How you can make a 3 minute call to action video for pre-orders for your book.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. And today I'm gonna share with you how I've made a video to invite the guests from my Unnoticed book to make a pre-order on Amazon and Barnes& Noble. Now, the pre-order may not be what you're doing, but you might be reaching out to customers or partners or members of staff with messages. And the reason I wanna make this podcast today is to share with you the learning journey that I've had today, making a 2.5-minute invitation video with links and a QRC to get people to go onto Amazon to preorder something. The methodology stays the same. I wanna share with you how you can make a video. Doesn't have to take as long as I did, but how you can make a video at low cost using readily available technologies. So first of all, when we reach out to people, we often are doing that with writing. And yet we know that video is many, many times more impactful than writing. Audio is more impactful than writing. It's more intimate, but video has all the benefits of the picture authority effect. Basically, our brains process pictures in a way that attaches them to meaning. And it does that in a way that's much more powerful than it does when it takes text, because text needs to be interpreted in a different way by the brain. It's a long story and some research that I was doing into this whole picture superiority effect for the Speak PR program. To cut a long story short, we all know a picture is worth a thousand words. And the video, you can multiply that because as we know, there are 28 frames per second in standard moving images. So you can just imagine if one frame is 1,000 words, what 24 or 28 frames per second is. So I want to have people that took part in my book, which has just come out on Amazon this week, to preorder. So A fellow author sent me the email that they sent to their friends and family and connections in order to get them to preorder. And I looked at it and went, well, that's great, but how does that come off the page? How do I really engage people with this whole project? And a big issue that I have is that the work for them must be minimal. They must be engaged in what I need them to do. I need to get them to come to me and be involved in what I'm doing so that there's benefit for them and benefit for me. Now, even the best copywriter finds that challenging, not least of which because most people only read the headline. David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy& Mather, the ad agency, used to say that 80% of your work is done by the headline and 20% by the body copy. Imagine if you're trying to get someone to do something beyond the simple task to understand and engage and take action through writing. Most of us are not that gifted. I include myself in that. We're not able to craft a narrative and send that to people and get them to take action. So we ask our email to do a great deal of work, but actually it's not necessary anymore. There are many tools available that we can use, you and I as entrepreneurs, to share our message and our call to action with those people that want to be involved. And I'm gonna share with you how I've done that today. The final result is a 3-minute call to action video, which includes me speaking with a camera recording, uh, and also a recording of me with the screen capture. There is embedded images that I've taken from the internet, and there is also a quick response code at the end, which people can scan and take them directly to the Amazon page where the book is there to be pre-ordered. So let's first of all look at the base tool I've been using, Descript. In fact, it's what I'm using now. And descript.com has several different packages. But all very affordable. I'm on a pro version, but it's like $30 a month. And with this, I can both screen record and camera record simultaneously. You can also use a product like Loom, which is also great. loom.com is fantastic. And loom.com is now also enabling you to share the videos, edit the videos, and also to have a transcript in real time. Very, very good. But Loom is all online browser-based. You can also use Camtasia, for example, for recording your screen. And then you can download that into something like Adobe Premiere or Adobe Premiere Rush, which is the base version, which you can get on subscription. I've tried Loom for video editing, but it's not quite sophisticated enough. When you want to do editing, which is more than trimming the front and the end. The Adobe Premiere is great, but it takes a bit of work. And what it really lacks and what Descript has got is the ability to get the transcript of your video in real time and you edit the text. That's right. You edit the text and it automatically edits the video. I've gotta tell you, you have to see it to believe it. So I use Descript now where I film myself and the screen simultaneously using Descript. I'm then getting a real-time transcript, which I can edit. Having done the edit, what I did was to film myself going onto the Amazon store and then showing the audience, the people that I'd like to preorder, the tab on the amazon.com, which has got the look inside the book. So I'm able to show them what it looks like inside the book by recording it. So then I've got this as the base video. What I've then done is to add some audio. I bought a little piece of music for $50, so I have the rights to it. And with that music, I can upload that and introduce, for example, I can introduce the same theme that I have for the podcast. So this podcast has the same theme music as my video. I was then able to take a screenshot of my podcast, download that, and put that as a project item within the Descript project folder. So then I've got the music and I'm able to add the picture of my podcast alongside the picture of me speaking. And the film runs along with me introducing the podcast and saying thank you. And then I've got the screen recording of the Amazon and I'm explaining what people can do. And then towards the end, I'm able to put a call to action. So then I included the voiceover and the text, which includes the details that have what I want them to do, which is to preorder, to review, and to share. And then I've told people to get their phone ready. And then in the final 10 seconds, I have a QRC, quick response code, Which they can scan, and then I end. So I generated the quick response code by going to a standard website. There are quite a few of these. One of them that I use today is called qrcode-monkey.com. I use that because I can change the color. I can also upload my logo within the QRC, and I can download that as a PNG file or as a vector file or as a JPEG file for free. It's crazy, right? It's crazy. So if you take the URL from the website that you want people to go to, rather than typing out a long URL, which especially for an Amazon book is a long one, cut and paste that into the QR Code Dash Monkey. There's another one called qrcode-generator.com. And then all you do is you download the picture and you have people scan that with their phones, and that will then take them to the right page. And if they're using an Apple, then of course what will happen is they can see that on their phone, but also they can mirror that on their desktop browser too. So now I've got myself a 3-minute video. It sounds quite easy. It took me a little bit longer than 3 minutes to make. Because I was adjusting the duration of the audio, affecting where the pictures lie, changing the size of the images and so on. But altogether, very easy for someone with remedial skills like me to edit a video. I then published the video on Descript. I shared that onto my YouTube account, but I've also then exported that as a regular 15-megabyte file And I've uploaded that to my Vimeo. So that is now on my Vimeo account. And with Vimeo, I can trim the front and the back, but I've already done that fairly closely. So what I have though done is to add some thumbnails, and then I've added that to a Vimeo showcase, and I've added an end screen with a call to action. It was important to add the video into one of the showcases within Vimeo, because what I found was that the call to action button, which is a link to the Amazon shop where you click here and go to the shop, is only active if that link is private or if it's in a showcase. Don't ask me why. We learned that through the correspondence with the Vimeo tech support. But what it means is that by uploading it to my Vimeo account, I now have this video which is within my own branded platform. I have the quick response code within the video. I've got my music front and back, which is within what I call my sonic branding guidelines. And then now I have this video ready to share. Now I could just share it as a link, but what I've done is found that Very few platforms will create an embed link for the video. We know that Vidyard does that, but only a couple of the email providers, including Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, enable, if you like, a native video. So in other words, you can embed the video frames into your email. They don't play within the email, but they look as though they're going to, and you click them and they go back to Vidyard or they go back. For example, to the VideoAsk website. VideoAsk is the other platform that I tried using, and it's very good. You upload your video as well there, and you can ask questions of people of how they want to respond. I didn't go down that path for this because this is not a survey, and I already have within my Zoho platform the campaigns that I'm using for the email. So I elected instead to take the Vimeo embed code, and within Zoho, the Zoho Campaign is very easy to either add a link or embed code into the email newsletter. And because I already have my database of 50 people that were my guests inside my Zoho Campaigns platform, I've created a one-off newsletter for this particular subset of my overall mailing list. What I've then done is to have my Unnoticed branding, a small introduction, and then a link to the video. And what I've also got from Sam, who has come and worked with me from Swapbooks as a consultant on the launch of the book, She provided me with a wonderful rendering of the book in 3D as a stack of books because I don't have the final book yet. They're gonna come next week, but I do want to get out with the pre-ordering because you can pre-order online. So by creating an artificial version, if you like, a rendering of the, of the book looking as though it's already fully formed, I can put that into my newsletter. So then I've got at the top of my newsletter, I've got my branding, which is the same as the masthead on the book and reflects also from the podcast. But I've also got that now as an embedded video, the video that I made in Descript, which has got my sonic branding and my visual branding. And I've also then got below that the image of the books, made up, if you like, as a stack for those people that don't want to spend 2 and a half minutes watching a video. In my text, I've been quite clear to say that this is only 2 and a half minutes because people don't want to watch a long video. I've also used the Zoho personalization of the header so I can put in the name of the person automatically as a mail merge field into the Zoho Dear, so it'll say, dear John, you're in this book. I'd like you to share it with your community. That's in the headline. That's in the subject header they're going to get. So that's pretty special cuz that'll make it stand out. And then there's a subhead as well, which talks about we're in this together. Want to share with you, we're ready for pre-launch. Please check out this video. So the email newsletter is specific to each individual person. And then the final piece that I really like about Zoho, and many platforms also do this as well, many of the distribution like Campaign Manager and so on. What you can do is you can choose either to press send all at once. You can send as a batch so they all go together on a particular time zone. But what I've done with the Zoho campaigns this time is to choose the distribution at the time when the recipient is most likely to open it. Let me repeat that. So in other words, the system is waiting to send the email until the person is most likely to open it. Now, in our SpeakPR methodology, I talk about personalization and I talk about the avatar and about the daily schedule. Of your avatar on the weekly and the monthly, because people are not always ready to receive the information that we want to send when we're ready to send it. So what we need to do is to send people the information when they are most likely to be open and willing to receive it. So what I love about this feature within Zoho Campaigns is I can set that campaign for 50 people who are based variously in Asia, Africa, India, Europe, and America, and Latin America. I got the full time zone set up here for these guests, and Zoho will enable me to deliver email to them when they're most likely to open it, not when I'm most likely to want to send it. So I want to share this because I spent the day creating a piece of content that, yes, has taken me much longer Than just drafting an email and sending it to 50 people. But I've also got a goal, which is to engage these 50 people to help me to help entrepreneurs to find out what they already know. So often we hear people say, I've sent the email, my job is done. Those of us that are old school say it's not about sending the email, it's about the result that we want to get. So If we're sending out content because it's convenient to us to send it in the way and the time we're doing it, we're really wasting our time as well as wasting the time of those that we're sending it to when they don't want it and it's not in a format that they like or are willing to engage with. I've also created this content in a format that might be the way that the people that receive it might want to create it themselves. In other words, They might share it then with their community. And ultimately, that's what I want. I want more people to preorder the book. So if I make it easy for them to want to preorder the book and then to share about the book, then I'm gonna get the multiplier effect. I'm gonna get the cascade theory that we talk about in our Amplify section of the Speak PR program. I was wondering what to share about today, and then I thought, why don't I share about how I've created a 3-minute invitation video, because this is a process and these are the tools that any entrepreneur can use. The combined cost is no more than $50 per month between the Vimeo account and the Descript account. It's not a function of money. It's a function of time and interest. And you're sitting down. Today's taken me a bit longer because I've been learning some new techniques. But I'll get quicker just as I've got quicker on the podcasting. But I encourage you to embrace some of the new technologies that are out there. And also think about if you're creating content, who you're creating it for. Don't create it because it's easy for you to create, create it with the end consumer in mind. And then ultimately, we will get much greater purchase because that content will be engaging and compelling. And ultimately, that's what we want. We were creating content. Not for the sake of creating content, but to build a better business. So I hope this has been a useful episode for you, and I hope that you come and look at the Unnoticed Show. I'll also put a link in the show notes to the video that I've created. If you've got any questions about this or anything else, please do just give me a call, reach out to me at email jim@eastwestpr.com. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Unnoticed Show.