In 2024, video content is one of the best ways to create impactful marketing campaigns that increase customer engagement and retention, whether you are a corporate business or small business owner making your mark in your industry.
Video marketing is a type of marketing strategy that promotes your service or product via visual and moving picture content, aka videos. Video content is a great way to present important content, in a concrete and dynamic way that allows the viewer to use multiple senses to understand the content. For marketing purposes, it is a great tool to support your business’s KPIs, goals and revenue generation.
As a small business owner, having an exact video strategy can help you to increase engagement with your customers, enhance your brand recognition, improve customer and user experience, increase SEO and analytical rankings and finally build trust with your customers.
In this article, we will discuss how you can create and implement a video marketing strategy without too much fuss.
What is a video marketing strategy?
A video marketing strategy is a sub strategy of your business’s overall marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how your business plans to achieve its goals finding and retaining customers and tracking it against your objectives. There are many ways to accomplish a marketing strategy, but focusing on a video marketing strategy is one path that has become more and more important.
A video marketing strategy for a small business can be the difference between the status quo and taking your business to the next level. As this article will discuss, video content is extremely popular with all customer demographics, so if you want to get your business name out there, creating a video strategy will take you there.
However, before we go into the types of video content out there, let’s discuss a little bit about how to create a video marketing strategy:
- Refer to your overall business plan and marketing strategy: This plan should have been created when you created your business. It needs tweaking year to year but should be pretty solid.
- Align video strategies with your business plan: By now you should know your target audience. Where do they find their information? Is it on television? Is it on social media? This will help you to gauge the type of video and the content you should provide to them.
- Capture your story: You know your business proposition, but how can that be put into a narrative that is visually displayed and compelling to your audience?
- Create a budget: Video productions can become quite expensive, or they can be done on a shoestring budget. Depending on your strategy and how you want to share your content, you should keep this in mind.
- Find the creatives: If you plan to do this in-house, be sure everyone has a plan ready. If you are looking to find an agency to help, then you will need to start planning with them and get the project rolling.
Types of videos for marketing
Now let’s get into the nitty gritty of the type of videos that you can choose from to support your marketing strategy. It is important to note that some of these types will cross over while others are very distinctive. You also may want to do several different types depending on the goals you are trying to accomplish.
Commercials or video ads
The first known version of video marketing was the commercials. With the advent of television in the 1940s, shows needed to find a way to fund the free service to the population—that is where commercials came in. Commercials are video content explicitly selling a product or service to the audience watching.
Since the 1940’s, commercials have evolved, both in style, content and form. While you can find the traditional commercials on network television, you are also likely to see them when streaming your favorite shows. They have become shorter and shorter to avoid the audience skipping their content.
Successful commercials and video ads are memorable, fun, creative and have clear action steps that the audience can take away. However, traditional commercials can be more expensive as the production can be more elaborate. They tend to be more for corporate businesses.
Social content videos
A form of commercial or video ad content, are social videos. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are amok with video ads. Sometimes, they are done so well, you do not realize it is an ad!
These videos are typically less than a minute, around the 30 second mark. Attention spans on social sites are extremely short, so if you want to capture the attention of the audience, you need to do so quickly. Popular types of videos on these platforms include having a customer explain how great your product is (including influencers), doing a quick recap of how to use the product, doing a live video in real time to show genuine use, or telling a short story that relates to the benefits of the product.
Social platforms are great because the audience can easily share or comment, making it easy for you to track the results. It is also very popular with the younger generations, so if this is your target audience this is where you should invest. In fact, 26% of marketers say shopping ads, such as videos, are the TikTok ad product that has performed the best for their company in terms of conversions.*
Explainer or product videos
Explainer or product videos are very similar. Explainer videos show the why behind a product the service versus a product video is more likely to show the how.
Explainer videos typically highlight a product, service, or business idea and then break down those complex ideas into easily understandable points. You can do both types of videos. First using the explainer video to show the problem that they may be facing and why it is important. For example, in this blog, we are explaining how important video marketing strategies are for small businesses. If we turned this into a video, it would become an explainer video.
Product videos already have the problem established, and a fix for that problem—the product or service. The video then goes into how your problem will be solved with this particular product or service and how the service works. For example, we will share some best practices and services you can use to start your marketing strategy. If this was turned into a video, it would be a product video.
Testimonials
There are several ways to reinforce trust to your audience when creating a video. This can be done through showing the product and how it is used, thus showing its purpose and success. It can also be done through testimonials of genuine previous customers.
Testimonials of previous customers show that the product actually works, so it appeals to the practicality of your audience. However, if you have testimonials that tell a good story, it can also appeal to the emotions of your audience. If your product or service changed a person’s life for the better, then your audience will want to be in on that action.
There are several ways to do testimonials. You can sprinkle them into an already established video—perhaps a product video. The customer can give a quote on how the product worked successfully for them. Or you can create a video that is only a testimonial. Have the customer share the problem they had, how the product worked for them and then how their life has changed for them. The latter will appeal to the emotions of your viewer in a deeper way.
Video marketing best practices
Now that you have a plan and have decided the type(s) of videos you want to produce, let’s talk about a couple of video marketing tips that will get you where you want to go.
Understand the different stages
Most video creation is not done on a whim. It takes careful thought, planning and follow through. Here are the 3 main stages of film production:
- Pre-production: This is the planning phase. This includes confirming a budget, creating a script, visuals, location, finding equipment and relevant staff.
- Production: This is when the video is created. All your crew and actors start creating the video in its rough form.
- Post-production: This is when the raw footage is then edited together, effects added, music and tweaks are created, culminating into a final product.
Crafting a compelling story
Stories are everything. You can tell someone logically why they need a product or a service, but until they see compelling, emotional need, they are less likely to pay for it. However, creating a story can be hard! You want to avoid cliches and be unique. Creating that can be difficult, but there are some things to consider:
- Character with a goal to accomplish.
- An issue or problem that your character faces
- The journey to fix the problem.
- A resolution that clearly shows your product or service saved the day and the results.
Keep in mind your SEO and other marketing strategies
Aligning SEO with your video strategy shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, you are creating your video marketing strategy based on your overall marketing strategy, which would include SEO. However, it is important not to forget this factor. SEO strategy will have your keywords and phrases that can be used when crafting the script for your video. It is also worth noting that Google is more likely to increase your SERP rankings if you have videos on your page, because they know that users will go to them.
Measure success
Finally, it is important to create a measurable impact on your videos. Whether that is through views, clicks or surveys where a customer stated that they chose you because of a video they saw. Keep track of these metrics, so you can improve your video content marketing strategy for the future and improve how you share that content.
How to use video marketing services
Now, you may be thinking, “Wow, I can really do this!” And that is great. But there is a reason there is a whole industry dedicated to video content strategy creation and production—it can be time consuming and expensive. Thankfully, UpCity’s has a curated list of video production providers and content marketing providers that can help you with the process.
However, if you are inspired and feel empowered to start creating your own video marketing strategy, go for it. We look forward to seeing how your small business uses this blog as a video marketing guide, and use the best practices learned here to create a compelling and stellar video campaign.
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