Video marketing has been hugely successful in 2017 and all signs point towards similar success in 2018. Videos attract peoples’ attention, they generate leads, and they get people to convert. But, how do you get in the video marketing game as a small business with a limited marketing budget?

In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to create a small business video marketing strategy.

Define your goals

One of the first things that you should do as part of any digital marketing and growth strategy, is to set your goals.

This will help you focus on delivering results and making sure that every piece of content you create will serve a clear purpose – aka, to help you achieve your set goals.

Some of the goals you could set up for your small business are:

• Educating your audience
• Educating your audience on how to use your products
• Boosting brand awareness and reaching more people
• Generating leads
• Converting leads into customers
• Generating more engagement

When setting your goals, be as specific as possible; I would recommend using the SMART goal-setting template:

• Specific – be specific and use numbers where possible (for example, increase lead generation by 10%)
• Measurable – can you measure this goal? What KPIs will you be using?
• Achievable – can you achieve this goal or are you reaching to high?
• Relevant – are your goals relevant to your overall business goals?
• Time-bound – what is the time limit for reaching a specific goal?

Know your audience and niche

In order to create video content that you want your audience to engage with (and actually be interested in seeing it), you need to understand your audience and the industry.

You’ll need to find out, through monitoring and analytics, as well as your own previous knowledge:

• What your audiences’ interests are
• How they behave online
• What content they like/don’t like

The more you understand your audience and niche, the better. You’ll be able to create more effective content and reach your goals much quicker – and easier.

One of the things that you can do, is analyse your competitors who are using video marketing as well, as well as influencers in your specific niche. What is their best performing content? What is their worst performing content?

What channels do they use, and what types of videos do they create?

Pick your channels

What channels are you going to use to publish and host your videos? There are numerous options here, such as:

• Your different social media channels
• YouTube (it might be worth looking into setting up a YouTube channel – that is whole new audience that you can reach, as YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world)
• Your website and landing pages
• Your blog

Depending on the channels you use, you might need to adjust your content strategy. For example, for your landing pages you would focus on sales and product videos, on your social accounts you could try live streaming, and so on.

Plan your video topics/categories

At this point, you should have your goals clearly set, so that you can use them to develop your actual video content strategy.

For example, if your goal was to generate more leads, you would need to create more product and sales videos. Or, if you wanted more engagement on social media, you’d create short, funny/interesting videos, or try live streaming.

Here is a rundown of common video topics that could help you achieve your goals:

• Product videos, such as explainer videos or demos about your product, or videos showcasing your products in use.
• Storytelling: great for engagement, storytelling videos can be used to present your business to the world, showcase your brand’s uniqueness, and so on
• Educational videos: these are great B2B and can help you generate more leads (such as webinars, for example); plus, you can use tools easily (check the end of the article for examples) to create animated explainer videos
• Live streaming videos
• Promotional videos
• Testimonial videos: testimonial videos can be great for converting leads, as they are much more convincing than words on a page
• Case studies: interesting case studies about your work, or niche case studies that your audience would find interesting

Establish who will create and manage your video marketing strategy

Video creation is not what it used to be; now, you can use all kinds of video marketing tools to help you create compelling videos from scratch, so you don’t need to invest in professional studios to film and edit your videos.

If that were the case, most small businesses would be unable to develop a video marketing strategy, because it would simply be too expensive.

At this stage, you should determine who will be responsible for creating videos, as well as for managing them after they are published, especially if they’re on platforms like YouTube.

Who creates the video concepts and writes the scripts?

Who gives final approval?

Don’t forget about measuring your results

It’s not enough to create videos and hope for the best. You should keep a very careful eye on your results, so that you can optimise your strategy as you go along.

With every video you post, you can learn something useful. For example, maybe some videos simply don’t resonate with your audience. Or maybe a certain type of video generated huge amounts of engagement on social media.

Whatever it is, learn from your results, and use them to optimise your strategy.

Plus, don’t forget to measure the goals you set for your campaign. Have you reached them in a timely manner? What went wrong, why didn’t you achieve a certain goal? What goals surpassed your expectations, and what you can learn from them?

Useful tools

As I mentioned earlier, video marketing is now very accessible to SMBs as there are plenty of tools that you can use to help:

Video management & SEO

• Agorapulse, for managing your YouTube channel and YouTube monitoring
• Vimeo for Business, for hosting and managing your videos, adding clickable calls to action, and for capturing emails for your list
• YouTube Keyword Tool, for researching keywords and adding better tags to your videos to optimise them for SEO

Video creation & editing

• Slidely Promo for creating videos from scratch (they offer the video clips and music with licensing, you just have to put them all together to tell a story)
• Wave, for creating social media videos, as well as other types of videos (you can easily create a video in all kinds of formats at once) – it’s particularly great for social media videos, though, as you can add text (most people don’t listen to videos on social platforms)
• Wideo, for creating and editing animated videos
• GoAnimate, similar to Wideo, it allows you to create and edit animated videos

Analytics

• BirdSong Analytics, for analysing your competitors YouTube channels and videos and performing research
• Google Analytics, for analysing the performance of videos on your website
• Social media analytics, for analysing the performance of your social media videos

Conclusion

Video marketing can help you generate better results for your business in 2018, and help you stand out from your competition. Start putting together your strategy now, and it will help you reach more of your audience, generate more leads and engagement, and turn more leads into paying customers.

Are you using video to promote your small business?