Dropping video bombs is an explosive way to get your business noticed
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Darin Dawson is the President and Co-Founder of the Colorado-based company BombBomb, which helps over 100,000 businesses across the world use video to communicate. In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about video and how their business helps entrepreneurs get noticed with it.
Image from LinkedIn
What Video Can Do For Your Brand
When BombBomb was just starting, Darin and his team were the primary users of their own product, which is video.
If you’re an entrepreneur, partnerships and relationships are important in terms of breaking through the noise. You can build your brand by reaching out to a lot of influencers and leveraging their respective audiences. You can also work with partners and do co-marketing.
To get in front of these people, video is a huge help. It helps you build relationships and be “face-to-face” when you can’t literally be face-to-face. It helps you to personalise at scale as well: You can sit in front of your machine and send out personal videos to introduce yourself and perform what can be very much considered a sales call.
Image from Unsplash
People want to work with people that they know, like, and trust. But in this digital age wherein we get so much stuff thrown at us — via our phones and inboxes on social media sites — technology can be sort of limiting. Before, you would need to introduce yourself to someone in person and be able to hone skills that are critical to any entrepreneur in the process. Now, you can’t recreate those kinds of experiences in a digital format.
Video offers a way to address that. You can be who you are. You can introduce yourself and build a relationship with others. You can ask questions and be inquisitive.
What Hinders People From Using Video
Even with the advent of technology, not many entrepreneurs use video. And most reasons are psychological.
When you record a video and play it back, your brain will say to you, “That doesn't sound right to me. I don't like it.” Often, the way you hear yourself in your head is not how you actually sound in real life. Realising that hinders many of us to continue doing videos.
Another psychological factor is not being satisfied with how you look. However, things are getting better because people are now using applications such as Zoom to communicate more frequently. Now, we’re seeing more of ourselves on camera than we did before.
Not knowing what to say is another reason people are afraid to use video.
In reality, you don’t have to overthink it. If you’re an entrepreneur, in sales, in marketing, or in customer service, doing phone calls is inevitable. The key is to be brief and on point. You can be far more personal as well to come across as your true self.
Image from Unsplash
Entrepreneurs have enthusiasm. They are passionate about whatever it is that they’re doing. If you’re one, you just have to bring that passion and enthusiasm through video. And it’s superiorly more effective than text or email.
Not Designed to Interrupt
Most of today’s mediums of communication are all trying to get someone’s attention and time. For instance, if you’re cold-calling someone, you’re trying to get them to respond to you, interrupting them in the process. In fact, Seth Godin calls such a technique “interruption marketing.”
But with video, you can send one and have your recipients watch it on their own time. In effect, they’ll have more time to take in what you’re saying and be more convinced to talk to you further, compared to when you’re cold-calling them and there’s the chance that they won’t be able to take the call right there and then.
“Asynchronous videos,” as they are called, can be created and sent on your own time and be viewed and consumed by your recipients on their own time. Doing these leads to better communication because you’re not interrupting their day.
Focusing on Their Customer's Customer
BombBomb was built in 2006, and their number one core competency is speed to video. Through their tool, they want to make sure that users can easily create and send videos — and, more importantly, get responses. Because, at the end of the day, it’s what entrepreneurs want: to get a better response from their communication.
Screengrab from BombBomb
BombBomb encodes videos and squishes them down into different versions. They spend far more time enhancing the recipient’s experience than they do with their user’s experience.
While they do love their customers, they know what they ultimately want. And that is to have more responses and increase their sales. To help them achieve the outcomes they want, BombBomb focuses on how their videos will look from the receiving end. They want to make sure that they’re received and played.
If you send an email, you won’t know if your recipient has read it. But with their tool, you’ll know if they opened the video that you sent and how much of it they have viewed.
Darin also believes that video offers a much richer depth of engagement.
They have the so-called “Video Page” where recipients experience your video. This page offers a space for a call to action. It also has a transcription of the video. Your viewers can like the video and comment on it through this page. They don’t have to draft an entire response because they can just simply “like” your video.
Where Can BombBomb be Used
Another core competency of BombBomb is that they work where you work. They offer iPhone and Android apps, Chrome extensions, and Outlook and Gmail integrations. They also do Salesforce integration and integration with other systems such as customer relationship management tools and accounting software.
If you’re an iPhone or Android user, you’ll have to download a native app to utilise BombBomb. Once you have it on your phone, you can record and send videos within the app. What makes them unique from others is that they also offer a complete email service. You can upload your list of contacts and you can send that video to a list of a thousand contacts, or just one person. You can all do that from their app as well.
When you use PowerWheel, which is BombBomb’s integration with Gmail, you can opt to record a video from there and send an email that contains a video to your recipient/s. This helps you bring your personality into the communication.
Screengrab from BombBomb
At BombBomb, they believe that human beings have intrinsic value and that we are uniquely designed to communicate with other human beings. If you simply send texts, you’re sort of handcuffing yourself. Videos offer a better way to level up your communication.
On Branding, Video Library Management, and Security
You as a user can brand your Video Page. You can have your own logo and add your call to action (CTA). You can even overlay your CTA on the video itself. The virtual backgrounds that you have in your video can be controlled and locked down as well. They also have out-of-the-box email design templates to further spruce things up.
Screengrab from BombBomb
Apart from branding, another concern is content management, which becomes pretty onerous as you produce more and more content.
With BombBomb, you’ll have video library management. You can folder and nest different videos. If you’re an administrator and managing a thousand of BombBomb users, you can deploy a video (or email and any other kind of content type) into a folder for all of your accounts. By doing that, your users — whether it’s your employees or franchisors — can have them at their disposal.
As many of BombBomb users operate in financial services, mortgage transactions, and real estate, they have to guarantee security.
Other features include being able to transcribe and store any video messages and being able to preview messages before they get sent out. They also offer a scalable way to do that for larger companies.
You can avail of BombBomb as an enterprise platform to access all these. You can also just get BombBomb Plus for $588 a year (if billed annually) or $69 a month (if billed monthly) so you can do unlimited video recording and more.
Getting BombBomb Noticed
Part of the success of the company is how they managed to build a great team. If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to carefully choose who you bring alongside you because you can’t do things by yourself.
Screengrab from BombBomb
In 2019, BombBomb was featured on Inc.’s Best Places to Work in the United States. Darin considers it one of his favourite achievements because he wants to let others know that they take care of their employees just as much as they take care of their customers.
Personally, he wants to be a good partner to the people he works with: He’ll do what he says he’s going to do, and he’ll come through for his partners and customers.
He also aspires for their customer satisfaction rates to be high because, as stated, people want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. They strive to keep customers and not lose them; to encourage them to tell others not just about their product but their people as well.
As proof of this commitment, Darin recounted how back when they were just starting and they only had seven employees, BombBomb had a “No Phone Left Behind” policy. This means that if the phone was ringing, they’ll be running to get the phone and have their customer answered.
Over the years, he has seen companies offer good products but get customers dissatisfied because of horrible customer service. By being the best at customer service, he emphasised that you can get noticed.
To learn more about their tool and how Darin and his co-founder Connor McCluskey built BombBomb, visit www.bombbomb.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Harry Cunningham on Unsplash
