How Video Marketing Can Benefit Small Businesses

We’ve spoken before about why video is such a powerful tool for marketing in general. In today’s digital age, it is one of the most essential tools for any business.

But we wanted to dive a little further into how video marketing for a small business can be especially useful. For many, building an audience and getting your brand’s voice heard can often feel like an uphill battle.

Creating decent and effective video content can feel like a daunting task. But the benefits far outweigh any initial obstacles. With that in mind, here are just a few of the benefits video marketing can have for small businesses.

FINDING AN AUDIENCE

One of the first benefits of video marketing for a small business is the ability to reach a larger audience than normal.

In using video, a company’s chance of being found via search engines increases significantly. Google is the obvious top dog when it comes to search engines. However, you may be surprised to find that Youtube is actually the 2nd biggest search engine online.

With over 3 billion searches per month, it has more search traffic than Bing, Yahoo and AOL combined (Roadside Marketing). It’s easy to see how video performs well on Youtube (we don’t think that needs explaining) as it is a video platform itself. With Google, the chances of being shown on the first page of searches increases significantly with video content.

There’s also Google’s ownership of Youtube - which means that video content hosted through Youtube will rank well on Google. In short: both Google and YouTube favour video, making it an effective booster when it comes to building a presence online.

NAILING THE MESSAGE

By nature, small businesses lack the same familiarity and popularity that large businesses can already tap into.

It may be easy to see this as a disadvantage in a saturated digital world where consumers attention is everything. But the beauty of video content is that the reasons it works for brands with an established audience also apply to finding new audiences.

The ability to capture a brand’s ethos in a concise manner through visual storytelling makes for a much more captivating way of building your brand image than other marketing means.

There are multiple video approaches a business can take to market themselves, such as explainer and awareness videos, or testimonial and case studies.

All of these types of video allow for target consumers to see who the company is, the products and service they deliver, and the outcomes current or former clients have received. This gives both a new heightened sense of trust and overall understanding to the target consumers.

Simply put, video provides a fantastic way to nail a message, in a concise and engaging way. A clear message can be effective for any brand, regardless of established audience and popularity.

DISTRIBUTING VIDEO CONTENT

So if video content is effective in creating a brand image and personality, getting that content in front of consumers is the next step in any strong marketing strategy.

This is another area where it is easy to assume that established brands are destined to forever come out on top. After all, they don’t have to do as much leg work if they already have an audience, right? We’re not going to sugarcoat it. A new business with no existing audience will end up doing more work to find an audience.

But now more than ever, there are many ways to make distributing content and building an audience an easier task.

Enter: social media. Social media platforms give small companies a relatively easy outlet to self-promote themselves. And with video content performing much better than any other type of post here, It’s easy to see how social media can complement a small businesses marketing strategy.

We’ve gone into why social media is such an effective tool on the blog before, so we won’t go into too much detail here on that. The key point is that used correctly, it can offer smaller companies a helping hand in finding relevant customers.

It can also be a totally free solution, if budget is an obstacle. A common worry with video marketing is its cost. But with the rise of social media and its ability to connect users, small companies can effectively offset any video production costs and market themselves for little to no cost. Most platforms also offer pretty great analytic tools too, which provide a great way to further maximise your social strategy.

REDUCING THE COST

Contrary to popular belief, production costs for video marketing can be inexpensive. One of the biggest myths is that spending more money means making better content.

Nowadays, there are ways to minimise spending on video marketing. One such solution is creating in-house content for social platforms at a very low cost.

Some of the most effective social content is natively shot video that uses the limitations of mobile shooting in an imaginative way. On top of this, phone cameras are getting increasingly better. In many cases, they can feel indistinguishable from high-end productions. Take a look at our Top Tips for Mobile Marketing blog that tackles how to create easy, professional-looking mobile marketing videos.

On top of that, there are also plenty of free and low-cost video editing programs that can be used to pull together longer-form video.

If you’d rather not create content in-house, however, there are other ways to minimise spending. It is easy to see big brand campaigns with huge budgets and feel put off from trying to compete. Try to think about what exactly you’re trying to get across in your videos, and adjust campaigns around this. Sure, multiple actors on big sets with ambitious effects isn't a possibility for many small businesses. But you can get to the same core message with a different approach.

Testimonials can be a great way to cut costs - especially if you’re using existing clients. Ultimately, every brand or campaign will have a different need or outcome. But there are ways to be cost-effective whilst still maintaining a professional feel.

These are just some of the few ways that video marketing can help a small business. Hopefully, we've helped to debunk some of the myths and misconceptions surrounding video production - especially when it comes to budget and spending.

Are you a small business looking to make the jump into video marketing? Do you want help with your own marketing strategy? Why not take a look at our portfolio of work and clients, and get in touch to see if we can help bring your campaign to life with stunning and affordable video packages.

Keep up to date with new blog and relevant video marketing news over on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Let us know what topics you'd like to see us explore next in the comments below!