Small Business Video Marketing Guide in 2023: How to Get Started

Small businesses often encounter various obstacles in promoting their brand, product, or service. Their marketing endeavors are hampered by limited budgets, personnel, and time. However, these challenges should not be used as an excuse.

Your competitors are likely facing similar issues. There are ways to surpass them and achieve your marketing goals.

One effective approach is to develop a robust small business video marketing strategy tailored to your needs.

Unsure about where to begin or what to include in your plan? Look no further. Our comprehensive video marketing guide covers all the essential steps that can ensure your success.

Types of Videos to Create for Small Business

Video content is a crucial element in establishing an online presence, regardless of the industry.

When planning a video marketing campaign, the first major decision is determining the type of videos to produce.

It’s important to note that not all videos are created equal, and each video type serves a unique purpose.

There are plenty of video agencies offering video editing and post-production services, so producing crisp video content for your startup or small business has never been easier.

Here are the various types of videos that small businesses can use in their marketing campaigns:

Bite-Sized Videos: Platforms such as YouTube Shorts and TikTok are gaining popularity and attracting billions of video views every day.

Bite-sized videos, 60 seconds or less, offer small businesses the opportunity to convey a message and move their audience to the next stage of the customer acquisition cycle.

Brand Story Videos: This type of video content provides the audience with insights into your company’s mission, vision, and, most importantly, history. People become interested in your brand when they are attracted to your brand story.

Product Videos: Showcase your product or service in the best possible way to your target audience. This video type is a must because 96% of all consumers watch product videos to learn about the product.

Educational Videos: If you are an expert or leader in a niche or industry, educational videos can help you soft-sell your product. You can create how-to, tutorials, guides, and Q&A videos to educate your audience.

Behind-the-Scenes Videos: This video type presents the lighter and more human side of your company. Use this video type to introduce your team, show fun moments in your company, and demonstrate how your product is made.

Social Proof: Testimonial and review videos created by customers are indispensable for small business marketing. Genuine praise or experiences of using your product coming from customers help build brand sentiment.

How to Effectively Create Videos for Small Business

Producing effective videos for small business marketing requires time and effort. To ensure your videos are professional and engaging, consider the following points:

Define Your Audience: Avoid trying to please everyone, instead, identify your target audience and create content that resonates with them. Develop customer personas to understand the demographics, interests, and preferences of your audience.

Set Goals: A video without a clear objective is directionless. Align your video goals with your overall video marketing strategy to ensure that every element of your video supports your business goals.

Generate Content Ideas: Research your competition and industry to come up with ideas for your video content. Look at top-performing videos and analyze social media trends to generate engaging content ideas.

Prepare a Script: A script helps structure your message in a way that attracts and holds the audience’s attention. Your script should have an introduction, body, and conclusion, with a powerful call-to-action.

Record and Edit the Video Content: Creating a professional video doesn’t require sacrificing authenticity. Depending on your budget and objectives, you can use a high-quality camera or even your smartphone. The real magic happens during post-production, where a skilled video editor can turn raw footage into a marketing masterpiece.

Make Sundry Decisions: Decide on the number of videos you’ll need for the future, and set deadlines to manage resources and allocate your video marketing budget effectively. Although it’s not the right time to develop a content calendar, these decisions will help you prepare for future efforts.

By following these steps, you can create effective content that engages your audience and supports your business goals.

Small Business Video Marketing Tools to Use

Using tools to perform tasks quickly and efficiently is an essential trait of humanity that dates back to the Stone Age.

As a small business owner, you’ll always have a jam-packed schedule, but your video marketing efforts can become easier and more successful if you incorporate marketing tools into every step of your video marketing strategy.

The following areas of this topic can significantly benefit from the use of marketing tools.

Niche, Audience, and Competitor Research: Conducting research in these areas can provide tremendous value to your marketing efforts.

Through this research, you can learn about the pain points of your audience, what is and isn’t working for your competition, and how to differentiate your business from others.

There are a variety of research tools available that allow you to track and analyze social media presence, KPIs, audience behavior, and much more.

Script Writing and Video Creation Tools: The outcome of this exercise will determine the success of your marketing campaign.

Fortunately, there are numerous AI tools available that can generate scripts for your video in all major world languages within a matter of minutes.

In addition, there are plenty of options for small business owners when it comes to top 2D or 3D animation software and video editing tools for real-time videos.

Project Management Tools: Managing a video marketing project is a colossal task and a unique skill in itself. Many small business owners don’t have the luxury of hiring a project manager.

Fortunately, you can plan, coordinate, allocate tasks, communicate, track progress, and do much more with project management tools.

Choose a project management software that has a user-friendly interface and is suitable for projects of any size.

Video Content Scheduling Tools: In social media marketing, it’s important to post content when your audience is most active on the platform.

In addition, scheduling software frees you from the cumbersome task of manually posting content across multiple social media accounts.

Choose a scheduling software that also tracks the performance of video posts.

Small Business Video Promotional Techniques That Work

It is essential to promote your video content on your website and social media platforms to reach your target audience. Here are some proven promotional techniques:

• Post your video content above the fold on your landing page to capture your audience’s attention.
• Share your videos on social media platforms where your desired audience is present, rather than publishing on all channels.
• Optimize your video content by using effective titles, descriptions, thumbnails, timestamps, and a call to action.
• Use paid advertising in addition to organic marketing to boost the reach of your content.
• Repurpose existing content to create bite-sized videos.
• Collaborate with micro-influencers on platform-specific channels.
• Use funnel-focused videos to reach the right audience with the right message at the right stage of the buyer’s journey.
• Maintain consistency with your brand’s elements to establish a subconscious connection with your audience.
• High-quality content that informs, educates, and offers solutions is the best video marketing strategy for small businesses.
• Post videos consistently and inform your audience about your posting schedule.
• Avoid uploading the same video on multiple platforms or different pages on your website.
• Utilize hashtags, contests, and free giveaways to promote your videos and popularize your brand.
• Email marketing is one of the most effective distribution channels for visual content.

By following these techniques, you can promote your videos effectively and engage your audience, ultimately leading to business growth.

Measure Your Video Marketing Campaign Performance

Tracking the performance of your videos can help identify effective techniques and areas that need improvement.

However, businesses often measure performance based on vanity metrics, which rarely lead to success.

Instead, focus on metrics that align with your marketing goals. Conversely, use your goals to identify video marketing metrics that matter.

The Awareness and Attract Stage

This is the first stage of your buyer’s funnel. Here, your goal is to create brand awareness and attract new customers by presenting your product as the best solution to their problem.

The audience is interacting with your content for the first time, so you need to monitor metrics such as views, unique views, impressions, unique users, ad recall lift, and awareness lift. At this point, you might want to try out your new business ideas.

The Engage Stage

The engagement stage is the true test of your video content. Videos are more engaging than other forms of content, so your content needs to be top-notch to grab and hold the viewer’s attention.

You can measure the quality and impact of your content by tracking metrics such as watch time, view-through rate, brand interest lift, favorability, and consideration lift.

The Nurture Stage

After the initial engagement, it’s time to nurture the prospect into a lead. Small business video marketing is quite effective in carrying the audience through this tough stage of the buyer’s funnel.

To determine whether your efforts have been successful, measure metrics such as signups, calls, appointment or event bookings, clicks on call-to-action, sales, and any increase in purchase intent metric.

The After-Sales Delight Stage

By this stage, leads have become paying customers, but your relationship with them shouldn’t end here. Your business success depends on converting one-time customers into loyal, long-term relationships.

You can measure the success of your videos in this conversion process by tracking return visits to install or how-to videos, engagement with new product launch videos, social engagement metrics, and improvement in video email engagement metrics.

Final Thoughts

The availability of video content and various social media platforms, marketing resources, and tools have made it accessible to everyone.

As a result, to outpace your competitors, it’s crucial to act fast and utilize our guide for small business video marketing.

Keep in mind, as more businesses adopt video content, the competition will intensify. Therefore, it’s essential to start now and develop effective video marketing campaigns.