Videos for Your Small Business

Large and small businesses alike are jumping on the video bandwagon. On average, Magisto estimates that small and large American companies spent an average of $20k on digital videos in 2017 alone. That’s almost as much as they allocated to digital ads and television advertising COMBINED.

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8 Reasons to Consider Video for Your Small Business

Why would you want to increase your company’s video budget spend? Overall, video drives engagement, and engagement drives customers. In other words, video can lead to an increase in revenue.

Consider these 8 questions we’re asking our clients about their digital marketing.

1. Do you want to capture more consumer internet traffic?

In 2016, 73% of consumer internet traffic was for video according to Cisco. By 2021, a whopping 82% of consumer traffic will be video. If you want to capture a greater share of consumer traffic to your website or social media channel, consider video. If you’re a business-to-consumer (B-to-C) company, you’ll have an increased opportunity to create more brand awareness, more engagement and more leads.

2. Do you want to sell more products?
   Perhaps not surprising, the majority of website visitors report they would prefer to watch a video about a product rather than read an article about it. What’s more, most people WILL watch videos about a product BEFORE visiting a brick and mortar store.

Additionally, an often-reported statistic is that as many as 90% of people report that video helped inform their product decisions.

Video doesn’t just impact off-line shopping, after watching a video, shoppers are 144% more likely to buy a product online.

Therefore, if you want to sell more widgets, consider how video can influence the buyer’s decision and increase both brick-and-mortar store and online sales.

3. Do you want to tap into a $1 trillion market?
   Millennials are 22- to 37-year-old digital natives who are looking to be edutained. In other words, they want educational videos that also entertain them. More important: their purchasing power is approximately $1 trillion, yes, trillion. If you haven’t shifted your digital strategy to attract millennials to your company and products, it may be time.
4. Do you want to improve responses to your landing page?
   A landing page is a web page designed for the sole purpose of capturing a visitor’s information. Add a video to your landing page, and watch your response rates soar—perhaps as much as an 80% greater response rate than pages with text and/or images.
5. Do you want to rank higher on Google and other search engine results pages (SERPs)?.
   Google responds favorably to video. In fact, your site is 53x more likely to get on the first page of Google search returns if you include video on your site. When you rank higher on the SERPs, you’ll generate more brand awareness and the opportunity to attract new visitors to your website, generating leads, and enhancing market share. Again, videos drive engagement, and engagement drives customers.
6. Do you want more buyers at your online store?
   Marketers estimate that video can increase your web traffic 41% (above companies not using it) and enhance organic search traffic 157% according to SmallBizTrends.
7. Do you want to increase email open rates and click-throughs?
   HubSpot reports that video increases email click-throughs 200% to 300%. Be sure to include the word “video” in the email’s subject line.
8. Do you want to reach a broader audience on social media?

People share videos to a much greater extent than images and text—especially if the video is entertaining. Video creates 1200% more social shares than text and images combined.

Only One Right Way to Approach Digital Video

We highlighted just 8 reasons why you may want to consider more video in your marketing mix. While there may be dozens of reasons WHY you’ll want to add more videos to your marketing mix, there is really only one way to go about it. HOW is that?

Strategically.

If you want to be successful with your digital marketing, always lead with strategy. This means identifying all of the following:

• Who the video is for (your persona)
• What brand messages you’ll include
• What you want your persona to do
• How you will measure the video’s success.

First, Identify your persona(s).

One of the first components of your strategy is understanding WHO your video audience will be. In other words, you need to know who you’re targeting (your personas). Next, you’ll want to identify what you want the persona to do after watching the video. Most important, ask yourself why the persona would WANT to watch the video? In other words, if the persona asked WIFM (what’s in it for me?), you deliver.

Second, be consistent with your company’s branding and messaging.

You’ll want to ensure that your video strategy (and messaging) is consistent with your corporate branding, your product features and benefits, and your business goals.

Furthermore, be sure your video will differentiate you from competitors with similar offerings.

Third, align your video strategy with other digital strategies.

You’ll want to integrate and align your social media strategies, content strategies, and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Video does not exist in a vacuum. Make sure your strategy includes multiple components and angles. Your marketing agency can help you with this alignment.

Fourth, summarize your video strategy.

Consider using this concise video strategy statement from Vidyard:

“At (Company name), we make (adjective) video content for (specify target audience), so that they (exactly what you want them to do).”

Fifth, know how you’ll measure success.

Arguably the most important component of your strategy is understanding how you will measure the success of your video(s). Six relevant metrics you may want to monitor are:

• View counts. How many people click on your video and begin watching? With many social media channels, such as Facebook, a view is counted if someone watches for three seconds. An exception is YouTube, which requires people to view the video for at least 30 seconds before registering a view count.
• Play rates. Play rates are calculated by taking the number of video plays divided by the number of page impressions. This percentage can help provide feedback about video titles, thumbnails, and placement of video on the page.
• Watch times. Watch times measure engagement. What percentage of your viewers watch until the end of your video? Where do they drop off? How engaged are they?
• Click-through rates in emails and on landing pages. Try A-B testing with and without video.
• Leads generated from your video.
• Viewer shares on your social media channels.

8 Types of Effective Videos

Once you know the objective of your video marketing, your targeted persona, the desired outcome and how you’ll measure success, you’ll probably be asking yourself: WHAT will we create?

Effective videos types can include:

• Customer testimonials that build trust.
• Educational videos, recorded webinars, and/or thought leadership videos that provides technical information and showcases your expertise.
• “Explainer” videos that define terminology and create understanding of a product.
• Detailed demonstrations, helpful how-to videos, and tutorials that explain your products benefits and features.
• Entertainment videos that generate more social shares
• “Edutainment” videos that overlap educational and entertainment value.
• Documentary-like case studies.
• Repurposed blogs as video that extend and leverage topics of interest to your audience.

Keep in mind that people’s attention spans are short. Whatever type of video you choose to create, be sure to grab the viewers’ attention within the first ten seconds, then hold onto it.

Likewise, keep your videos only as long as necessary. A 30- to 60-second customer testimonial may be sufficient. But a demonstration video may need to run as long as two minutes. In general, try to keep your videos under three minutes, if possible.

Other sage advice? Be interesting. Distinctive. Don’t mimic others. Avoid the hard sell. Listen to what prospects and customers are asking. Be sure to answer their questions.

Always end with a call to action—even if it’s just encouraging your viewers to go to your website to learn more.

Let’s Talk Video Strategy

Happy to meet you for a cup of coffee and discuss your goals. The coffee is on me and the ideas are free.

We help you #BeSeen & #BeHeard.

JRS Mar/Com is a Digital Marketing Agency focused on helping businesses #BeSeen & #BeHeard across websites, videos, social media, and search engines. We work with companies to develop professional online personas and strategic direction for their business. We also offer packages for ongoing marketing support.

For more info, read on to Videos for Your Small Business Part 2: We’ll discuss WHEN and HOW OFTEN to create videos and the pros and cons of WHERE to host them.