Video for Small Businesses

If you aren’t planning to use video in your next marketing campaign, you should think again.  Most small business owners think video is too expensive for them.  Video can be created on a shoestring budget.  You might have to call in a few favors to get yours to look good, but remember at the end of the day, it’s about engaging content.  Here are 5 video marketing hacks from Harshavardhan Vijayakumar in Business Marketing Social Media Marketing Video Marketing.

Video marketing is huge already and is only getting bigger every day. Big brands are investing a sizable portion of their advertisement budget in creating good video campaigns because it’s quite evident that people are interacting more with online video content.

In contrast, smaller companies seem content with blogs as their only form of content marketing strategy. We find that they are not very keen to join the video marketing wave, chiefly because they consider the process of creating good video content to be affordable only for bigger brands (which is not actually true).

This mindset of other smaller companies from the same market place can be your big opportunity as a small entity yourself. By creating a series of solid video content and promoting it well, you can reach your target audience effectively, create excellent awareness for your brand and establish yourself as the market leader in a short span of time.

The following are five effective video marketing hacks that we have put together after considerable research and we hope they will offer you better guidance about the video marketing process.

1. Create effective video content

• Research–As in most campaigns, research has to be the first step here too, in determining various specifics like:

• Who is your target audience?
• What are the current trends in your industry?
• What is your company’s USP?
• How much can you spend on creating and promoting a video content?

Spend good time in collecting and crunching the relevant data to plan an effective video marketing campaign.

• Quality – Although the quality of video is as important as the message it conveys, don’t go overboard with expensive cameras and equipment for your first campaign Make use of the free resources available such as: Vacant office space/land, a friend with good camera/lens, and dannabe artists/musicians etc.

A simple video is enough to start your video marketing campaign, but ensure that it’s content is rich and professional looking. Your video can be of any type – advertisement, founder speech, customer testimonial, educational – but it should connect well with the audience and leave a good impression about your brand.

• Run time –People have shorter attention spans today, making it quite hard to get them to focus for more than a minute to watch a promo video. So, sticking to a 60-second mark for your video content can be a safe option. Your real challenge will be to leave a mark in people’s mind about your brand within that duration.
• Subtitle – Add subtitles to your videos, or at least include captions in between. Do you know that 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound? So, it’s always better to add subtitles to them, or if your video is without much speech, then include some captions, at least, in-between. Subtitles also help, when you want to cater to that small percentage of people in your locality who don’t speak your language.

2. Promoting the video in YouTube & Facebook

First Stop: YouTube

A lot has been written and said about how effectively YouTube can be used to promote your brand. If you had decided to try video marketing, then you must start to learn as much as possible about YouTube video optimization tips.

Next stop: Facebook.

YouTube may still be the No.1 channel for video distribution, but it has now lost the monopoly status it enjoyed for more than a decade — Facebook has emerged a strong contender in the recent years. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said “Within five years, Facebook will be mostly video,” which is a clear sign of the path the social network is going to take. Facebook is gearing up for a fierce battle with Google for video distribution supremacy, which should actually benefit companies doing video marketing.

As a business entity, you can post your videos directly to your Facebook page, and it will reach your friends, followers and fans instantly.

And don’t forget Facebook Live. This enables you to share your knowledge, offer advice, conduct webinars, showcase new products and get feedback via live video on Facebook.

3. Post your video in every other channel available

As a small company, you must use every free resource available to increase brand awareness. Post your videos in sites like Vimeo, Daily Motion, Metacafe etc., because they also have a sizable share of viewers.  According to industry statistics, Vimeo, Daily Motion and Metacafe, in total, gets around 400 million visitors every month. Who knows how many of them could be from your region? All you have to do is spend few minutes in creating an account and uploading the video content in those sites.

Instagram has more than 500 million monthly active users; so, Instagram video marketing  is a must for all small businesses.

Likewise in Snapchat, five billion videos are being watched everyday. So, you must learn to promote your video content in Snapchat too.

Periscope, a mobile live streaming app, is already proving to be a great video marketing tool and you can use it in a similar way as Facebook live to promote your brand.

Finally, don’t forget to add a link of all the video content to your website. Apart from helping in SEO by reducing the bounce rate, videos in your website can give your company a personality, encourage regular visitors, offer better engagement and convey your message effectively to your potential customers.

4. Include videos in e-mails

E-mail marketing, arguably, has the best ROI among all forms of digital marketing and we hope you are already doing it. If not, start immediately by learning the ropes of e-mail marketing.

It has been found that using videos in e-mail has several benefits:

• 50 percent increase in click through rates
• 40 percent more time spent reading mails
• 40 percent more e-mail sharing
• 25 percent increase in conversion rates
• 300 percent higher ROI than traditional e-mail marketing

Looking at all the amazing numbers here, it definitely makes good sense to add videos in your e-mail newsletters as often as possible.

As only 20 percent of the marketers are following the video e-mail strategy currently, you can distinguish your brand from the crowd, by being an early adopter.

5. Repurpose your existing content into videos

If you have been blogging as part of your content marketing strategy for a while, then you could now be having a lot of written material, which can be easily converted as video content and used for video marketing.

How does the blog content get repurposed into vlog content? It’s quite simple.

• Segregate the blog into a series of slides.
• Add relevant images to the slides.
• Create a video montage.
• Add voice over to explain the points.
• Save it (It’s a narrated power point now).
• Share it in all social media channel.

As an additional incentive, these slides can be posted in Slideshare as well, which will add tremendous value to your SEO strategy.

With online video contents fast becoming a key means for people to fulfill their information needs, small brands that take the initiative to embrace it as part of their digital marketing strategies will see rapid growth.