, and tends to inform
a lot of the text and graphics.
The other thing I think that's really important for me is
I get real with my clients.
We just, I think, that's my legal brain.
It's like okay, we're talking about a,
but are we really talking about b, let's, yes or no,
tell me what we're doin'.
And let's, again, cut through the chaff and get to the germ
of what the real issue is, and so I think
I don't really even want something that's like pretty.
Like I want it to be really sort of robust
and down to earth, and kind of in keeping with that.
I'm over talking it a little bit but does that make sense?
- Yes so clean, uncluttered, but also down to earth
and solid and strong.
I think that that will inform us very well as we sort of
look at clothing options and locations,
different backgrounds because there are so many different
places that we could shoot and ways that we could shoot
but we'll keep that in the back of our minds
as we're looking at everything,
because stylistically it's important that we
match your brand which you've already established.
Alright, so I believe we've got some solid ideas
for how Banks is going to approach her own special brand
of self promotional video creation,
in terms of substance and style.
Now that we have this additional, important information,
let's move forward and talk about how to get
all of these great ideas into a solid structure.