About Us Video: Harness The Power Of Personalization
An About Us video is a powerful way to build trust and admiration from your viewers, but it needs to be personal.
What Is An About Us Video?
An About Us video showcases the real personalities behind your brand. It differs greatly from a product or promotional video because it’s not about what you’re selling.
It’s about who you really are.
Many brands get huge results from About Us videos, which are known to build trust and admiration in your brand. This is especially valuable to brands that have higher ticket items, as well as service based businesses that have a lot of competition.
When Is An About Us Video Required?
An About Us video is required when you have a new potential buyer who is considering working with you, but isn’t familiar with your brand.
In our blog about Video Content Strategy, I broke down the three stages of psychology a buyer goes through when considering a sale, and how videos will influence each one.
During the second stage, your potential client is asking the question “Can I trust you with my money?”
They already know what you offer, but if they don’t know your brand, they require more than logical understanding. They need emotional security. Put simply, they don’t trust you yet.
And why should they? There are many brands out there that have abused the trust of your potential clients in the past.
Not having this trust is what prevents most sales from happening.
So if you want to increase your close rate, you need to inform your client who you really are, and why they can trust you.
That’s exactly what an About Us video can do for you.
Our agency believes in this so much that we made a really great About Us video for ourselves!
In this blog, I’ll use ours as an example to highlight how to make an effective About Us video for your brand, so you can start building more trust and admiration in your ideal clients, but it needs to be personal.
How To Build Trust & Admiration
Apply the following steps to your About Us video, and your audience will find your brand much more trustworthy than your competitors.
Say Something Personal
Transparency is the key to building trust and admiration in today’s marketplace. By including some personal information about you in your video, you remind people that you are human just like them, and that will always bode well.
So what should you say, while still maintaining professionalism?
Here are a couple of questions to spark your imagination:
- What did you do as a child that relates to your current brand?
- What are some of your core values?
- What do you do outside of work?
- What is your backstory?
In our About Us video, Jenn and I (the two founders of our company) both share passions we pursued as a kid that eventually positioned us to be experts in our field today.
Not enough brands share elements of their childhood in their About Us video, but by doing so you create a massive boost in authenticity and therefore trust.
Why There Was No Other Option
A very powerful storytelling technique in your About Us video is to highlight the part of your life where you felt your pursing your current brand was the only option for you.
Most entrepreneurs and business owners have had an experience where they felt they just had to start their own brand.
This is a powerful and compelling story!
Why is this so important? Because it shows how passionate you are about your work, and that kind of authentic passion builds trust and confidence in your audience.
What was the reason you broke out and started your own brand?
In our video for example, we talked about how storytelling in business wasn’t easily accessible for smaller businesses. We went on to highlight how our brand became about bridging that gap by offering storytelling videos to those who didn’t have “name brand” budgets.
Clear And Defined Antagonist
As much as your About Us video is about you, it also needs to be interrupted at some point by an antagonist.
Your antagonist should be the real problem your client is facing. Introducing an antagonist not only builds tension in your storyline (which is a good thing), but it increases the client facing demand for your brand.
Good marketing creates demand, and this is accomplished through your antagonist. So take some time to get extra clear on what that is, and the havoc it’s raising.
At the very start of our video, we introduce our antagonist: Your business needs a big video budget in order to compete with what name brands are doing.
It’s basically the “Thanos” of all video marketing problems.
Tip: It’s great to introduce your antagonist early, and only solve it in the latter half of your video. Drag out the resolution a bit. As humans we will often stick around to make sure the story ends with a “happily ever after”.
Authority Position
From a cinema perspective, placing yourself in the centre of the frame (instead of off to one side), communicates authority.
Have you ever seen ads for the online teaching series called Masterclass? If so, you’ll notice they always have their teacher in the centre of the frame.
Here’s an example:
If you’re conducting an interview for your About Us video, make sure you position the spokesperson in the centre.
This will build more trust in the person watching it.
Best wishes with making your own About Us Video!
By Anthony Madani
