What’s the most effective way you can get the attention of a potential customer?

You probably want to begin by talking about what a good job your company does. But this is not the most effective approach – and could blow your opportunity to engage the potential customer more quickly.

Sales coach Dean Minuto of SalesBrain says your first step is to focus on the customer’s fear of loss — “if you don’t do this, then this could happen.” Fear of loss, it turns out, is twice as effective a motivator as the potential for gain.

Try focusing on what the customer’s competition is doing well and how your can help your customer overcome that… if they’ll take this action now.

The second tactic Dean talks about got my attention because I’ve seen it work so well: online video testimonials.

Dean says, in business, we’re all concerned about making safe choices. Most of the time, we don’t necessarily want the best choice or even the cheapest. We want the one that carries the least risk that ensures we won’t be fired.

How do you convey safety? By presenting customers on your website, talking about the great job you do. A customer is an impartial third party who has already chosen you and seems pretty happy about it.

Unless they’re prevented from participating because of corporate policy (or because they don’t want the outside world to know they use vendors), customers usually love to give testimonials.

Give ‘em some questions in advance, put ‘em on camera or behind a microphone, make them feel comfortable, ask a few questions and — voila! — you’ve got a powerful sales tool.

Online video testimonials should include visuals of your product or service in action and should run no more than 2½ minutes.

Online audio testimonials should only last a minute or so, though you can create a second version that’s 6-10 minutes long describing what the customer learned from working with your company.

Fear and safety: we’re all wired the same way. Might as well profit from it!

Within three years, close to 90% of web traffic will be video in nature. Not just Netflix (which currently accounts for about 20% of all web bandwidth) or YouTube, but corporate videos, as well.

More and more often, senior management is looking at video on the web as a way to reach potential customers, attract investors and even train new hires in corporate culture.

But after 35 years in video — most of it interviewing hundreds of CEOs for a half hour PBS television series — I can tell you there are three things to keep in mind about producing an effective corporate video.

1. Have a goal.

From your first meeting, target the video to reach a specific audience and pick one overall message you want them to remember. Trying to reach multiple audiences or convey multiple messages? Produce multiple videos. People will only remember one thing after watching your video. What do you want that message to be?

2. Keep it short.

I remember when Knowledgestorm did a survey of thousands of readers and concluded that 2 ½ minutes was the ideal length for a video. Most executives want to go much longer than that…tell the whole story of the company in a 20-minute video because surely everyone will be interested. Not so. Being brief is difficult. It takes planning and great production. (In other words, it takes time to be brief.) It’s worth the time.

3. Use visuals to tell your story.

80% of what we remember comes from what we see.  If you’re on camera more than a few seconds at the beginning, middle and end of the video, you’re wasting an opportunity to accomplish your goal (which, remember now, is one concept per video). Use images of people, places and things to tell your story.

Follow those three rules and you’ll be as much an expert as the guy who’s been doing it for 35 years.

About What’s Up Interactive:
What’s Up Interactive is a relationship-driven interactive marketing agency dedicated to growing our customers’ businesses. What’s Up delivers creative website design; mobile app development; video production; innovative organic search marketing that successfully builds online audiences; social media marketing strategies and email marketing solutions. Our clients include AT&T, Georgia Lottery, Georgia Aquarium, and Fox Television Stations, among many others. To learn more, please visit whatsupinteractive.com, and follow us on twitter.