Today’s small business owners are quickly learning that video is essential to a modern marketing approach. Research is finding that videos can make website conversions 64% more likely and even provide an increase in product knowledge and brand awareness. All of this points to video marketing as a key weapon for moving the needle.
For entrepreneurs who are aware of this trend, the next step is figuring out the best ways to use video around your specific products, services, and brand. The approach will vary but there are countless examples of video that have become best practices among businesses.
The following list will provide you with proven methods of using video to promote your startup along with a few creative ways to stand out amongst the growing herd.
Create a brief video explaining your company mission and services. It’s a great way to engage visitors who are new to your brand whether your platform of choice is YouTube, Facebook, or just your website. Remember to include important contact information. Studies show people are able to retain more info when it is consumed via video versus other forms of media.
This is also a great opportunity to associate a face with your brand. Give your art director time to explain your company’s approach to design or bring out the CEO for a few words on what makes the company special. Showing the human side of your business can go a long way.
Ways to get creative: Consider investing in an animated video. Colorful and quirky visuals will make less than interesting details more fun and digestible. Through telling a compelling story, you can also help to form the narrative people use when talking about your brand.
There are quite a few ways to do this one. Make a video that gets up close and personal with your top-selling products and breaks down key selling points. You can also bring the camera behind the scenes to share how your products are manufactured. Videos like this are super effective for emphasizing the quality of what you’re selling and sharing the intricate details normally overlooked in typical product descriptions.
If your company is providing a service rather than physical goods, try recording a timelapse of your employees or customers. Another great loophole is creating a video with examples of different customer personas for each of the plans or perks you offer. Think of who would use your service and develop scenarios for those archetypes.
Ways to get creative: Work with an artist to build a visually intriguing schematic or try Dollar Shave Club’s approach by using humor to shine a light on what makes your products awesome. Time these showcases alongside a major product release to really drive your marketing message home.
Sit down with experts in your industry to create interesting video blogs, or source stock videos at Motion Array, your audience will find valuable. Content like this is great for SEO and allows your brand to tap into the followings of the influencers you chat with. Releasing a regular series of interviews could slowly build your brand’s reputation as a thought leader in the field. Interviews are a wonderful tactic for B2B companies who need to show value around the services they’re offering.
An eCommerce startup might share a video providing useful marketing tips to sellers while a Real Estate business could provide education to potential home buyers. Consistency along with the value of quality over quantity will keep you on the path to growing the audience for this content.
Ways to get creative: If you want to take things a step further, a growing number of businesses have started building an entire podcast around their brand. Podcasts have a low barrier to entry and with the right amount of transparency they can be used to cultivate an engaged audience that converts.
One of the best things about the current era of technology is that you no longer need a full-blown production team to create video content. Instagram Stories are a highly accessible tool that will allow you provide content directly to your social following. Take a lesson from Shopify, a company who regularly uses Instagram stories to feature educational content and success stories of users on their platform.
While stories only last 24 hours, you can keep them around longer by adding them to the highlights section of your profile. Highlights allow stories to be viewed by anyone who visits your page and if you title them episodically it’s like having your own mini web series on Instagram. You can also use Instagram analytics to track your engagement on your stories.
Ways to get creative: Add some flair to your stories with boomerangs, polls, gifs, and animated text from apps like Hype Type. Accounts with a following of at least 10K users can attach a link to stories and track engagement right through Instagram.
Facebook Ads are a popular scalable promotion tool that has become essential to most digital marketing teams. With platforms forcing organic reach into the coffin and videos receiving the highest engagement rates on social media, it seems video ads are the perfect combination for capitalizing on Facebook’s massive audience.
One of the best things about this tool is the highly customizable targeting capabilities that allow you to selectively advertise based on recent purchase behavior, life events, interests, and more. Adding visually engaging video to the mix allows you to capture attention quickly and increases the odds that visitors will become leads or customers.
It was a popular approach on late night infomercials and the strategy still holds up online. Bring in your customers to share a story of how your business resolved an issue for them. Have them express the challenges of their prior situation or mention specific employees who successfully assisted them. If you’re dealing with a truly happy client you’ll be able to keep things as human and authentic as possible. The less staged your testimonial feels the more likely you are to inspire a sense of trust among viewers.
Ways to get creative: According to a study by Google, 68 percent of customers prefer testimonials from “people like me,” which is a strong incentive to feature a variety of people from different backgrounds. Experiment with different ages, genders, or ethnicities then targets segmented audiences within these demographics to increase video performance.
Save your customer service team some time by going live on Facebook or Instagram and educating your audience. If all you hear is crickets, answer frequently asked questions and use the moment as a chance to show them your office culture. Speaking to your customers directly on social media allows them to see the face behind the brand.
Bring on people from other departments to answer questions pertaining to different sides of the business. You can also use this as an opportunity to ask viewers your own questions but tread carefully- the internet is the wild west. If a customer isn’t happy with your service, they might see this as the perfect time to attack in the comments.
Ways to get creative: Holding regular weekly webinars is a great way to grow an active following. Promote the topic of the webinar in advance and keep an organized list of things you would like to cover. Webinars are proven to be extremely useful for B2B companies who want to maintain a connection with users of their service. Be sure to record the entire session in the event you choose to share it via email, your website, or inside a facebook group.
Exciting news is a sure fire way to get engagement on social media. Platforms like Facebook have been proven to prioritize big announcements over other types of posts. Obviously, whatever you post will need to be genuinely interesting to gain traction but once that’s taken care of you can focus on creative ways to share the news.
One of the more effective ways to do this is through video. Recording a quirky announcement video will get much more attention than a simple tweet or graphic. It also invites your audience to interact with your content for a longer period of time which in turn increases the odds of conversion, sharing, and brand awareness.
Ways to get creative: Try making a parody video around your news or product launch. It’s not always guaranteed to hit but companies who prove they have a sense of humor generally score higher among consumers for brand likability. Best of all, if your humor connects with the audience there’s always a chance the video could go viral and result in a huge return. You made it through your crash course on promoting with video.
The strategies listed above have been tested and replicated across a variety of industries but we encourage you to try out your favorites and see what works for you. There are plenty of other creative ideas for promoting your startup and you’re only limited by what you can envision.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels then we have a lot to choose from.
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