Coming up with the best video marketing campaign for a small business is very stressful. Hence, I created this video marketing guide for small business owners who have a limited budget and who are looking not to miss out on the leads.
You have to ensure that the video marketing strategy you are employing targets your audience (customers) and conveys the message as you intend. There are many forms of video marketing that small businesses are using today to gain a competitive edge in the market.
Here is the ultimate guide to video marketing that will show you how you can use this strategy to push your small business to the next level.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is an activity that aims at informing a buyer about the availability of a product in the market. It is an act of promoting and selling a good or service to the customer.
Marketing is an essential component of e-commerce and business management because it involves informing the buyers of the availability of products and services in the market.
As a broad concept in business, most entrepreneurs strive to learn more about the latest trends in marketing, like digital marketing.
What is Video Marketing?
So, you know of the saying that a photo is worth a thousand words? Well, try imagining how many photos are there in a video just to catch a glimpse of how effective video marketing can be to your business.
Video content marketing is any form of a marketing campaign that incorporates videos. Nowadays, every marketer is looking forward to including a video in their online marketing to make their online marketing campaigns more effective.
Ideally, in the United States, over 75 million people watch online videos every day. Also, in 2019, video content contributed to 80% of the total consumer internet traffic.
Types of Video
There are different varieties of videos that you can use for marketing. When choosing a type of video to focus on, you should find out if it is the best one to communicate with your target audience. Understand the purpose of the video you are creating before you pick one.
Below are some types of videos that you can create for different sets of the audience:
- Product reviews: Also known as demo videos, product reviews can help you advertise your product. This type of video often generates a lot of comments from viewers, which can help you determine what customers are saying about your brand and make necessary adjustments to improve your products and services. The right people to include in a demo video are those intending to boost their social following. They will offer ‘free’ advertising to your business when you involve them in creating the video.
- Explainers: If you are launching a new product on the market, then this type of video can save you a lot. Explainers inform the potential buyers about the product usage, price, and where they can find it. It seeks to educate the audience about the products and convert viewers to customers.
- Interviews: Most marketers use interviews to start a conversation between your audiences as a guest influencer you feature on the video. Additionally, you can always re-use an interview video by creating podcasts to market your business brand.
Getting Started With Video Marketing
There is a lot that every business owner should learn about video marketing.
Video marketing is becoming a trend nowadays, and it vital that you get its basic concepts and scope to ensure you meet your objectives for engaging in it.
Coming up with the best video content for your marketing campaign is the fastest way of increasing traffic to your website because video content is straightforward to consume.
In this part of the article, we let you know how you can get started with video marketing and position your products and services to willing and able buyers.
Here is what to do and get started with video marketing for small business:
1. Have a Plan
Planning comes first in every marketing campaign, and video marketing is no exception. Surely, without a reasonable plan, you are getting nowhere with your video marketing strategy. When setting a plan, you must ensure you meet the following objectives:
- Be specific: You must always ensure you have a specific objective you want to fulfill in your video marketing campaign. For instance, you can start by saying, ‘I would like to increase traffic to my business website this month by at least 30%. The goal you set should be specific and give a broader picture of what you intend to accomplish with your marketing campaigns in the end.
- Set achievable goals: The reason most entrepreneurs fail to realize their marketing goals is because they set them so high. Always ensure the goal you set is realistic and achievable. For example, saying that you intend to attract a million new visitors to your blog in a month, is being unrealistic.
- Trackability: You must ensure the marketing goal that you set is easy to track. This way, you can easily tell if your efforts are bearing any fruits along the way.
Some food for thought: In reality, video marketing is a bit crucial for increasing traffic to your website. Therefore, you want to ensure that you find out what works better and what doesn’t work at all when setting your goals.
2. Information is Key
Video marketing should target informing the customer new things they don’t know about the product or service. As much as you are focusing on luring the consumer to purchasing your products, you want to ensure you are informing them in a simple and persuasive language. That means you want to keep your video precise and focused on the objective.
You should begin with what you know when you opt for educational, entertaining, and inspirational videos. There are different styles of content that you can use for marketing. You must pick the best style of content that you believe will keep your target audience on the screen.
For instance, if you opt for educational content, then you must focus on providing information that your audience can imitate. For inspirational content, you should aim at spicing up your audience’s lives by including some inspiring moments and breathtaking views in your videos.
3. Get The Tools Ready
Video content is a sure way of putting your business brand in the limelight. It helps you develop trust with the customer. When the customers share the content, it reaches many potential buyers and making your business more popular in the flooded market. Well, to ensure you get the best out of your video marketing, you must ensure you use the best video marketing tools around. Here is a list of some of the top five tools you should strive to learn using if you intend to use video marketing:
YouTube
YouTube is the most powerful video marketing tool in the world today. YouTube has over one billion users, and posting your video on this platform helps you reach a multitude of potential customers.
You can come up with short video marketing content, and YouTube can recommend it to the viewers when they are watching or searching a video that similar to your area of specialization.
Wistia
Wistia is one of the best tools for beginners in video marketing. It has the best dashboard that helps you to create and learn more about video content creation. You can host all your videos with Wistia professionally. The tool has an in-built SEO features which will help your video to rank up on major search engines like Google.
ViewBix
ViewBix is the best tool for those intending to come up with interactive video adverts. The videos you create with ViewBix can work on all devices. It is fast and convenient to make a video with this tool. It only takes less than five minutes to come up with the best video.
You can add an integrated call to action and include your business banner and logos on the video using ViewBix.
Facebook Live
If you are looking for some tools that you can easily work with to create your videos and post to a larger audience, then Facebook Live is all you need. This tool is very easy to use and faster than most of the tools you know.
With a topic you want o talk about; you can simply go live on Facebook and reach out to your target audience. The audience will share the live video and help you to reach more and more potential buyers through backlinks.
Clipchamp
With this tool at your disposal, you can create and edit the best videos ever. Clipchamp comes with different features like overlay options, transitions, and motion titles. You can easily cut the video, adjust the color, improve audio quality, and include your business brand logo and name on the video.
4. Create Your First Video
Trust me. If you are not a pro in making a video, then you should expect your first video to be the worst. However, with a proper plan and strategy, you should not be afraid to start creating some video content for your target audience.
When you start creating the first video, you want to focus less on the quality. You have an idea of how the video should look like, right? Then create the video and let the creativity part come later. With a draft of the video, you can then focus on editing it and adding some flavor. It is very easy working on your video creativity once you have your first draft out of the way.
Note that to come up with the best video, you must be a good storyteller. That means you want to focus more on the crucial details of the advert while you keep your audience entertained, inspired, and educated.
When you post your video for the first time, you are likely to get some feedback from the audience. Whether the comments are good or bad, you should work around improving the content of the video. You want to major in addressing some of the critical issues that your audience points out on the content.
5. Optimize And Analyze The video
When coming up with video content, you must always focus on SEO. You must optimize the video for all search engines if you want your target audience to get it fast. Just like in written content, when making your video, ensure you stick to the keywords. Be informative and entertaining.
If your video is highly informative and packed with relevant keywords, then it is likely to rank up on most search engines. That means you want to do a keyword search and find out which words you are going to use when creating the audio.
Come up with a short video description that entails relevant keywords. The video Meta descriptions make it easy for your audience to find out more about the content before they can click on it. Lastly, you want to ensure that you are balancing metrics and storytelling in your video content.
6. Link With Influencers
With digital marketing taking center stage, a lot has changed for every business that seeks to establish an excellent reputation in the market. Unlike the past, when businesses would seek endorsements from celebrities, sit back, and watch their brands grow, things have greatly changed today. You have to reach out to top influencers to make your marketing camping successful online.
There are many influencers in most of the social media platforms that you can partner with to ensure your video marketing campaign is successful.
An online influencer is anyone with a multitude of followers on any social platform. For example, someone with over 100,000 followers on Facebook or Instagram can help your video content reach a target audience faster. When you engage an online influencer in your video, they increase traffic to your business website.
When choosing your influencers, you must ensure they can promote your products and attract the audience to your business. That means the influencer’s personality must relate to the product you are promoting.
Also, communicate and engage the influencer in coming up with the content before you publish it. Influencers can help your design content that they feel your target audience will like most.
7. Don’t Forget To Advertise
Ideally, your main objective for creating video content is to market your products and services and increase your customer base at the end. That means you want to include some bits of ads that can easily drive traffic to your business site.
You can practice all the skills and principles that you have been using in coming up with other marketing content. Ultimately, to maximize the effectiveness of your ads, you can focus on creating content for different age groups, interests, and location.
To convert your video viewers to potential customers, you must feed them target information. Find out which social platforms your audience is using mostly and invest your money in creating content that targets that site.
If a majority of your potential customers use Facebook, then you can capitalize on Facebook ads. Create content that will reach them directly. Invest more in PPC ad platforms because they give the best results compared to free ads.
When creating content, focus more on the relevancy of the information you are giving out. You can create multiple contents and dispatch on various platforms to target various groups.
8. Length of The Video Matters
When creating video content, you must be brief and straightforward. According to Hubspot, you should strive to come up with an ideal video length for different platforms. If you intend to post the video on your YouTube channel, then you must ensure it is below two minutes. Here is a recommended time limit for other social platforms:
- Facebook: 1 minute
- Twitter: 30-44 seconds
- Instagram: 30 seconds
Note that the more precise your ads are, the more likely the viewers are going to spend time watching it. If you create a long advert, then you can be sure nobody will be willing to spend all the time and bandwidth watching the video.
If you are posting the video on your site’s landing page, then you should turn off the auto-play feature. Posting videos that play when one visits the site can increase your site bounce rate. Therefore, keep the video on silent mode. Also, the videos you create must be playable in all devices.
Since most people use their phones to access the internet, you must always come up with mobile-friendly content just to make it more convenient for them to watch the video.
Benefits of Video Marketing
Video marketing should target attracting more customers to a business. Every small business strives to realize ROI and growth. With a well-researched marketing campaign, your business can increase its customer base and increase sales revenue in a short time.
Here are some important data that points out the value of video marketing:
- Studies have shown that individuals that watch video adverts are 64-85 more likely to buy a product or service.
- Video content contributes a lot to the global internet traffic. Most people prefer watching videos to reading written content. That means with a quality and informative video on your site, you are more likely to win the heart of a potential customer.
- With a keyword ‘video’ on your email subject, you can increase your open rates by at least 19.0% and boost the click-thought rate by 65.0%.
- A video normally has audio. In most cases, people prefer what they can see and hear. Therefore, including quality imagery in your video increase customer’s information retention by up to three days.
- A video plays some magic in increasing traffic to your website. When people share and tag your YouTube video advert on various social platforms, your site will rank on top of Google and other social media platforms. Video marketing helps to boost likes, shares, and backlinks to your site.
- Video marketing helps you to create and build trust with your customers. You can share a lot of information with your customers regarding the product or service you are offering, helping them learn more about your brand. Ideally, customers develop some trust in your business brand if you talk to them and explain more about the product in person.
- Mobile users prefer video content. According to YouTube, video consumption grows by 100% every year as most people prefer watching videos on their mobile phones. The number of those with mobile devices also grows every day, which means you increase your audience.
Top Tips To Market Your Videos
Yes, video marketing plays a significant role in reaching the most potential buyers. However, you must position your video on the right platform to ensure it reaches the target audience. Here are some tips that you should employ to market your video and achieve desired results.
- Check on your frequency of posting. If you post videos frequently on your site or YouTube channels, you are likely to boost your following. People are likely to miss your video if you only post once in a while.
- When coming up with content, you should focus on answering the question that most people ask about your product.
- Use SEO metrics and tools to optimize your website and rank it at the top of search engines. This way, you are going to increase the number of views for every video that you post.
- Use paid ads to promote your content on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
Final Thoughts
Video marketing can help your small business to grow its customer base. It is a proven way of building trust with your potential customers and informing them more about the products and services you are offering.
Since most people prefer watching videos to reading stuff that you post on your site, the only sure way of increasing traffic to your business website is including a video advert on the landing page. With this ultimate guide on video marketing, you are always ready to launch your first video marketing campaign and grow your business.
