It's taken me years, but I finally got my favorite livestreamer, Brian Fanzo, founder of iSocialFanz, to join me on Marketing Smarts to explain how brands can expand their audience and build stronger relationships with customers through video.

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Brian addresses audiences around the world about livestreaming, social media, technology, and digital marketing.

I first met Brian at the Social Fresh conference in a few years back, where we made this gif:

Tomorrow's the day! @iSocialFanz joins me on the @MarketingProfs podcast to talk about video for brands. Watch for it at https://t.co/urDVsauPDC. In the meantime, check out this awesome gif we made the night we met at #SocialFresh. (It also features @Chari_S!) cc: @mayhemstudios pic.twitter.com/jUYRmFQrSK

— Kerry O'Shea Gorgone (@KerryGorgone) March 6, 2019

I invited Brian to Marketing Smarts to talk about livestreaming and video, and how any brand, from consumer products brands to B2B software companies, can benefit from "pressing the damn button!"

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

Everyone hates watching himself or herself on video, so don't let that stop you (05:39): "Let's face it, video is not easy for anyone. Video is scary for a lot of people. For most of us. I've done over 2,000 videos myself, individually, in two years. I still don't like watching myself on video. I talk too fast. I move my hands too much. I'm like, 'Brian, stand still, you've got ants in your pants, what's going on?' I think, for many, video is intimidating that way.

"I always remind people: There's a camera on the front of your phone, but there's also one on the back. So one of the places I tell people to start is, 'Why don't you interview other employees, or your current customers?' I think customer testimonials done in a video style are underutilized. Why have we not done that more? Even more so, it doesn't have to be once a year. Do customer testimonial videos when they happen.

"One of the brands I was on a phone call with this morning, we were building a strategy for them to do these pop-up workshops, and they're going to do customer testimonials on all 10 of them. Last year, they did one day of the year where they did customer testimonials. If you have a smartphone, you have decent lighting, and it's not too loud around, you can do some things like that. Customer testimonials, employee interviews are a great way to do [video]."

Don't just repurpose your other content into a video—use video to show people something they've never seen (06:50): "Give people access to something they can't get anywhere else. If you have a product launch or you're doing a cool event, or maybe you're revamping a website, give people a behind-the scenes. Do like a 30-minute series where you're like, 'Hey, this is what happens behind the scenes.' People love seeing how the sausage is made. And it's really easy.

"And the cool thing with this is it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be massively done. Because you're like, 'Hey, I'm pulling the curtain back and letting you see this.' And it is scary. There are two rules for anyone who's doing video with me: Perfection's a fairy tale, and control is an illusion. You can only control yourself, you can't control any of the other variables. If you can embrace those two concepts, doing things like doing testimonials, behind-the-scenes, is a great way to start on video, and it can be used in multiple different ways. One thirty-minute video...can be chopped up and used in marketing. It can be used in recruiting. It can be used in your internal sharing network."

Video enables people to relate to you so you can grow relationships more quickly (09:22): "Consumer behaviors around video have drastically changed. We are now more forgiving. We're more open. We trust somebody that's on video a lot more than we trust someone that's just writing. For me, building relationships on social media is everything. And I can grow a relationships four times faster if we are communicating on video, even a Twitter video reply, or if they're watching my livestreams than if it was just tweets back and forth or if we become Facebook friends and comment once in a while."

Video can work for B2B brands as well as B2C (11:19): "Relatability comes through your employees. A great company is great because they have great employees. No company out there today does an amazing job of putting their employees first. It's still a logo. It's still a brand.... Start highlighting your employees. [In B2B], people are making their decisions, more often than not, on the trust they have with the company that's delivering the service [that the company is trying] to understand their pain points, that they're going to stick around for a long time, and that they get the industry. What better way to do that than through [video for your brand]?

"If you're a B2B services company, you should let an employee take over your Instagram Stories account once a week. And the employee doesn't have to talk about just the company. Let them document their life. Let them talk about why they do what they do. Let them talk about the amount of work they do on certain things. Because, when it comes down to it, when someone's making especially a software decision, and one company understands the employees and they can picture people they trust, and the other one is logo and a website and the same price structure, it's a no-brainer that you go with the one that has people you can relate to."

To learn more, visit isocialfanz.com and be sure to follow Brian on Twitter: @isocialfanz.

Brian and I talked about so much more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on March 7, 2019