There is a difference in how people process information and learn. When marketing to your audience, your method of delivery should strive to reach the broadest spectrum based on learning styles. Successful marketers understand this concept and they deliver information that will appeal to the vast majority of their audience.
Let me give you an example of how this works. You have a potential customer who primarily learns by seeing something. Your method of advertising is a radio commercial that this potential customer has to listen to. Do you think your advertising will be effective in reaching this potential customer? The answer is probably not.
VAK Learning Styles or How to Game the System
To be an effective marketer you need to understand that there are 3 primary learning methods. They are visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Every person in the world will have one of these 3 as their primary or preferred method of learning. These learning methods are referred to as VAK.
- Visual – 65% of the population are visual learners
- Auditory – 30% of the population are auditory learners
- Kinesthetic – 5% of the population are kinesthetic learners
Most marketers use print medium to reach their audience. This method can be effective because it easily reaches 65% of your target audience. The problems is that you are losing 35% of your target audience that could potentially buy whatever you are advertising.
Now granted if you hit .650 in baseball you would make the Hall of Fame. But if you only reached 65% of your audience as an Internet Marketer then you would make the Hall of Shame. That is the equivalent of leaving money on the table and this is a failed strategy.
How to Reach 95% of Your Audience Every Time
The quickest way to increase your appeal to your target audience is to use a blend of communication mediums. That is a fancy way of saying use both written and visual communications. The visual would be an article or post on a website. The Visual would be a video describing almost the same thing you say in the written post.
Have you ever read a book and then watched a movie based on that book? Which did you prefer? Did you prefer watching the movie? Did you prefer reading the book? Maybe you preferred both. I have never read the Harry Potter series of books. My younger sister will stand in line at the bookstore at midnight to buy a new Harry Potter book so she can immediately read it.
By having both the book and movie available they were able to reach both myself and my sister. If they only made just the book or just the movie available then they would have only reached one of us.
Create a Video and Reach 30% More Potential Customers
Just adding a video to your marketing efforts allow you to reach out to 30% more potential customers. Now right now I bet I can guess what you are thinking – making videos is too hard. For the longest time I agreed with that statement because I am a left brain person. I thought video (and graphics) were something that only right brain people could produce.
Then I stumbled upon the knowledge that I can easily produce a video using software that I – and probably you too – have on your computer. It is called Microsoft PowerPoint. Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the programs that is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. The other products are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.
Starting with PowerPoint 2010 and PowerPoint 2013, Microsoft gives you the ability to save your presentation as a video. You no longer need to use expensive video capture software like Camtasia that can cost over $250! This allows both right brain and left brain people to easily create a video.
At this point most people who are hesitant to create videos because they haven’t done them before will start making up questions to shield them from the potential of creating videos themselves. So let me answer any questions right now so that you can overcome your reluctance to take advantage of this new skill that I am about to teach you.
The first question is what if you have PowerPoint 2007? Microsoft does not give you the option to directly save your presentation as a video. But don’t fret. Check out my video below on how to convert a PowerPoint 2007 presentation into a video using free software.
Now if I haven’t answered all of your questions then you might have a question like what if I don’t have PowerPoint? Dude, how did you reach the age you are without having PowerPoint would be my response. If you don’t have it on your home computer I bet a bazillion dollars that you have it on your computer at work.
If you truly don’t have PowerPoint then I have good news. Microsoft is following in Adobe’s footsteps and has now made Microsoft Office available in the cloud. Microsoft now offers Office 365 Home Premium for $99.99 per year or $9.99 per month. You can try it out for the first month for FREE! You can get Microsoft Office 365 Home here.
Custom PowerPoint Templates
As a valued reader to my website I want to reward you by giving you two of the PowerPoint templates that I use to create my own custom product review videos. These PowerPoint templates already have slides for the most common items that you will use in a product review video. There are slides for:
- Product Introduction
- Features
- Benefits
- Images
- Customer Reviews
- Rating
- Where to Buy
- Visit my Website
- Call to Action
All you have to do is to make a copy of the template and then put in information for your product. Delete any slides that you don’t want to use. If you want to have multiple slides that have images of your product then duplicate this slide. When you are finish then save your new presentation and export it as a video. Viola you made your own product review video.
Here are 2 sample videos that I created using these 2 templates so you can see them in action.
Product Review Template One
Download Template One for Free Here
Download the fonts used in Template One Here
Product Review Template Two
Download Template Two for Free Here
Creating a Product Review Video using the Custom Templates
Now that you have my custom PowerPoint templates, you need to know how to use them. The first step is to make a copy of the template. You want to always keep a copy of the original template and not modify it.
If you are including images of the product in the presentation, then you will need to save a copy of the image(s) on your local computer. Make sure you remember where the images are located because you will be asked to find them when replacing the default images with images of your product.
The templates are designed so that all you need to do is to enter information about your product where it says. For example if you see text that says “Product Name”, replace the text with the name of your product.
If there are slides that you do not want to use then just delete them.
Watch this video below for instructions on how to use the custom template to create a product review.
Adding Audio to PowerPoint Presentation
Your video will be much more compelling to your listeners if it includes background music. Videos with background music just sound more professional.
I am including 5 royalty free looping audio tracks that you can use in your own product review videos. If you don’t know what looped audio is then let me explain. A looped audio is designed so that as soon as it ends it can start over from the start and you will never notice the change. There is a free flow of music from the end to the start. Because of this a looped audio can be as short as 15 seconds but you can play it continuously throughout your video.
Click here to download the 5 royalty free audio tracks
Watch the video below to see how easy it is to add one of the five royalty free looping audio tracks to your custom product review video.
Creating a Video Using PowerPoint 2010/2013
At this point you should have created your own PowerPoint presentation using one of my custom PowerPoint templates. You should have audio added to the presentation. The last thing you need to do is to save the presentation as a video.
Starting with PowerPoint 2010 and in PowerPoint 2013, Microsoft provides the capability to save a presentation as a video. You have the choice of saving it as MPEG-4 format or as a Windows Movie Video format. It does not matter which one you choose because YouTube will support both formats. I have found that MPEG-4 is a more universally acceptable format. Videos created in the Windows Movie Format are generally smaller in size.
Creating a video from a PowerPoint 2010/2013 presentation is very easy. Watch this short video to see how to turn your presentation into a video.
Creating a Video Using PowerPoint 2007
Microsoft does not provide the mechanism to save a PowerPoint 2007 presentation directly to video. Instead you are going to export the slides and then assemble the video using Windows Media Player. Watch this short video on how to do this.
If you watched the video and thought it would be too challenging for you to do yourself, then you need to read this article. This article shows the top 5 ways to convert PowerPoint 2007 presentations to video for free. Read the article here.
Pay What You Want
All the information that I provide on my website is free. I provide this information under my principle that I call “Pay What You Want”. If you think the information about creating product review videos using PowerPoint is valuable to you then you can choose to “Pay What You Want” for this information. To take advantage of this option just select your choice below and pay using PayPal. Payment is voluntary. You only need to pay if you think this post has added value for you.
How to Make Your Videos Better
People who watch videos on web are 64% more likely to take action whether that is to opt-in to an email list or to purchase a product. You need to be using videos if you are marketing a product for someone else as an affiliate or marketing your own products.
What I have provided here is a quick and easy way to create a product review video. If you want to build upon what you have learned here today then, I recommend you check out a product by Joey Xoto called Video Marketer’s Guide. Here is an intro video for Video Marketer’s Guide. As you can tell the quality is much better than the quick and easy videos that I create.
If you are ready to take your videos to the next level, check out Video Marketer’s Guide here.
Hi Jennifer,
Love the information you are providing on this site 🙂
I have a quick question for you regarding video promotion. When you make a video, like your first example for the wine storage, and you point to a link below the video to purchase can you put in the direct Amazon link? I’ve been told that it is against the Amazon TOS and YouTube doesn’t like it either and that you can only link to a blog first and then use the Amazon link from there?
Any ideas / advice would be most welcome.
Looking forward to seeing the RatRaceGrad website grow as you provide really useful information.
By the way, bought your Amazon Authority Site WSO product and loved that too 🙂
Cheers
Colin
Colin,
Thank you so very much for the positive comments. You never know how something will turn out when you decide to go down a different path from everyone else but I am excited about what I can offer differently with my website.
To answer your question, you must put a link to your website in the YouTube description and now a direct link to Amazon. If you put a direct link to Amazon then this violates their TOS. Yes, you do see videos that have links that go directly to Amazon. I do not encourage people to do this because you risk having YouTube ban your account or much worse have Amazon close your affiliate account.
Glad you loved my Amazon Affiliate Bible.
Jennifer
This is an excellent tutorial.
I made a couple of slideshow videos using Google Drive and the free camtasia programme.
I have open office and wonder if that could be used. I have to go check that out.
Thanks so much for sharing.
Victoria,
I do know that you can make flash videos from Open Office. Let me know if you are able to use my templates with Open Office.
Glad you enjoyed the post.
Jennifer
This is great, i love that you gave us a couple real examples to use as well!!
One question I have is whether you noticed a better conversion is you’re speaking instead of just having soft music in the background. I like the simplicity of just having music and the text but I was curious if you had tested both and if so, what you’ve noticd in regards to that.
Also, thanks for the TOS reminder about Amazon and YouTube links!! 🙂
Lance
Lance,
I have seen statistics somewhere (but don’t remember where) where they say having someone standing in front of a camera is more credulous than a powerpoint video. I don’t record audio for the simple fact that I don’t have a voice over quality voice as you can tell in the videos above. I can produce a video much faster without having to worry about the audio and synching the video to the audio. Thought I have used fiverr to get voice over for some videos when I felt like I needed it. That works perfectly if you don’t have a quality voice like I do.
Jennifer
Took me a while to get the first product video up and running, as there is a bit of a learning curve, particularly as I am using Powerpoint 2007. Having the templates and music really helped. Now that I understand the system the future video should be easy. I will see how it impacts traffic to my site. Jennifer, thanks for your assistance.
Tom,
I celebrate your success at getting your first video made. You have to share it with us. Trust me doing the second one will be faster and by the time you get your 5th or 6th video made, you will be an expert.
Not only are you driving traffic from YouTube with your video, you are also engaging your potential customers by adding video to your blog post. I recommend that you install your video on other video sharing sites besides YouTube. Why limit incoming traffic just to YouTube?
Jennifer
Do you make more money from your youtube videos or from handwritten reviews on your websites?
John,
I do 99.9% of my income from product review articles on my websites. I use the youtube videos to drive traffic to my website and to provide a high PR backlink to my websites. I do not create videos to drive traffic directly to an affiliate program but instead drive them to my website then to the affiiate program.
Jennifer
Hi,
and thanks for the pages!
I was wondering the numbers and though I have to ask where did you come up with the 30%? Is there an article or something you could link?
Thank you very much 🙂
Gin,
There are multiple stats about the power of video. Here are a few you can read:
http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100802320
https://www.streamsend.com/landing_marketing/whitepaper-video.html?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=PR2013&utm_content=VidROI&utm_campaign=PRVidROIPR2013&ocode=PRVidROIPR2013
Hope that helps.
Jennifer