3 Reasons Video Marketing Is Vital For Promoting Your Small Business

You can’t escape video marketing these days.

It seems that wherever you are there’s a Facebook live, Twitter video or an advert playing on your internet browser. Businesses of all shapes and sizes are using video as part of their marketing strategy and there’s a very good reason for that, it works!

Many of the small business owners I network with or work on marketing strategy for, look at me in fear when I mention the word “video”.

It can be scary putting yourself out there for the world to see, but there is a lot more to video marketing than hopping on live to your contacts social media feed (although that really is a fantastic way to introduce yourself to your target audience).

In this blog, I want to share with you the reasons you should be using video marketing for your business and offer a few suggestions that might work for you along the way.

Video marketing helps to increase sales

Sales are essential for your business, so anything you can do to improve your conversion rate and take prospects down the funnel into being paying customers, has to help.

How we absorb and understand information is different for all of us, so a mixture of pictures and words is important for covering all bases. This is why I strongly advise that you use visual based social media such as Pinterest alongside more traditionally text-based platforms like LinkedIn.

When it comes to effectiveness, 76% of business owners who use video marketing has said it’s helped them to increase sales. Which makes sense, because you’re using pictures and words in a video to get your important points across, show what you do, answer questions or simply have a direct conversation with your audience.

Your target audience will respond to videos in different ways. Some will sit down and focus on the video itself, while others will leave it running in the background so they can listen to it as they get on with other tasks. Either way, it’s getting your sales message across to those who need to it, and in a way that’s different from web copy and memes.

Video marketing has one of the best returns on investment

Marketing can be costly and return on your investment is important. Video is one of the methods with the highest ROI, in fact 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the best type of content for gaining the best return.

You might think it’s expensive to produce a professional video, and yes, it certainly can be when you outsource to professionals who are using studios, lights, sound, etc to put your business in the best light possible. But remember you can hop on to social media and do a live for free too.

If you’re not quite ready to go live just yet (I know, it scares me too!) then you can always use Zoom instead. Set it to screen share and talk over what you’re doing for a “how to” style video, you could go through your portfolio of recent work talking about what you did and what the finished product looks like, or simply talk through some questions sent to you by clients (with their permission, of course).

You don’t have to put yourself in front of the camera to make video marketing work for your business.

Video marketing is great for building trust and rapport with your audience

I say this often, but it really is true that people do business with people.

It’s why networking works so well, and why social media marketing can be great at establishing connections and building relationships. Video marketing is something of a shortcut in this regard, because every minute you’re talking to your target audience is a minute that they’re understanding what you’re about, what you do and why they should trust you.

The effects of video marketing can be long lasting too. Studies have shown that 80% of users recall the content of a video they’ve watched in the past 30 days – I wonder how many can remember what was in your last social media post or blog in that time?

And once you’ve uploaded your videos, they’re always there!

You can easily build up a video library collection of tips and tricks, how to guides, testimonials, Q&A sessions and tutorials that your target audience can access for years to come.

Video is a powerful form of marketing that more and more business owners are taking advantage of. It can be a scary prospect putting yourself in front of a camera, but when it’s such a fantastic way of increasing sales and getting noticed by your target audience, it’s a fear that’s well worth getting over.

One of the best tips I’ve heard for live video is to just do it and never watch it back, so why not try it today?