What Is Video Marketing And Why Is It Important for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, you can significantly benefit from video marketing since it lets you gain more traffic and, hence, more conversions. Most consumers, regardless of the industry, rely on videos to get educated and entertained, even while making purchasing decisions. Since videos are more convincing than any other form of marketing, it’s high time that you delve deeper into the concept of video marketing and start utilizing it for your business.

Let’s jump in, and you will know the needed steps to take-

What Is Video Marketing?

Video marketing is a method to promote your business by creating videos about your products and sharing these videos via different online mediums. Business owners can share these videos using social media platforms, blogs, websites, and other digital mediums. Video marketing helps increase the reach of your videos and attract a larger audience, providing you with more sales.

Benefits Of Video Marketing For Businesses

There are a number of reasons that make video marketing a must-try for every business. Let’s get to know these reasons or benefits that you acquire with video marketing. 

Increased Earnings

Video marketing involves discussing your products or services in videos; these videos are then sent to your target audience for them to watch. This means that these videos produce and increase brand awareness, which leads to better engagement, more conversions, and hence increased revenue.

Power To Influence

Since videos are easy to remember and understand, consumers rely on videos more than they rely on something in text format. Videos also allow a better demonstration of products and services, which help consumers make their buying decisions easily. Videos have more power to influence your potential buyers than any other form of communication.

More Engagement

Video marketing involves sharing your videos regularly on video sharing platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Since these platforms comprise millions and billions of active users, it increases your chance of being watched by the right audience. By posting your videos on such video streaming platforms, you can even build a large following, create a community, and boost sales potential. 

Easy On Your Pockets

Video marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. It also means that small businesses can easily make videos and market them without significant expenditure. Small business owners can start filming their videos using a smartphone, use a free editor, and process these videos further for marketing. That’s how easy it is!

Improved Digital Image

When a business creates videos and shares them online regularly, it helps the business build a better image in search engines. You achieve domain authority, which predicts your appearance on search engine result pages. The more effectively you market your videos, the higher the ranking or domain authority you achieve.

How to Get Started With Video Marketing?

Now that you know how video marketing can help your business transform tremendously, let’s discover how to start or take moves toward video marketing.

Uncover Your Audience

Before creating any videos, you should know whom you will create for. Take a look at your services or products, and you will have an idea about your ideal audience. Dive deeper into demographics, where you will know their age, gender, profession, location, and such important factors. Uncovering these factors would give you a clearer picture of which kind of crowd would watch your videos and which kind of tone and vocabulary you should use.

Identify What You’re Trying To Achieve

Next, you wanna know what’s the point of creating these videos or why you are putting so much effort. Ask yourself the purpose of these videos. Is it for increasing brand awareness, sales or making people visit your website? Just like knowing your audience, knowing your purpose would let you create the most suitable and effective videos.

Know Your Finances

You should always know your budget so that you can invest in creating videos and their marketing. Know your finances, plan your budget, and take every step according to the budget you decide. Ask yourself which equipment you can buy, if you can afford a professional videographer, your budget for traveling, how much money you can spend on advertising and your team who would be supporting you in this entire journey.

Choose The Video Type or Types

Since there are various kinds of videos, you should choose the one that suits your business. For example, there are explainer videos, demo videos, expert interviews, commercial videos, live event videos, company culture videos, etc. Know all these types and pick the ones that suit your purpose the most.

Pick The Platforms

It’s important to pick the platform carefully where you’re gonna publish the videos. You can choose many social media platforms, you can also use a video hosting platform, and you can share them on your own website. The platform you choose determines the video length and its format. Make sure you know the medium before creating any script.

Create Your Video

After being clear about all these steps, it’s finally time to create the videos. Take your equipment and script, and start creating your very first video! Take care of clear audio and visuals while filming; use lighting, a microphone, and a tripod to make your videos look professional. The better your setup looks, the more professionalism will be reflected in your videos. 

Lighting creates a lot of difference, and if your budget allows, you can experiment with the backlight and fill light other than your primary lighting source.

Edit Them

Don’t publish the video just yet! Once you have recorded the videos, there might be some or a lot of work to do. This is the editing stage, where you refine your videos, remove redundancies, and create a better version.

Consider using some program, software, or application such as Movie Creator or iMovie. There are various free applications available; you can experiment with a few and find your way out.

Publish Your Videos And Promote

Now is the time to upload your video to reach your audience. While posting your videos, include hashtags, video descriptions, a catchy title, and keywords. It’s important to adopt some SEO practices to make your videos searchable by search engines.

Find the right time when most of your audience is available; this timing depends on your time zone and the platform you use. You can always Google about the most suitable timings for a particular platform; you can also go to your insights and uncover at which time your past posts reached peak performance.

5 Most Popular Video Types To Consider

Let’s now dive deeper into the 5 most popular kinds of videos that you can consider creating. Always choose the types of videos that help you achieve your objective of video marketing.

#1 Explainer Videos

These videos are used to explain something, such as a product or a service. In these videos, you focus on the buyer’s persona or the pain points of your audience. You then explain your products/services and how choosing these products can help the viewers solve their problem.

#2 Commercials

Commercials, as you know, are most common on TV and nowadays on streaming sites, too. Commercials showcase the best features of your product in a few seconds. These videos also bring the pain point of the customers, but unlike explainer videos, commercials are more creative and emotion-inducing, which motivates the viewers more to take action.

#3 How-To Videos

Such videos are made for educational purposes, and every video teaches your audience something new. These videos are useful for the audience who are already interested in your product but want to gain more information about its usage. In how-to videos, you can explain your product, describing its working mechanism so your audience can feel more confident buying it.

#4 Customer Testimonial Videos

These videos are made to showcase past customers who are satisfied with your services or products. In these videos, you ask your customers to tell their experience with the product while it’s being recorded. Such videos can be put on your website or social media channels for new customers to watch and establish trust.

#5 Short Videos

These are the short-form videos that are vast in popularity and are known as reels and shorts. These videos are great for catching attention; since they end up within seconds, they should be fun and creative while being informational. Short videos are great because they support today’s consumers’ short attention spans. Creating shorts regularly while promoting your online presence can be a rapid way to build a following.

3 Prominent Video Marketing Platforms

Here are the 3 most used platforms for video marketing purposes that you can never go wrong with-

#1 GUDSHO

GUDSHO is a top video marketing platform for the B2B market. The platform is perfect for small size businesses as well as enterprises. They let you host videos, monetize them, and assist you with marketing using their vast marketing tools. GUDSHO comes adorned with several features such as special screening, guest invites, geo-restriction, single sign-on, custom subscriptions, etc. They also let you earn revenue from your videos via SVOD, TVOD, AVOD, and Donations. Here, you don’t get a free trial period; however, their plans always remain pocket-friendly; do try it.

#2 Vidyard

With Vidyard, businesses can create, host, and share videos. The hosted videos here help you take your visitors and potential buyers further down the funnel. The Video analytics provided let you track the engagement rate and overall success of your videos. Additionally, companies can benefit by branding the videos. For example, you can customize the video player and add your brand’s name to your videos. They do offer a free plan that lets you have a taste of their services!

#3 Wistia

Wistia focuses on B2B and lets all sizes of businesses host and market their videos. So, if you have videos and want to share them online to attract more traffic and sales, Wistia is designed just for that. Their SEO assistance is also notable, which automatically optimizes your videos for the search engines, freeing you from doing it manually. Just like Vidyard, Wistia also lets you customize your video player, and you can add a custom logo, background, brand name, and more elements. Wistia also provides a free plan and lets you have it for 3 videos.

Conclusion

Video marketing for small businesses can charge them up and make them shine bright in the digital realm. As a small business owner, this is the right time to choose suitable video types and an ideal video marketing platform. By just using your smartphone, you can film professional videos and grab a shocking amount of traffic and engagement. So don’t wait up! Use the tips above, explore the platforms, and headstart your journey of taking your business higher than ever!

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