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This week Jonah offers up three tips to consider when making your promo video.

Your promo video is the most valuable asset that you have to get yourself booked as a magician. The biggest difference in your magic business as to whether or not people choose to book you or not.

If you have been trying to book yourself out as a magician for any amount of time, you’ll realize that very soon, you need proof that you can do what you say you can do. And the form of proof that you possibly could have would be a promo video, a video demo of what you do with audiences, people, reacting, clips, and different things like that.

The Wrong Promo

What happens if you get this wrong? Well, the first thing that happens if you get this wrong is you don’t have a promo video and you have to dodge that question when it comes up. If you don’t have a promo video it’s very difficult to convince new potential clients that you’re going to be perfect.

The second thing that happens if you get this wrong is maybe you do have a video, but it is a video of you performing for the wrong audience. So maybe it’s you performing for kids when you’re trying to get corporate gigs. Maybe it’s you performing outdoor street magic when really you’re trying to do private events and you’re trying to do events for companies. There’s lots of different ways that you can have the wrong footage. Your video could convince people that you are great but not the right person for the job. 

The third thing that happens if you get this wrong is you could have an amateur looking video, a video that basically convinces them that you are not good enough for the part. So we want to make sure that we do not do any of those things. 

The Right Promo

Here’s what starts to happen if you get a great promo video, if you have one that really works for you.

The first thing that happens is you’re going to start booking bookings right away. People are going to call you and say you’re perfect for the job. You don’t have any convincing to do, you don’t fight on price because they see proof that you can actually do this. 

The second thing that happens if you get this right is your conversion rate goes up. Let’s say before one in every three people who inquired with you actually ended up booking you. Now it may end up being something like 50% or 60% of people, maybe even more because you have the one thing they’re looking for, which is they want proof that this is actually going to be good. 

And thing number three that happens if you get this right is you start to get authority in your market. If you do a good enough job of showing people a promo video, with lots of people in your market in that video, then it becomes unequivocally true that you are the expert in that market because you do loads of shows for just that market.

How To Get The Best Promo

Now let’s talk about three things you can do to actually make your promo video better or put together a really good promo video.

First, show them themselves. There’s a lot of different things we can put in promo videos. We can put closeups of us doing card tricks. We can do footage of us on stage. We can do footage of lots of different things. The real thing that we want is we want promo footage of us performing an event. When the viewer looks at that, they realize that this is my people. This is my venue. So if you perform at comedy clubs then your promo video should have lots of comedy clubs. If you perform at summer camps, it should have summer camps. If you perform at corporate events, it should have corporate events. Or at the very least it should look like people are at corporate events. Too many magicians who get their promo video spend thousands of dollars on getting somebody to go into a studio with them and take fancy videos that nobody really needs. It’s not the video in the studio that’s helpful. It’s the video footage that comes from the actual events of other clients just like them.

Second, the next time you have a booking, for a market that you do lots of shows for, bring a videographer to it. Paid for quality. There’s a few things in our business that we can do. You can print business cards on your own. One that Jonah doesn’t recommend that you do on your own is making a promo video. This is the number one deciding factor on the planet that’s going to help convince people that you are the right person for the job. Jonah recommends that you hire somebody to make the video. It is obvious when a video has been edited or put together by a pro versus an amateur. 

Getting Promo Video Help

If you need help putting together a promo video and marketing your services, please send Jonah an email to magic@torontomagiccompany.com. You can chat about potentially working together and see if he can help. Jonah has a new gigs program starting next month, and that might be for you. So please send him an email.

Additionally, there is a Discourse in Magic Facebook group where different listeners of this podcast get together and chat about magic and podcasts and all things like that. So if that might be for you, then check out the page at facebook.com/discourseinmagic