Video has been around for a long time, and video marketing is nothing new. However, the availability of video marketing, to more than just large corporations, is relatively new. In fact, 2016 has been called the year of video. Everyone, from individuals or small business owners to large corporations, has peppered the internet with clips promoting products, services, personalities, and more.
Nevertheless, you might still be skeptical about using video for your small business marketing. In this post we’ll go over how video marketing can help your business and the benefits it brings, to encourage you to incorporate video into your marketing plan.
Video marketing accomplishes all the work that traditional marketing does, but it amplifies the effects. Humans are visual creatures, and we can’t help but be drawn to moving images, whether they show a cat jumping into a box or a service that a business provides. Read on to learn about how this visual marketing tool can help your business.
Increase Brand Awareness with Video
One of the best ways to grow your customer base is to help more people find out about who you are and what you do. Rather than getting lost in the crowd, you want your business to stand out among your competitors. With videos, you quickly convey what your core values are. You can increase exposure to potential customers by offering entertaining, educational videos that inform them about your company and help them remember your name.
Video Can Increase Your Online Presence
The more places your potential customers can find out about you, the better your chances of converting them into paying customers. Once you have identified and established your brand, you need to get the word out. “But I already have a spiffy website, a blog, and a social media presence,” you may say. That’s a great start, but continuing to spread the word makes the difference between a business that gets noticed and a business that gets chosen over its competitors.
YouTube is the second largest search engine, and that’s just the top dog. Numerous other sites, including many social media platforms, make video the star. If you aren’t using video for marketing, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to amplify your reach and engage your audience.
Video Reveals Personality
Some of the most effective disrupters (think Dollar Shave Club) have reached audiences by being unique, but that doesn’t mean you have to come up with a clever marketing tactic to be effective. Companies that live and breathe their brand are highly successful with their marketing. Simple videos that show who you are can be an effective way to put a face, and personality, to your business name.
Video Will Boost Social Media Engagement
The days of Vine are in the past, but video continues to take a larger and larger share of social media content. There’s Facebook videos, Facebook Live, Twitter Periscope, and Instagram Live, just to name a few. Why should you care? Because video is the most shared content on social media.
Facebook places a higher priority on video content because they know that’s what users want. We like to share content that will entertain our friends and move them, and video has a better chance of doing that. More than links, images, or plain text, video has the best chance of getting shared by your followers. You can easily dip your toes into marketing video through social media, by learning how to post videos to Instagram and Facebook.
You Can Build Trust with Video
Marketing is about showing potential customers that you understand their concerns and can solve their problems. The best way to build a relationship is through face to face interaction, but this just isn’t realistic for growing a business. All the time in the world is not enough to meet every potential customer personally and earn their trust. Thankfully, you can capture that sentiment in the form of video content. Even better, it’s available 24/7.
Video marketing can help your small business by building long term relationships with clients before you ever meet them. When customers see you, your team, or your product in videos, they gain more confidence in your brand. Trust is essential for every small business, and video marketing can be there when you can’t.
Benefits of Video Marketing
Small businesses used to be at a disadvantage when it came to video marketing. The barriers to entry were just too steep. Fortunately, in today’s marketing landscape, producing video content now provides more benefits than drawbacks. Below are some of the main benefits of video marketing for small business.
Improve Search Engine Ranking
We’re very drawn to video and will stick around to see how it plays out. While this is great for your engagement and conversion, it’s also good for how search engines evaluate your site.
Google uses time on site to help determine whether you are providing what visitors are looking for when they search for a particular term or phrase. When they hang out on your site watching a video, Google (correctly) interprets that as you providing the valuable information they a visitor wants. This can help you move up in search result rankings.
Enhance Your Mobile Marketing
Mobile continues to grow as the main method of accessing information online. With better technology and increased bandwidth, video is now fit for mobile marketing. Video content on a mobile device is generally viewed full screen, so you can know that your audience is getting the full experience. If being viewed on a desktop, your video can still be effective because even if users aren’t completely tuned in visually, the audio component can still deliver your message.
Convey Information More Efficiently
When you’re trying to find out more about a product or service, you want the details quickly, in an easy-to-process presentation. Video is an excellent way to communicate with your potential customers. In just a few seconds, you can grab their attention, explain what your business is about and why they should care. Can you do that it in writing? Sure, but you can do it faster and more memorably in a quick video.
Excellent Return on Investment (ROI)
Video marketing isn’t just about intangible benefits. It can lead to significant financial payoff. By adding an explainer video to your landing page, you can increase sales (as much as 80% according to some studies). Thanks to modern technology, producing effective videos no longer requires a substantial line in your marketing budget.
You can make decent videos with your phone and a little bit of planning. Customers aren’t expecting blockbuster production quality from their online videos. In fact, they prefer simple clips that do a solid job of explaining a product or service rather than a polished, high-budget production that doesn’t tell them much.
Increased Ad Effectiveness with Video
It’s too easy for your audience to scroll right by your banner or sidebar ad, and these elements tend to blend in after a while. Videos on the other hand, grab our attention. Video ads can captivate your audience and allow you to accomplish quite a bit in a shorter period of time, bringing more visitors to your site and priming them for purchase.
While video marketing has been around since television was invented, online video has now become available for small businesses to market their business and level the playing field. Video content continues to grow, and it shows no sign of slowing down, so get started with your first video today!