7 Video Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

You see a page loaded with text you ignore. But if you see a video on a web page, you tend to pause and notice.

Videos have their own charm and a way of attracting human brains. So, how could marketers resist the power of this wonderful engagement hook?

If you are looking for quick and effective ways to increase the performance of your video marketing efforts, you are on the right page. Video is the most convenient type of content to consume by your audience regardless of the vertical. Anybody from a stay-at-home mom to a CEO watches a product video before purchasing.

Related: How Video Marketing Can Improve Your SEO Results?

So regardless if you are a small business owner or an individual looking to build a personal brand, read on, and you can take away a handful of highly actionable tips that will improve your videos’ quality and effectiveness.

Tip #1 Tell a story

A great marker should be a great creator. Marketing means being creative and thinking outside the box, yet we often seem to forget that and get caught up in the technical aspects of it, such as reports, metrics and all kinds of different tools that are supposed to increase the ROI.

But the very foundation of a solid video campaign is nothing more than a good storyline. Remember that at the other end of your campaign will be a human being who needs to relate to your story and that’s what your focus should be on.

As per this presentation, based on YouTube’s studies, 70% of the effectiveness of your campaign will depend on how good the story behind your video is. That’s how important this very first step is, and if you get it wrong, you will have a flimsy foundation to build your campaign on. It doesn’t matter if you shoot in 4K, have the best videographer and video editor or if you laser target your audience. It all comes down to the story.

The storyline will have to be somehow dependent on your brand, and there are no specific guidelines, but generally speaking, videos that are either funny or emotional (or both) tend to perform better.

So, definitely put the majority of your time and effort into building a solid script before you actually start shooting the video.

Tip #2 Show rather than tell

The video’s whole purpose is to show your viewers who you are, what you can do and how your service or product works. A video should be worth a million if a picture is worth a thousand words.

Get as specific and as explicit as you can with your video. Be totally transparent and let your audience see what it is that you will provide them. Don’t just have someone in a suit behind a desk talking for 2 minutes straight about your company profile. Nobody is interested in that. Instead, show them what you can do for them.

Zappos, which is one of the biggest retailers specialising in skiing equipment, has increased conversion by as much as 25% just by adding demo videos to each of its products. So, if you’re selling a physical product, that’s a great way to boost sales.

If you’re selling services or digital products, you can include B-rolls of your team while working at your headquarters or while hosting an event for your clients. Anything that adds credibility to you as a business will work. Customer testimonials are also a great way to build trust.

Tip #3 Focus on video quality

Nobody wants to launch their campaign with an average-looking video, right? Yeah, I know we have all these fancy cameras nowadays which can shoot in 4K, can colour correct and so on and so forth and are not expensive to buy. Heck, even a high-end smartphone can produce amazing-looking videos.

But, if your video requires a lot of camera movement and different types of shots which you are not comfortable filming yourself, then, by all means, hire a videographer. According to this study, your video’s quality will greatly influence how people perceive your brand.

To be more specific, 62% of the consumers will have a negative perception of a brand that published a poor-quality video. So definitely make sure the video quality is spot on. Otherwise, your campaign will actually hurt your brand instead of promoting it.

For most businesses, the easiest, least expensive and most convenient thing to do is to shoot a green-screen video and then outsource everything to a video editing company. This way, you can add any backdrop later in the video editing stage; there will probably be no camera movement, eliminating the shaky footage issue, and you can shoot these videos anywhere. There’s no need to worry about what’s in the background anymore.

This is especially important if there’s a lot of post-production work needed. You will be better off by having someone else do it for you while you spend time actually creating more content for your business.

Tip #4 Target a platform

One mistake that we’ve seen many businesses make is to simply take the same video and throw it on all social media platforms. While that will probably get you some results, it is definitely not the optimal way of handling it.

And it’s not just us saying that. Mark McMaster said in the same presentation cited above that 44% of the campaigns they analyzed were not optimized for the platform they ran on. And when we say platform, we pretty much refer to just YouTube and Facebook as these two giants take up 86% of all online video view (not taking into account Instagram views, which runs through Facebook ads, too).

YouTube works like a search engine, and people go to YouTube to get answers to specific questions, watch how-to videos, product reviews, tutorials and so on and so forth. The content they want to watch is mostly informational or educational. So if you plan on running your campaign on YouTube, keep that in mind and make your videos more informational and maybe slightly less funny.

Facebook, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. There is no intent base. Most people go on Facebook simply to distract themselves from work and just chill. They connect with their friends and enjoy watching funny videos or pictures. And that’s what you need to remember if you’re targeting Facebook.

So if the goal of your campaign is to laser target women looking to buy mascara products, for example, then YouTube is great for that. But if you want to go after a broad audience, such as women interested in the beauty industry, because you want them to know about your company or your product, that’s what Facebook is great for.

Yes, filming and editing two videos instead of just one will probably cost twice as much, but if you set up your campaign correctly, the ROI will be better.

Tip #5 Keep it short

Our attention span is just 3 to 5 seconds when we are online. That’s it! So you literally have just a few seconds to grab people’s attention before they are gone. No time for fluff. Your video needs to be short and to the point.

The opening scenes should be intriguing, super funny or even shocking (if that works or your brand), and keep the viewer watching.

There are no specific guidelines regarding how long a video should be exactly, but generally speaking, YouTube videos used for commercial/advertising purposes should not surpass the 2-minute mark. On Facebook, you’re looking at 60 to 90 seconds tops. Obviously, if you plan on running your video through Instagram as well, you’ll need to keep it under 60 seconds – the maximum duration allowed by the platform.

Using a snappy, fast-paced video editing style is a quick and effective trick to help you keep the duration down. On top of that, this type of video tends to get more views and perform better overall.

Tip #6 Use copy pull-outs

Since 85% of all Facebook videos are played with no sound, getting your message “heard” becomes an issue if you rely on audio. Of course, you can always use CC or subtitles, but that’s so last year.

What you can do instead is to add catchy and highly animated copy pull-outs. These aim to get your message across in an engaging way, even when there’s no sound.

As opposed to subtitles, copy pull-outs will not be a full transcript of your video. Instead, copy pull-outs will be just a summary of the voice-over, a bunch of enough keywords to make the viewer understand what the video is about if there’s no audio playing. And when they turn on the audio, the text overlays should complement the audio message nicely.

There are plenty of video editing tools which allow you to add copy pull-outs, but one that really stands out from the crowd is Adobe After Effects. So, if you want to get your feet wet with video editing, you should try it. Initially, It looks intimidating, but you’ll get used to it quickly.

Tip #7 Optimize for all screens

Since 51% of all video views come from mobile devices now, you want to ensure your videos are easy to watch regardless of the device. You can easily implement a few tricks immediately to do that.

First and foremost, use big and bold, easy-to-read text. There’s nothing more annoying than struggling to read small text. In fact, we know from this study that typography, in general and font size, in particular, greatly impact web page bounce rate. It kind of works the same way for videos as well.

If you are doing a product review, include plenty of close-up shots. The basics of cinematography or filmmaking teach us that a combination of wide, medium and tight shots works best for keeping the viewer’s interest and attention on the subject.

The same principle applies to small screens, but including tight, close-up shots of your product (especially of the more important features) will be beneficial. You can easily handle this in the video editing stage, provided you have plenty of close-up footage.

Last but not least, don’t use those cinematic bars you see at the top and at the end of the video. These work great on big screens, but on mobile, they take away precious space and don’t really bring any added value to the video.

Conclusions

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. Just make sure to get the storyline right, have something funny or emotional that will click with the viewers and be totally transparent and honest with them.

Avoid the standard sales pitch and try to add value to your brand with your videos. Remember to make the video snappy and catchy from the beginning; keep it short, and you should be good.

Know more: How to Use Videos in Email Marketing Campaigns