By USDR
Video has several benefits over text. Video marketing is naturally engaging, playing on the human instinct to keep watching someone talking to you. This is why TV ads were so successful until people gained the ability to choose from increasingly niched entertainment options. There is greater information retention if people see and hear someone describing something than reading pure text, and it carries greater emotional weight. So, let’s look at the four ways small businesses can use video marketing to boost their sales.
Dominate Product Demonstrations with Video
How is your product supposed to be used? How are your products assembled? How do you repair the items? Instead of letting how to instruction websites dominate these searches, upload your own branded videos to answer your customers’ questions. This is content you can easily dominate that makes the company look good to those interested in the product or needing support now that they own it, and it lets you create branded content to utilize long tail search queries like “how do I change a filter on a Company Name ABC?”. And you can link the videos back to the correct website to request service, buy replacement parts or buy the next version of your product.
Pull Back the Curtain and Gain an Audience
One of the best types of videos to produce is to pull back the curtain and show the inner workings of your operation. There are several TV shows, for example, based entirely on videos on how different things are made. What is it like to be a patient in your facility? What is a day like for your tech support team? What do your managers do in a given day? Think of it as a short reality show that you control and put out for your audience. These videos are ideal for sharing with your social media followers to keep them engaged with the brand.
This type of content needs to be done by a professional if it is going to have a chance at going viral. Contact a Tampa video production company to create a polished video about your business operations if you’re going to rely on this type of video marketing.
Testimonials
The video of a real life person talking about how they loved your product carries much more emotional weight than the potentially faked text of someone’s testimonial on your website. If you can find customers to give testimonials like this, it can increase the emotional impact of your brand. You can use fan videos you solicit from your customer base as part of a contest to generate many different testimonial videos, as well as social media buzz about the contest itself. This type of video can be done by amateurs and still be seen as legitimate.
Don’t overlook the value of “unboxing” videos. Think of the marketing value of people unfamiliar with your brand seeing someone running a coupon blog excited to receive your sample pack and showing off what they got. Social media influencers who are very close to the target demographic are ideal sources of testimonials if you can get them to demonstrate the product and give their opinion, since they are seen as just like their audiences and thus legitimacy.
Educate Your Customer Base
If you can empower your company’s subject matter experts to create educational content online, you can achieve a win-win-win for your effort. Whether it is subject matter experts talking about your industry, your product or the problems your product solves, putting the SME in front of the public in a branded uniform or T-shirt is already marketing. Sending out the links to this educational content via emails can double or triple the click through rates of the emails. And this is the type of video marketing content perfect for social media sharing because it is useful to others but not something that is easily summarized by a rich snippet.
Summary
Create product demonstrations and how-to videos so you can dominate these long tail search queries often claimed by instructional sites. Have your team create your own educational content whether about your industry or the problems your product solves, while tacitly promoting the company and/or product. Take a cue from reality TV and pull back the curtain on part of your operations, and bring in professionals when creating this type of video marketing. Finally, seek video testimonials to have more impact than text pasted on a webpage.