The best way to get booked as a speaker is through a constant stream of referrals, but the best pro active marketing tool is a demo video. It doesn’t need to be a Hollywood production, but it needs to show your best…at least for a few minutes. Watch this short video post (5-minutes) and then visit the Georgia Speakers Bureau website at www.gsblive.com and click on the “video demo” tab on the top right to see some of the demo videos we shot recently at the Mansion. We’ll be holding another speaker’s demo shoot on Friday, November 16. If you’d like to reserve stage time and join us, you can register on the same page.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everyone. Steve Siebold back with Publicspeakersblog.com.

Okay, I want to talk today about video demos. The video demo, in other words, your video showing you speaking on stage for three, four, five minutes is usually all the customer will watch or the prospect will watch. It’s one of the most important marketing tools you can have in 2018, 2019 going forward because the client needs to see you speak. So you want to have a high quality, three camera shoot in 4K if you can, highest quality video you can possibly get so when you’re up for a speech they can see you speak. They can hear it. The sound is good, everything’s good, and it’s a world class kind of production.

We get about a hundred of these a month at Georgia Speakers Bureau, and people send in videos all the time. The number one thing that they do wrong that gets them rejected by companies that the Bureau sends the videos to is that … Really, two things … one is they’re not entertainment. They’re boring. They sound like schoolteachers teaching math or history or something like that. That is the number one reason they get rejected, so your video demo has to be interesting. It has to be entertaining if they’re going to pay you thousands of dollars to present the speech.

Number Two is they’re not saying anything new. They’re not presenting unique points of view.

Between these two mistakes, this is why 95% of the videos that we send out to companies that we get in are rejected, because they’re not entertaining enough or the person’s not saying anything new. They’re saying, “Hey, you gotta set goals. Hey, you gotta eat less and exercise more. You know what you really want to do, you want to make sure that you go to bed early and get up early.” I mean, just the basic things that are two hundred years old that everyone knows in an audience.

You want to be presenting unique points of view. In other words, a point of view that is unique. It’s different than other points of view. Maybe you’re offering solutions to problems. Okay? I’ll give you an example of a point of view.

I’ll give you an example I used on Hardball with Chris Matthews during one of the school shootings. I got on Hardball with Chris Matthews a few years ago and I said, “Here’s my unique point of view.” I didn’t say that actually, but this is why I was on the show. I said, “We need to arm the teachers.” You’d of thought I was the devil. I mean, I got so much hate mail after that. I said, “You need to arm the teachers, teach them how to use a gun and then have a gun in the classroom.

People said, “Oh my gosh, that’s the worst idea in the world. Do you really think this is a good idea?”

I said, “No, I think it’s a terrible idea, but we live in a brutal world. We live in a world where people come in and shoot children in schools so when you live in a world like that, you have to adapt to the world that you live in. I think it’s a terrible idea, but if my kid’s in your class, I want you, the teacher, to have a gun, not a broom handle, not a stapler because that’s not going to stop a guy with a machine gun.” The gun probably won’t either, but at least the teacher has a better chance.

I’m not asking you to agree with that opinion. That was a few years back. Of course, now they’re training teachers all over the country to … They’re arming teachers. They thought it was nuts when I said it years ago. But that’s a unique point of view. Now you might disagree. You might agree. A lot more people disagreed than agreed, and That’s fine.

The point of it is is that you’re presenting something unique that you can back up and defend and someone looking at hiring you for a speech says, “This is a smart person with unique ideas that solve problems or partially solve problems. This is a person we need to speak to our group.”

So these are the two things. You have to have a demo video. You have to be entertaining. You have to have unique points of view. Otherwise, why will they pay you thousands of dollars to speak. There’s really no reason. If you speak like a schoolteacher, you’re going to get a schoolteacher’s fee which is very low as you know.

Now if you don’t have a demo video, and you’re asking, “How do I get a demo video?” Here’s an opportunity. On Friday, November 16th, we’re going to hold a video demo shoot at the Bona Allen Mansion, our home office outside of Atlanta. This is something we held a couple a months ago if you remember watching the blog, and there’s some samples on the Georgia Speakers Bureau that you can look at. We have four samples on there from our last video shoot, and kind of give you an idea of what your video may look like.

Go to GSBlive.com and click on on the right, top side of the website it says, Videos. Click on that and you can see some of the demo videos that we just uploaded a couple a days ago. Your video will look similar, something like that in terms of the production. Okay.

Then sign up if you want to. I’ll put the link on the blog here. Sign up for the video demo shoot. It’s one of the cheapest ways to do it is when you do it with a group. If you do it individually … I’ve done them both in groups and individually, and the individual ones can cost you twenty five thousand dollars. I think my last video was about twenty thousand dollars. For this video, group video, you can do it for two thousand dollars because you’re doing it with a bunch of people in one day so it just takes the cost down.

Check that out if that’s something you’re interested in doing. If you have a video, and it’s working for you, great, no problem. If you don’t, you’ll want to have one. You’re going to want that video on a website so that’s what you do now. You send people, you send prospects to your website. That’s what we do now. People say, “If they’re interested in having me speak and they’ve never seen me before, they go to the website, they see the demo video, and they make a decision based on that.

Something to think about, and if it fits for you, I’ll look forward to seeing you on Friday, November 16th at the Bona Allen Mansion.

All right. Thanks for watching the blog. I’m Steve Siebold. I’ll see you next time.