Three ways Benjamin Kitzinger grows an audience
Benjamin Kitzinger helped a design and tools company turn customer testimonials into a whole new way to build an audience.
Benjamin is a Sr. Multimedia Marketing Manager and Video Producer at Altium, a printed circuit board (PCB) design and tools company in San Diego.
In this week’s episode of the Dear Video podcast, we talk about how Benjamin uses customer stories to actually expand Altium’s audience and the ways he is able to get more engaging stories from his customers.
- Listen on Apple Podcasts
- Listen on Spotify
- Listen on Anchor
You should listen to this episode if…
- Your customers have a great stories to tell about your brand and you want to know how to get them onto video
- You’ve ever felt uncomfortable being interviewed or doing the interviewing
- You want to expand your audience
Three ways to grow your audience through video
- Widen your audience by asking different questions
Benjamin told me that he wasn’t always a good interviewer, but that after doing it and learning how to interact with customers, he’s gotten good at it.
The thing that makes all the difference?
Asking different questions. When you ask a customer for a testimonial or to share their story about how they work with your company, do you ask the same questions to everybody? I did.
Benjamin started asking customers more personal questions about their experiences, how they felt about working with Altium, and about their individual story. He started doing this as a way to get to know customers before filming them, but he found that these questions and answers were actually a lot more engaging and the videos started to attract wider audiences. - Find your customers’ common denominator
Altium’s customers are largely engineers, which means that they will all probably have at least something in common.
Ok, ok. Yes, they’re all engineers, but you need to dig deeper. Benjamin discovered that engineers often have something in common that led them to become engineers - when they were kids, a lot of them would take things apart and rebuild them to learn how the world worked.
What do your customers have in common beyond working with you? When you figure that out, you can start talking about that common denominator as a way of expanding your audience and attracting the right kind of people to your business.
- How to be a better interviewer to get better stories from your customers
There’s a reason TV interviewers get paid the mucho moolah, amiright? It’s because they know how to ask the easy questions and follow up with the heavy hitting ones.
Benjamin shared his approach to asking the right questions and it starts with simply preparing a list of topics and questions.
But then, he says, you have to learn to listen carefully to the answers so you can ask probing questions that get to the real stories you want to share.
Listening is something I’m working hard to get better at. I feel that being a better listener will help me ask better questions. It worked for Benjamin and I’m certain it can work for you and me, too.
