When it comes to gaining new leads and turning customers into fans, video is the new star of the marketing show. With mobile data being more affordable than ever before, people are watching more and more video content on their mobile devices, on the go.
The amount of time spent watching YouTube alone has grown at least 50 per cent every year for the past three years. Other social media platforms like Facebook are also prioritising video content with their algorithms, making it more visible to users than other forms of content.
This has big implications for small businesses, as it’s a great way to increase engagement with current and potential customers. Indeed, a shopper who watches a brand’s video is nearly twice as likely to end up making a purchase as someone who doesn’t. Video is eye-catching, easy to digest, and feels more “real” to consumers than just words or static images. It’s also surprisingly simple to produce great-looking videos, even with the small budgets SMBs often face.
Here are five ways to help your video content reel in customers:
Don’t break the bank
Shooting and editing high-quality videos no longer requires box-office budgets. You can use your smartphone and some off-the-shelf video editing software like Adobe Premiere (which comes at a discount for small businesses) or iMovie (which is free with every Mac computer). Learning how to edit is also simpler than ever before thanks to numerous free tutorials – usually in the form of online videos themselves.
Creating videos can be cheap!
Be alert to your surroundings
When filming a video, always re-watch your footage to check that it’s of decent quality. Is the lighting crisp and bright? Can voices be clearly heard? Has the camera remained stable? Is there something showing in your video that you don’t want to include? Doing at least two takes of all filming can be a good way to help insure against unexpected mistakes or bad shots.
Share on social media
Social media channels are one of the best ways to get your videos seen by the right audience. However, don’t limit yourself to simply posting your video on your Facebook page. Adding a little bit of advertising budget to “boost” your video can not only give it greater audience reach, but also allow you to specifically target audiences based on their interests and demographics. Doing so is also extremely affordable: Facebook videos, for example, can cost as little as 1 cent per view to boost out to broader audiences here and on Instagram.
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Don’t forget your website
The great thing about video is that it’s extremely easy to repurpose for multiple channels. Consider filming a short introduction to your business and how you can help customers, then make this the very first thing people see on your website homepage (rather than paragraphs of text). Most website-building platforms make it simple to add video to pages: with WordPress, for example, all you have to do is copy a YouTube link into the text of your page or post. No coding required.
be imaginative and have fun!
Be creative with your story
Video offers a whole universe of possibilities to help get people excited about your business. A behind-the-scenes look at how you make your products can captivate people’s curiosity and build their trust in the quality of your goods. Interviews with your existing customers or employees can demonstrate great service while telling extremely powerful human stories. And new technologies like live video can help you share stories from “ask-me-anything”-style customer forums to humorous reaction videos. Ultimately, the only thing that can restrict your small business video strategy isn’t costs or resources – it’s imagination.
Three more of the best from Tara Commerford:
1. Three ways to get customers on a shoestring
2. How to make your domain name more powerful
3. Five technologies that make doing business easier
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