Video Content Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses: What, Why, and How
If this blog were a video, more people would have found this content more engaging. This is probably not a very good way of starting a blog, but this is true. 69% of people prefer videos to text to learn something new.
That’s the power of videos. It grabs the attention of the viewers and sends a message across in a more interactive way.
With so much power, you can only imagine what it can do to your marketing efforts — It will immediately give it a thrust. You will have a better probability of getting higher returns on your campaigns.
This is why 94% of the marketers who have used video once will continue to do so in the future. This number in itself is an excellent indicator of the success of videos in marketing.
We talk more about video content marketing strategy in this blog. It is a compilation of the different facets of video marketing — What, Why, and How.
This single resource will be a helpful guide in your marketing journey, especially when you start experimenting with videos in your campaigns.
What is video content marketing?
If you’ve never heard of video content marketing before, don’t worry, it won’t keep you awake at night. Think of it as a branch of the content marketing tree.
The purpose of a video content marketing strategy is to educate, engage, and entertain the audience consistently. The difference comes in the way you create and share content.
Video content marketing emphasises creating and distributing content using videos. There are different ways of doing this.
You can use your existing content like blogs and infographics and repurpose them by creating a series of short videos.
You can also create brand new video content in the form of webinars, interviews, product walkthrough videos, customer testimonials, and more.
Depending on your marketing team’s goal, your video content will shape around it.
It’s easy to get started with a video content marketing strategy, but over time it becomes challenging in producing videos consistently.
Following a strategy here will keep your efforts focused and calculated. If you’re finding this difficult to follow, here are two steps that will help you to develop a video content marketing strategy.
Buyer persona
A buyer persona tells you more about your target audience. It’s not just about the demographics like their age, gender, or where they’re from.
A buyer persona is going deeper in understanding their behaviour, likes, and interests.
To educate yourself about your target audience, you should be asking yourself questions like — What do they look for in a brand? What motivates them to make a purchase?
Of course, you have to employ tactful ways of getting this information. Use surveys, send personalised emails to start conversations or arrange an interview with the customer to get more personal with them.
If these ideas seem to be far-fetched right now, then start with a buyer persona template. This will give you a good head start.
Buyer journey
Videos are powerful. True. But, if your videos are targeted at the wrong audience, it will be more like a distraction for them.
This is where you have to map the videos with the buyer journey stage. Before we go to that, let’s understand what the buyer journey is.
A buyer’s journey is made of different stages that a buyer goes through before making the final purchase.
The best way to understand this is by observing your buying behaviour.
Think about the different steps you followed before buying that expensive car or that night lamp for your bedroom. Your steps were influenced by the nature, price, and use of the product.
It isn’t easy to standardise the stages for every product. Having said that, as a rule of thumb following are the stages which a buyer usually follows –
Attention: At this stage, a buyer is aware of the problem and looking for ways of overcoming it
Interest: The buyer has now found out about your product and is keen on learning more about it
Desire: Here, a buyer is diving deep in research and comparing your product with alternatives to get the best deal for their money
Action: The final stage. The buyer is confident in what fits their needs the best and is ready to make the call.
Making videos for buyers at different stages gets you more views and engagement because the information is more relevant for the buyer.
Moreover, it improves the chances of increasing conversions as your brand is more visible now, and your content comes across as helpful to the buyers.
Why use a video content marketing strategy?
Experimenting with new ideas in marketing is a priority for many small businesses. If you’re one of them, then pat yourself on the back. But, trying something new is not an individual call.
It’s a team effort, so it has to be decided in unison. So if you’re convinced that a video content marketing strategy will work for your small business, but a nod from others, then here are a few pointers that will be great to break the ice.
Remember, these points are not exhaustive. Think about other ideas that will help you make a good case for going ahead with a video content marketing strategy.
Improved brand recall
It’s not a surprise if you spend a significant part of your marketing budget on retargeting ads to remind your prospective customers about your brand.
There is nothing wrong with this, but you can save some dollars and better brand recall with videos. Videos have a retention rate of 95%.
In other words, people don’t forget what they see in videos. So when people see your brand videos on the landing pages or social media accounts, they will remember it and come back naturally.
Higher trust
Videos are excellent for building trust. What takes you can easily make a great effort in any other form of content with a video.
Think about this: It’s hard to believe that a rainbow has seven colours unless you have seen it with your own eyes. You trust what you see more than what you hear or read.
Videos do this job for you by increasing transparency. This is an excellent opportunity to invest in product videos, brand stories, customer testimonials because together, they will be a great medium of showing the audience what your business is all about.
Better ROI
If you’re a marketer, there’s no way you have not thought about the returns from video content marketing strategies.
ROI is the best metric for ascertaining the effectiveness of campaigns. With videos, you can bump your conversions by 80%. The best part is that you can use videos on different channels.
So if one doesn’t work out well, you can get better returns from the others. Besides, videos are more personal.
Therefore it also works very well for getting a higher click-through rate too. To sum up, clicks, traffic, and conversions, videos prove their mettle no matter what.
Show more, tell less
Your target audience is used to getting hammered by claims made by companies of being the best in the industry.
Honestly, it’s a bit archaic and exaggerated if you keep your marketing the same way. Unless you show them what makes your brand different. And, the best way of showing them is by using more videos in your content marketing strategy.
Whether it’s about your happy customers, unique product features or your CSR activities, videos prove your point.
It’s not just telling anymore, but showing what supports your claim. This makes the experience process more believable and stands out from the crowd.
How to use video content marketing?
This is where you have to let your imagination run amok. How you use videos in your marketing strategy can have so many answers. But, there is an element of caution here.
Trying too many things at the same time can cause burnout without yielding results. A good way of proceeding with new ideas for videos is by going slow, running a check on the resources you have, and establishing a timeline.
This way, you get sufficient time to plan what you want to do, what you have, and the timeline you can follow.
All right, now that we have set the table, let’s look at some of the most popular videos brands create for a video content marketing strategy –
Product walkthrough videos
This is an excellent idea of proactive marketing. Instead of waiting for your prospects to make a demo appointment, recording a product walkthrough video and uploading it on your YouTube channel is a smart way of engaging with them.
Moreover, you can use the video in your emails, landing pages and in all the other communication channels that you use to talk to your customers.
How-to videos
This is a perfect example of showing more, telling less. Making how-to videos and uploading them on YouTube is one of the trending video ideas.
It’s a great way to invite the user to show your product, introduce new features or make snippets of product demos that are concise and easy to consume.
If your product has many features, and you often get “how to use” tickets in your support portal, then how-to videos are made for you.
Unboxing videos
Unboxing videos are more popular than you think. There is an exciting trivia shared by Think with Google – The number of hours spent watching unboxing videos is more than watching “Love Actually” 20 million times.
From the marketing point of view, this can be a brilliant opportunity of recording unboxing videos of your product and then upload them on YouTube.
So, when your target audience looks up for a reference product video, there is a high chance that they will see your video.
This will help build more trust as you exhibit a high level of transparency by making an unboxing video on your product.
Screen recordings
Not every small business has a video team and all the expensive video equipment to produce videos. Does that mean they should stop thinking about video content marketing? Heck no!
Screen recorders are an excellent alternative to this video equipment. Most of them are just plug-and-play. You only need your laptop, a script, and some creativity to make your video enjoyable.
Due to this frugality, many small businesses have started using screen recorders to churn out video content like tutorial videos, training videos consistently.
Summing up
Video content marketing is here to stay. It’s the present and will grow more prominent in the future. If you have refrained from using videos in your marketing activities, then act now!
However, before you get your feet wet, get a clear understanding of what it is, why you should do it and how you should do it.
Start by creating a buyer persona and identifying the typical stages a customer passes through. This will help you nail the type of video content you should produce.
Later, onboard your team and educate them on the benefits of a video content marketing strategy and how it can make a difference.
There will be many things to say here, but if you need pointers, talk about building higher brand awareness. As more people watch your videos, the higher are the chances of remembering your brand.
The same goes for higher ROI. With videos, you can expect a better return on investment. As you resort to more video storytelling, gradually, your audience will trust you more.
When you have all the above in place, get the camera rolling. Our best advice would be to start with product videos.
As you know your product very well, it won’t take time to start creating videos. Followed by that, how-to videos and screen recordings are some ideas that you can give a shot.
While you do all of that, don’t forget to keep an eye on the performance of the videos. Based on that, you have to keep improvising new ideas and techniques.
Remember, a video content marketing strategy is a long shot, it may take some time to take off, but it’s a worthwhile investment.
