Grow Your Small Business With These Video Marketing Ideas

With videos increasingly turning into the most popular content format on the internet, video marketing strategies represent a vast opportunity for small businesses to share their ideas, project influence, and generate leads from a global audience. 

According to a recent Wyzowl survey, 86% of businesses included video as part of their marketing mix, and, among those, 88% witnessed excellent ROIs, compelling further investments in the format over the coming years.

Despite the obvious benefits of small business video marketing, it can be quite intimidating for first-time users. While there are no barriers to entry, there is a learning curve that can hold back entrepreneurs from getting in right away.

In this article, we take a deep dive into video marketing ideas that can help your small business gain traction. However, Without any significant investments or time-intensive efforts, we will help you get in on this trend and start seeing results right away.

Introduce Your Brand

This is a no-brainer. If you are a small business without an established brand identity, the first step is to introduce yourself, your organization, your team, and the brand with a professional video. 

There are various tried and tested best practices when it comes to this, and you can get plenty of inspiration browsing through the YouTube channels of other leading brands, either within your niche or in general.

An ideal approach, however, would be to simply illustrate company values, goals, and visions, along with your origin story, that is, the problem that led you to start this company. Also, You need not worry too much about the look and appearance, as audiences love the authenticity and simplicity displayed by small businesses.

Product/Service Explainers 

Once information regarding your brand and business is well established, the next step is a product and services explainer. This caters to the primary intent of most searches on YouTube, and a well-crafted explainer video should result in plenty of targeted leads.

An explainer video can demonstrate your product or service, with all its features and utilities on full display for potential customers. Also, It need not stop there; you can produce a wide range of explainers focused on instructions and how-tos; focused on common problems and issues within your niche. 

Alternatively, you can focus on teaching certain skills and creating explainers on certain topics within your niche that can help establish your brand as an authority. With innumerable templates, presets, and styles, anyone can create professional explainers effortlessly.

Customer Testimonials

There are few other things that lend as much credibility and authority as a customer testimonial. Authentic video testimonials from real customers can be very convincing to audiences and often result in substantial leads and conversions.

Keep in mind that viewers tend to reward authenticity; so you need not put in too much effort in directing or molding such content as per your needs. Even raw and unedited footage can add substantial value to your marketing mix.

Here again, there are plenty of video templates precisely aimed at testimonials; making it very easy to churn out attention-grabbing content. There are even dedicated services aimed at collecting video testimonials from customers; this includes sites such as Boast.io & TestimonialHero. 

Behind-The-Scenes & Bloopers

Giving a peek behind the curtains into the lives of your team, employees and organization creates plenty of trust and a feeling of authenticity among followers. In a world filled with faceless brands and organizations, such approaches can be a breath of fresh air.

Airing bloopers are ideal for creating memorable brand experiences. This strategy is used by some of the most famous brands; including the likes of GoDaddy, Vogue, GoPro, and Nike, among others. 

While common sense dictates a social media presence aimed at projecting professionalism, respectability, and competence; fans relate better to brands that are not afraid to show their funny bone, mistakes, and gaffes.

Repurpose Videos For Different Formats

YouTube is far from the only destination for videos. With the emergence of newer platforms and formats for content, with substantially higher levels of reach and virality; you can take your brand and marketing efforts a lot farther by repurposing the same videos across different formats.

This mainly includes turning your large videos into shorter 15-second to 30-second snippets for YouTube Reels, TikTok, and Instagram Shorts. Its well evidenced that most people don’t like to spend even 10 minutes watching a full-length video; making shorter formats composed entirely of interesting snippets a lot more appealing. 

Once you have sufficient footage, repurposing videos across different formats is quite simple; especially with numerous dedicated services with templates and tools to help you churn out snippets effortlessly.

Support A Cause

A couple of times each year, the whole of the internet, across different networks; platforms, and sites, rallies towards a common cause.

At the moment, the raging cause involves the ‘War In Ukraine’, and thus; you can see brands sporting banners, videos, and posts exclaiming ‘Slava Ukraini’; whereas a few weeks ago, it was the ‘Free Britney Movement’. 

Such causes are a dime a dozen off-late, and irrespective of the value they add, brands can garner substantial goodwill by participating and joining in with their followers in bringing attention to whatever the raging issue is at the moment.

This might come across as shallow, but in reality, this is exactly what movements require more active participation. However, this could very well be a double-edged sword; especially if the cause you pick up isn’t in-line with the beliefs of your target demographic.

Summary

Videos are increasingly becoming the crux of most digital marketing strategies. Like them or not, they represent the future of content and information consumption on the internet.

The best time to get started with video marketing was 10 years ago; the second-best time is now. The ideas above represent just a small portion of opportunities that currently exist for small businesses; but are a great way to kick off!