The days of doing behind the curtain marketing are beginning to fade as more businesses are challenged with making meaningful and worthwhile relationships with their existing, and new-found customers. Video marketing encompasses a broad spectrum of areas, including challenges, for potential business growth that will automatically foster authentic business to customer relationships.
Whereas only a few years ago video marketing was considered to be something that can be done only through YouTube or Webinars, these days most social media networks have adjusted their platforms to allow natural video marketing in the form of live and static videos. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have grown immensely in these areas.
There's already a great deal of information on how Facebook Live can be used for business growth, and Instagram has seen an all-time high use of video for brand marketing, these are clear indicators that video marketing is beginning to become a more streamlined method of marketing, but for a newly found small business -- how to keep up with an already established market?
If you plan to use video marketing as part of your online marketing strategies, take a moment to digest the following tips and suggestions so that you can be on your way of producing videos that will effortlessly portray the vision of your brand.
Understand the basics
Jumping into a new market without prior experience or without any understanding of how this market works, can be detrimental to initial rate of success. Before creating a roadmap of success on how videos are going to strengthen your brand, try to understand the basics of how video marketing works and what are some of the beginner-friendly approaches for getting your first video off the ground.
Infusionsoft put together a nice 101 guide on the different video types that a beginner would use in order to attract initial traction. These different types of videos can be used as initial learning tools, yet can be turned into long-term strategic roadmaps that would in-depth cover the aspects of your business. YouTube is another wonderful resource for exploring talks and seminars on the topic of video marketing.
Get your software right
The first impulse after learning a little bit more about video marketing is to actually get out there and try to produce a replica of what anyone else would consider a marketing video, certainly ideas can be found anywhere and everywhere -- follow the leading brands on social media and you'll learn how they're using video to promote and grow their brand across the different mediums.
There's a huge selection of great video editing software on the market, which is essential for feeling comfortable to create videos in the first place. The price of such software can range from $10/month to $2,500 for a standalone license. To better know what your requirements are, you'll need to create a roadmap of what kind of videos you are planning to produce so that you better understand what to look for in the software that you're going to purchase for this particular need.
Create a video marketing roadmap
Nothing good ever came out of jumping into things without preparation, and since marketing is a sensitive area on its own, it really helps to prepare the best you can so that even your first end-products (a functional marketing video) are holding their own ground on the vision that you had envisioned.
Your roadmap consists of understanding the type of videos that you are mainly going to focus on in order to promote and strengthen the image of your brand, those types could range from simple how-to videos, product introductions, customer testimonials, explanation videos and so forth.
Usually the first video that a brand is going to make is going to revolve around the overall explanation of what your brand is about, and the kind of products or services that you provide. From there on, you can focus on creating videos around those individual areas, but also create educational resources that further promote your expertise in the field that you are working in.
Vidyard put together a superb guide for how to get your first video in the pipeline, starting from idea and finishing with a concise understanding how to go from zero to hero every time.
Are these tips helpful? I'd love to hear your own personal stories with video marketing success and misfortunes that hopefully eventually led to some big successes.