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A follow-up to “Why Your Great Product Idea Is Stuck in Your Head (And What to Do About It)”
In that last post, I wrote about the invisible skill stack that keeps business owners from ever making the videos they know they need. This post picks up where that one left off — because making the videos is only half the job. The other half is knowing where each one belongs.
I recently worked with Missy Boggs of Snow on the Roof Santa Hair on exactly this. Over a few days we produced three very different kinds of video: one origin story, thirteen short Public Santa Announcements, and five in-depth training videos. They came out of the same project, but they’re not doing the same job — and treating them the same would waste two of the three.
The Origin Story Video: Your Everywhere Video
Missy’s business didn’t start as a business. It started with her husband wanting to become a professional Santa without white hair or a white beard — and Missy, a hairstylist of over 40 years, realizing she’d never bleached a man’s beard to white before. That sent her into the Santa community, talking to wives and Santas, hearing about chemical burns and beards falling out from bad bleaching jobs, and figuring out how to get it right safely.
Word got around. Other Santas started calling. One story stuck with her: a well-known Santa ready to quit altogether because of severe allergic reactions to bleach—swelling eyes, swelling lips —nothing his old stylist tried worked. She started over with him from scratch, detoxing his hair, testing formulas, until he no longer needed Benadryl and could be bleached safely year-round.
That’s not a product demo. That’s a “why I do this” video — and a “why I do this” video belongs everywhere:
- Pinned at the top of the YouTube channel and social profiles
- Embedded on the homepage or about page
- The first thing a prospective client sees before a sales conversation, not the last
- Reused in email, in a welcome sequence, in a press kit
People don’t fully trust a product until they trust the person behind it. The origin video does that work before a single feature or price ever comes up — which is why it shouldn’t be filed away as “just” a testimonial or a nice-to-have. It’s the video every other piece of content is standing on.
The 13 PSAs: The Reminder, Not the Pitch
The Public Santa Announcements are a different animal entirely. One, for example, warns Santas about counterfeit bleach and developer products sold by third-party Amazon sellers in packaging that looks nearly identical to the real thing — and what buying the wrong version can do to your hair or skin. It’s genuinely useful information, not a sales pitch, and that’s exactly the point.
Thirteen of these give Missy a real content calendar — enough to post regularly through the buildup to Santa season without repeating herself. Their job isn’t to close a sale in the caption. It’s to:
- Keep Missy visible to the Santa community between purchases
- Answer the specific questions and worries Santas actually have (safety, counterfeits, technique)
- Position her as the safety-first expert in a niche where bad information can genuinely hurt someone
A person doesn’t need to buy something the first time they see one of these. They need to remember who to call when they do. That’s a reminder video, not a pitch — and it works because it shows up consistently, not because any single one goes viral.
The 5 Training Videos: Value for the People Who’ve Already Bought In
The last tier is the opposite of public. The five training videos — walking stylists and Santas through the actual products and techniques — aren’t posted publicly at all. They go directly to Missy’s paying clients and to the stylists she personally trains.
That’s deliberate, and it matters:
- The content is only genuinely useful to someone who already has the product in hand — publishing it publicly wouldn’t sell anything; it would just give away technique she’s spent over a decade refining
- Access to the training library becomes part of what a client or trainee is paying for, not a free extra
- It deepens the relationship instead of just starting one — this is the tier that turns a one-time buyer into someone who stays with her brand and refers other Santas her way
If the origin video builds trust and the PSAs build recognition, the training videos build retention. They’re not for growing the audience. They’re for taking care of the people already inside it.
Matching the Video to the Job
None of these three video types would work if you swapped their jobs. A training video posted publicly would bore a stranger who doesn’t own the product yet. A PSA sent privately to paying clients would feel like a downgrade — they already know her. And an origin story buried in a private client folder would never do the trust-building work it’s meant to do.
This is really the second half of the point I made in the last post. Once the skill stack of actually making a good video is handled, the work isn’t finished — it just shifts to a different question: who is this video for, and where do they already spend their attention? Get that match right, and thirteen short videos and one long one can do more for a business than a single expensive ad ever could.
If you’ve got video sitting around — or video you know you need to make — and you’re not sure what to do with it once it exists, that’s exactly the kind of thing I like to help sort out.
