Marketing is a game of give and take. You can never equally invest in every channel or marketing activity and instead have to carefully decide where to spend your time and money.
Video marketing can seem like a frivolous expense, especially for small businesses who have to be even pickier with their available resources. But, consider these facts: By 2020, online videos will make up more than 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic. Users watch more than 500 million hours of video each day on YouTube. And, people retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10 percent when reading in text.
While video can seem like a luxurious marketing activity, it can actually impact every stage of your customer lifecycle, from onboarding to engagement to retention.
You don’t need to invest in expensive, professional camera equipment to do video marketing. Instead, you can use the tools you already have.
Here are three ways to do video marketing on a budget:
Like any marketing campaign, your strategy is just as important as the asset itself. In other words, you should spend just as much energy thinking through your small business video marketing plan as you do creating the video.
Here are three steps to defining your small business video marketing strategy:
1. Decide what kind of video you want to make
Creating a video just because they perform well on social media isn’t enough. Instead, you need to understand your goals, your audience, and why you’re creating a video. This information will help you decide what kind of video you want to make.
Here are the most popular types of marketing videos you can choose from:
2. Think about your distribution strategy
Once you’ve decided what kind of video you want to make, you need to think about where that video will live. This is a two-part decision: first, you need to consider the more logistical side and decide where you’ll host the video. Will you upload it directly to your website or on a video hosting site like YouTube or Vimeo? Or, will this video live exclusively on social media, on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat for example?
The next step is to decide how you’ll get your video in front of your target audience. Hosting videos on your website, YouTube, Vimeo, or social media will bring in some organic traffic, but not enough to justify the ROI. You need to leverage your own marketing channels to get your video out there. Some options include:
3. Track your success
Small business video marketing success will look different for every business. Some may want to use videos to increase conversions on a landing page while others may track engagement on social media. Whatever your goal is, make sure you define your success criteria and track the metrics over time.
Here are four metrics to track video marketing success:
The popularity of video marketing offers both opportunities and challenges. Its success clearly shows customer demand, but also means that every other business will also be investing in video, making it harder for you to create great content that stands out.
But, if you take your time, carefully choose the right type of video content, and understand how you’ll promote it, you can make stellar videos that resonate with your customers (and stay within your budget!).