Video content is quickly becoming a favorite among marketers everywhere. For small businesses, creating video content is a great way to stand out from the competition and offer a fun and easily consumable way to market your products or services to your customers. Creating and promoting video content is also becoming easier and more feasible for small businesses with tight budgets through social media.
Let’s first take a look at the impact that video content is having on social media marketing (compliments of Buffer).
- Online videos will account for more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2020
- Over 8 billion videos or 100 million hours of videos are watched on Facebook everyday
- More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube everyday
- More than 100 million hours of how-to YouTube videos were watched in North America in the first five months of 2015
- 60% of marketers used videos in their social media marketing in 2016
Now that we’ve seen how video content has rapidly grown over the past few years and is now dominating social media marketing, let’s talk about how you can leverage video content for your business. There are tons of different videos that can be made on many different topics, using many different styles. For now, we’re going to focus on three types on videos that you can leverage for your small business: promotional, “how-to”, and testimonials.
1. Promotional Videos
A promotional video can be used to tell your customer about your products or services. When creating a promotional video, it’s important to focus on your target audience, the overall message, and the benefits that your product or service will provide to your audience. Are you looking to create brand awareness? Will your video educate your customers? Do you want to increase sales on that particular product? A promotional video can be used to help meet all of these goals, but make sure you have a specific goal in mind before you begin your storyboard.
You’ll also want to consider the duration and the tone of the video when planning out your promotional video. Promotional pieces tend to be shorter in length in order to keep the audience engaged throughout the entire video, and will need something to immediately grab the viewer’s attention.
2. “How-to” Videos
Fun fact: YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. Visual learners skip the “how to” Google search and go straight to YouTube so they can complete a task as they watch someone else do it in a video. These “how-to” or “support” videos can be extremely helpful for any business. And the number one rule to creating a killer “how-to” video – keep it simple!
When creating a how-to video, it is acceptable to make the video longer in length so you can explain the full process of the task, set-up, or tips at hand. With this said, you want to make sure that the video explains that task in the simplest way possible. Good how-to videos focus on 4 simple things: the problem, the solution, how it works, and a call to action.
It’s important to also remember that how-to videos are not just limited to businesses that sell electronics or tech-savvy companies. A how-to video can be as simple as “How To Tie a Neck-Tie” or as complex as “How To Play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony” or “How To Build a PC”. Take some time to discover what you can teach your customers, and use your skills and knowledge to create an enlightening how-to video for that process.
3. Customer Testimonial Videos
You know that you run an awesome business offering even more awesome products and services, but convincing other people of that is the difficult part. This is why customer testimonials are extremely important to any small business. Video testimonials are becoming a huge marketing tool for SMB. In fact, customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing at 89%.
Again, while customer testimonials can be longer than your average promotional video, you want to be sure to keep it simple. Focus on the solution, the benefits, and the results that the customer got out of using your product or service. Another important thing to consider is that testimonials appeal to customers because of their authenticity. Try ditching the script and having a casual conversation with your customer about the product or solution. This tends to create a more relatable video for the audience, and helps the customer feel comfortable on camera.
Small businesses can leverage video content in many different ways. It’s important to define your video goals and decide which type of video content will bring the best results to your business.
Click here to view Star Micronics’ full YouTube video library.
