How to Make Video Work For Your Business: A Practical Guide to Getting Started
By now you’ve certainly been told that video is an essential marketing tool for your business. But, knowing you need video and creating video are two different things.
Many brands struggle with video marketing because they don’t know how to get started.
On the surface, video marketing can be intimidating. Coming up with budget, content, filming, editing, and publishing videos can seem like a big undertaking. But, it doesn’t have to be complicated or complex. Here is what you need to know to start using video marketing for your business.
Video Content Types
To start thinking about how you can use video as a part of your content marketing efforts, consider the types of videos you can create. There are a variety of videos that can help your brand tell a story, reach new audiences, and connect with your customers.
Brand Stories: Help customers get to know your business with a short video that introduces your brand mission, vision, and team.
Explainers: Show how your products or services work and how your offerings benefit customers.
How To Videos: Guide your audience through a task by offering step-by-step directions in a video that shows how to do something.
Product Demos: Show your products in action with a product demo video that helps customers see exactly how your product works and how it can help them.
Expert Interviews / Thought Leadership: Highlight your expertise by showcasing thought leadership content and interviews with experts on your team.
Case Study / Testimonials: Present the results of your work through a case study or testimonial video that walks audiences from a customer problem to the solution you provided. Having your customer on video to talk that through is even better!
Live Video: Go live on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or Zoom so you can engage with your audience in real-time. Interact, answer questions, and record the video so you can republish and reuse it.
Once you have a few ideas for the types of videos you can create, consider how you can tie them to your business goals.
Related: 5 Common Content Marketing Questions Answered
How to Use Video for Your Business
Different types of videos will work in different ways for your business. Before you decide what type of video to create, spend time thinking about your target audience, goals, call-to-actions, and video placement (where you will publish the video).
Here are a few of the best ways to leverage video for your business.
Get discovered in search and social.
Video can attract new audiences and customers to your business. You can use video to:
Boost your website SEO. When a video is on a webpage, Google search crawlers may see the page as more valuable and boost its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Get found on YouTube. When a video is published on YouTube, it can help more people discover your brand by attracting audiences who use YouTube as a search engine.
Attract attention on social media. Video content attracts more attention and engagement on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, so videos are likely to appear more frequently and reach more audiences than static graphic content.
Educate your audience.
People are visual learners. A video can help your audience better understand information about your brand, products, services, and industry. Using explainers, how to videos, and product demos, you can educate your audience and help them understand how you and your offerings provide solutions and solve problems.
Build brand loyalty.
Video gives you an opportunity to invite your audience into your business. You can use video to showcase your brand mission and vision, introduce members of your team, and give a look behind the scenes. Helping your customers get to know your brand more personally and the people behind it can help establish and build lasting trust and brand loyalty.
Increase conversions.
Explainer videos, product demos, case study videos, and testimonials can all be useful when trying to move interested prospects into becoming buyers. Featuring videos on landing pages and other content in the buyer’s journey can provide information in different consideration phases that can effectively encourage audiences to move closer to doing business with you.
Improve social media ad performance.
It can be difficult to stand out on social media. Video helps you cut through the noise. At SpotOn, we’ve seen first-hand how social media ads perform better when they incorporate videos instead of static graphics. In the chart below, you can see the difference in the click-through rate (CTR) of 3% vs 0.23% for LinkedIn ads with video and without video -- not to mention the multiple times savings on the cost per result.
The ads have the same audience, but the first line shows results for an ad with video. The second line shows the results for an ad with a static image. Video can help you get more out of your social media ads by attracting more attention and engagement from audiences.
Use repurposing to stretch the use of your videos.
One of the best things about video marketing is each video can be used in multiple ways. You can post a video on YouTube and also embed it on a landing page on your website. You can take one 60-second video and cut it up into multiple 10-second clips that you can post on your social channels. A video can act as an ad on Google or social or a welcome video on your website. When you produce a high-quality video, you can stretch the content to work in multiple ways.
Related: Inbound 2021 Takeaways: Content Strategy
How to Get Started with Video
Video marketing can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be.
If you want to get started with video, you can keep it simple. You can always DIY it with a major investment in time learning new skills -- lighting, directing, editing. Or, if you don’t want to handle the creative on your own, you can work with a partner like CROOWStudio to efficiently create videos for your business in a professional studio near you. Here’s more about how it works.
SpotOn has partnered with CROOWStudio because they make it incredibly easy to get started with video. They offer studio packages for digital shorts, interviews, and brand stories that fit any video content idea and use video templates that make it easy to select the style, quickly storyboard, and collaborate with the director and editors to produce high-quality videos. CROOWStudio lays everything out for you so you simply follow prompts instead of starting from scratch. It’s video marketing made easy.
If you want to get started, learn more about making videos with SpotOn and our partners at CROOWStudio.