This blog post provides a comprehensive small business video guide. Learn which videos a company should make, and how to leverage video for growth.This video is brought to you by Dubb.
Owning a small business in an ever-expanding and constantly shifting business landscape can be fairly difficult. As the world becomes more and more digital, the challenge of engaging the online market has also become more difficult.
In fact, all across the globe, business owners are trying their best to come up with different approaches and strategies to further establish their brands and create online presence.
Amid these twists and turns in the business world, you might be left with these very pressing questions:
How do I keep up?
How do I sharpen my marketing strategy to attract more customers?
What new tools or innovations can I explore in order to keep up with the changing world?
This could be the silver bullet answer to your questions: video marketing.
Over the past several years, many experts and different researches have shown that human attention span has drastically declined. On average, a person’s attention span has been reduced from 12 seconds to just 8 seconds—even shorter than the attention span of a goldfish!
So, for example, if you attempt to advertise your business using text-heavy content, it is highly likely that people won’t bother reading the entire thing. Sometimes, they might not bother reading it at all.
This decline can be traced back to the rise of social media and the evolution of social media content that people interact with on a day to day basis. This development has posed a serious challenge to online marketers. If we were to engage potential clients and make them avail of our products, how can we do that in just a short period of time?
In addition to this, people nowadays put a high premium on immediacy and accessibility. Meaning, business clients and customers demand quick information, quick access to products, or instant delivery of the services that they need.
Because of this, business owners and online marketers are faced with a serious challenge of engaging their potential clients by innovating and trying out new approaches to promote their businesses.
In order to do this, business owners and online marketers must learn to diversify their strategies in order to effectively reach their target market.
To put it simply, relying on traditional marketing approaches may no longer work in the current business landscape. But take heart, because video marketing can provide solutions to these problems.
Video marketing is a marketing tool that can ramp up audience engagement by integrating various social activities around a particular video.
By using videos instead of traditional mediums, you’re delivering your message in a different packaging, which guarantees the most engagement. With the right video marketing platform, accessibility may just be as good as seeing them face-to-face.
Now, if you’re a small business owner planning to get started with video marketing, we’ve got you covered. Coming up with business video ideas and figuring out how to distribute them do not have to be as complicated as they sound.
What kinds of videos would work for my small business?
1. Hero Videos
Because you’re just starting out, you’d want to introduce yourself strong. The first step to doing that is by making a hero video.
A hero video can be a couple of things, but it’s essentially an opportunity for you to briefly introduce your business and build trust and anticipation on the outset.
This kind of video usually consists of someone greeting the viewers—in most cases, this person is the business founder.
The hero video serves the purpose of putting a face to your business. It tells viewers that you’re more than just an email, product, or some random company. By putting a face to your brand, you’re showing your potential clients that you’re a real person and that you can be trusted.
Your company’s product or service will largely determine the actual message of your video. Also, your objective will determine the video’s overall context. Nevertheless, it is very important that your video conveys the message that you value relationships over transactions; because that’s what people are looking for.
The main point of e hero video is to establish trust and relationship with your potential clients. By putting a face to your brand and message, you’re creating an impression that you are more than just a random company that’s selling something on the internet. You are someone that they can trust; a real person that’s interested not just to transact with them but to establish a healthy business relationship with them.
But, just a caveat: Be careful not to bore your potential client by bombarding them with lots of information about your company or your product. The hero video’s goal is to capture their attention and to initially build trust and rapport.
So don’t make the mistake of losing their interest with a video that’s too long. It’s not imperative to present every piece of information about your product on your hero video.
That’s a job for…
2. Explainer Videos
An explainer video must do exactly what it implies—to explain.
As compared to the hero video, an explainer video can be a bit longer by a couple of minutes. On average, this type of video can be as long as about five minutes.
The video’s core focus is your product or service. In this video, the main idea is to explain—in the most concise way possible—what the viewers need to know.
This video is where you bring out the big guns, so to speak, in order to impress your potential clients about the products and services that you offer. Show them what your business is made of! Differentiate your brand from your competitors. Convince them that your products or services are the best in the market.
The primary question that must be answered by the video is this: How are you any better than the rest of the other businesses that offer similar products or services in the market?
The key here is to present your products in the most creative, concise, and innovative way. Explore different options and approaches in making an explainer video. You can make use of photos, screenshots, text, animations, and other graphic elements to further establish your brand and communicate your message.
Speaking of further communicating your message, how do you communicate your brand and your message in a more personal way to the clients?
Use testimonial videos.
3. Testimonial Videos
If there’s a video that could better support or justify your business, it would be a testimonial video.
Contrary to popular notion, a testimonial video does not actually have to be a testimony from a client. In fact, testimonial videos can also be referred to as a “social proof video.” When we say social proof, it is essentially a demonstration of how the product or service is working in real life. The video aims to let the clients see how the product works in order to create value for the product or the services that you offer.
A testimonial video can be a lot of things, really. The main idea is to give a tangible demonstration of how your products or services provide solution to their problems or meet their personal or business needs.
You may also consider going over the metrics from a successful transaction with a client in order to make a powerful testimonial video.
Now that we’ve got the kinds of videos figured out, let’s lay down some important requirements in video marketing:
Requirement #1: Tracking and Analytics
Knowing your target market and having a sense of familiarity towards your consumers is essential in managing any kind of business.
In the case of video marketing, this basically means that you need to know how much interaction or engagement your videos have been receiving. It’s integral to find out who are watching your videos, how much of the video they actually watched, and what they did after they were done watching the videos.
In other words, you need to invest in tracking and analytics in order to know if you’re successfully engaging and reaching your target market.
There are video marketing platforms that provide tracking and analytics features to help you know how many people you are actually reaching. These features can also give you important insights on what’s working and what’s not.
Knowing these things can help you a lot in terms of planning your marketing approach, recalibrating your business strategies, or even in improving your product line.
Sadly, this feature is not available on most platforms such as YouTube. Sending your videos via SMS or e-mail as mere downloadable files or attachments will not help you monitoring engagements as well.
With Dubb, we provided you with detailed analytics information that will give you important insights about your video marketing strategy. Again, the goal is not just to send out your message to your target clients. We also want to know if we’re engaging our target market and if our products and services are meeting their needs.
Requirement #2: Call-to-Action
The purpose of a call-to-action (CTA) button is to elicit a response from your audience. It is best to always include a CTA in every video you will broadcast to encourage participation and response from your viewers.
Instead of just being passive, CTAs grant viewers the choice to participate in the business as a valued client.
Here at Dubb, we offer more than just basic CTA buttons that only allow link redirection. If we’re serious about leveraging our online marketing reach and augmenting our online engagement, we must invest in more than just the basic functions.
We believe that interactive, clickable, and trackable CTAs are the way to go, and Dubb provides exactly that.
Dubb allows for customizable CTA buttons, and not just link-based ones that others offer. Customizable CTA buttons makes for greater efficiency and accessibility. It also allows business owners to meet their customers’ needs quickly and efficiently, or to even anticipate what their customers would need.
Requirement #3: Branding
One of the biggest challenges with online marketing is the fact that you will have to compete for people’s attention against a number of competitors that offer the same products and services. Providing excellent products and services is one thing, but to actually get business owners and clients to believe in your product is another.
In business, branding is a very crucial thing.
Branding is everything that has to do with your business identity. It’s what makes your brand stand out from other brands in the market. It’s the face of your company. A good company brand can accelerate your sales and expand your reach in the market.
Having said that, it is important that your business logo or your company brand must always be on every material you put out, especially on promotional materials. This will further establish your brand on the market and will help potential clients have a good recall of your brand, products, or services.
We might lose the opportunity for branding when we distribute our videos through email, text messaging, or even other video platforms.
Requirement #4: Ability to Send in Bulk / Automation
Of course, it is critical that you have the means to send your videos out in bulk in order to achieve greater business efficiency.
While there may be other platforms that you can use such as GMass, Outlook, or CRMs, Dubb is the only platform that offers bulk SMS capabilities and e-mail automation.
This helps in building drip sequences of emails and building marketing automation workflows, so you must definitely check that out.
Once again, if you want to leverage your competitive edge on the digital market, video marketing is the way to go. Check out all these powerful features that we’ve shared above and see for yourself how these can help you boost your online engagement and attract more clients to your business.
Should you need any support, check out our support articles or videos in order to learn how to utilize these tools and features that we provide.
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