By Tiffany Rowe
In this day and age when consumer dollars are often tight but competition always expanding, it’s important to find ways to stand out in a crowded marketplace and to attract the attention of your target customers time and again.
While there are plenty of top marketing avenues you can pursue, one particularly great way of marketing your small business to the right people happens to be video. Although videos used to be the domain of huge corporations, technology has meant that the creation of a business-related video is easier and cheaper than ever, no matter the size of your venture. Read on for some reasons you should be implementing video marketing for your business today, and some tips for doing so effectively.
Top Benefits of Using Video
If you want to build your brand and increase your firm’s search rankings online, then video can help you to do it. One of the best ways to get the attention of consumers around the world is through video. In fact, online video these days accounts for a massive 50 percent of mobile web traffic, and doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon.
Potential Customers Would Rather Watch Videos
Many people would rather watch videos than read text on a screen (or page), and as a result they typically give more attention to a video than to written information.
When you provide large amounts of texts consumers can tend to lose focus quite quickly, whereas when you use videos you can communicate the same message in less time, and make a more memorable impression as you go.
Search Engines Value Videos More
Search engines like Google understand the importance placed on videos and use this in their algorithms accordingly. As such, you’ll find that adding video to your website, as well as through sharable mediums such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the like can help you dramatically improve your search rankings.
Videos Showcase Your Brand
Keep in mind too that you can use video marketing to increase the amount of trust consumers have in your business. Through videos you can more adequately showcase the benefits of your organization or your products or services, and convey a lot of your brand’s personality. You can help to inform and entertain people, and make it easier for customers to make decisions on what items or services to buy, and how to use them.
Videos Build Relationships
Videos allow entrepreneurs to build relationships with an audience, and to interact more with current and potential customers. Incorporate videos into your marketing and people will likely spend more time browsing your website or other digital presence, and will also be more likely to refer other people to your brand.
How to Use Video Marketing Effectively
There are a number of things you can do to ensure your videos get as much traction as you’d like in the marketplace.
Call in the Professionals
For starters, you might think you can get away with using your smartphone to shoot videos for your business, but you probably shouldn’t. It often pays to hire the services of a company that specializes in corporate videos, such as Diamond View Studios, so that your creations are as professional and well-edited as possible.
Keep It Short
Next, make sure that your videos are kept short. Most studies indicate that consumers tend to have an attention span of about 30 seconds, so it pays to keep your messages short and sweet, especially if they are being used for branding or advertising purposes. If you find that videos are turning into long spiels, then break them up into segments and post them as separate options for people to watch.
Make It Personal
Don’t be afraid to add personality to your videos. They should represent you or your venture’s brand, and should preferably invoke some emotion in the viewer as well as inform or entertain them. In particular, it helps to get people laughing with some humor — you’ll notice that most of the top shared videos across the globe each year really tickle the funny bone.
In addition, feel free to add personal messages in your creations. This can be from business owners, managers or staff members, as well as testimonials or reviews from customers. The personal element in a video can have more of an impact on viewers.
Check the Details
Before you upload new videos to the web, make sure you watch them over to ensure you have included pertinent contact information in them. For example, apart from your company name you may want to include your web address, email address, phone number, or social media details, so that anyone watching knows who created the video and how to get in touch with you for more information.
Similarly, to ensure you get the best results from your videos, they should generally always have a call to action in them. This will vary according to the goals of each video and where you’re going to post them, but might include things such as:
- Your website for people to visit in order to sign up to a newsletter or purchase
- Your physical address so they can stop by
- Your phone number to call for further details
- Add a special offer such as a free gift with purchase, free shipping, or a discount to give people an incentive to take the next step after watching the video.
Tiffany Rowe is a marketing administrator who assists in contributing resourceful content throughout the World Wide Web. Tiffany prides herself in her strong ability to provide high quality content that readers will find valuable. She enjoys connecting with other bloggers and collaborating for exclusive content in various niches. With almost two years of experience in blogging, Tiffany has found herself more passionate than ever to continue developing remarkable content for all audiences.
