How Video Marketing Led to Brand Differentiation and Revenue Growth for The Fresh Diet, Part 1

This is part one of a two-part series on how diet brand The Fresh Diet has leveraged video to grow brand awareness and its bottom line. The second and final part of this series will run in Thursday's issue of ROI Report.

I've been using video for my clients since 2009. Some of my best examples came from a diet company that was a client a few years ago. I've replicated this success over and over, so I wanted to share this short case study (and a few tips from other clients) with you.

Background: Marketing messaging for many diet brands has become generic. It all seems too similar to me. As a diet marketer, you have to work pretty hard to break through the glut of similar messaging being put out.

My job as The Fresh Diet's marketing consultant was to position the brand differently.

So, how did I do it? I used video to promote the company as fun, lighthearted and deeply committed to its customers. Once the videos were created, I naturally posted them to The Fresh Diet's YouTube channel, and then cross-posted the same videos to the company's blog, website and, of course, all of its social media pages. We created dozens of videos, and asked our customers to create their own videos as well.

Results: Video, mixed with other marketing, helped The Fresh Diet achieve nearly 100 percent revenue growth year-over-year as well as multiple inclusions on the Inc. 500 fastest-growing list during my tenure.

Tips on How Video Can Help Define Your Brand
1. Define your goals before you create any video. I started with an assessment of The Fresh Diet and its market. Then I created a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. From this, I defined The Fresh Diet's social media objectives as follows:

• Put a face on the nameless, faceless entity, as there were multiple regional and national diets competing for "share of wallet."
• Show customers and prospects alike that they're real human beings, committed to making a real difference in their lives.
• Build a community of deeply engaged and loyal customers who would "walk through fire" for The Fresh Diet.

2. Use video — and social media — to execute your brand's goals. In order to position itself as being human, The Fresh Diet had to be about fun. Dieting, if you've ever done it, is not fun. However, with the right support, it can be made to be.

The videos we created for The Fresh Diet had to be about fun. They needed to have the customer and prospect forget for a while that they were doing something less than pleasant.

We shot testimonials, but we also created video contests, and even rewarded our customers and prospects with a spoof of the TV show "Undercover Boss."

The Undercover Boss spoof was shot in a day guerilla style. We spent half-a-day shooting (in multiple locations), the other half of the day editing, all with just one high-definition camera and a cameraperson who also was an editor. It was very inexpensive. The video got well over 20,000 views — which was quadruple our customer base at the time — and a ton of positive comments and likes.

Moreover, it successfully conveyed that the actors in the spoof — The Fresh Diet's CEO, customer service manager and head chef (and even myself who was the voice of the brand's social media — were real people who didn't take "the serious business of changing lives" too seriously. Compared to those nameless, faceless diet brands, we BECAME real to customers and prospects. The Fresh Diet's trust level went up … as did its sales.