Video Marketing for Small Business: How to Win Bigger Competitors

Image via Unsplash

Today's market competition may be daunting for small business owners. Still, they always have a way to keep their business growing and last for a long time.

Implementing video marketing is one of the best ways to overcome fears over bigger competitors. A good video for marketing can boost up to 80% conversion rates.

Thanks to the advent of technology, creating a video is now less burdensome for small businesses. Even with a tight budget, they still have an exit to create engaging videos.

We've gathered some steps to successful video marketing for small businesses, plus tips to win over bigger competitors. Without further delay, let's dive in!

Video Marketing for Small Business

As of now, video marketing seems to be the future of the global market. Small businesses need to know the essential steps to create a robust video marketing plan to survive the industry. 

Here are some steps to do video marketing for small businesses:

1. Research Target Audience

Above anything else, researching is a must-step that will determine your success. You can study the two factors to study your target audience: demographic and psychographic characteristics.

Demographic characteristics aim to identify your target audience more accurately by looking at their gender, age, education, income, and family size.

On the other hand, psychographic research lean more towards the audience's psychological characteristics. You can learn their personality, interests, attitudes, lifestyle, social status, and activities. 

Identifying the target audience will help you craft the most suitable video for marketing purposes.

2. Build Plans and Strategies

The second step to a successful video marketing plan is to build a robust plan and strategies. Especially for small businesses, measuring every step is vital to keep their business last long.

As small businesses may worry about budget allocation, it's necessary to allocate and plan spending for video production and overall marketing effort. 

You can spend less money creating the video alone or with your team. But remember that you have to invest in a good camera, editing app, and properties. Also, you need extra energy and time for video production.

However, you can be more laid back if you work together with a video production company. You may allocate more budget, but the result from the professionals won't disappoint you.

3. Look into Social Media Trends

Keeping an eye on the latest social media trend will always benefit businesses. You can discover what video style is on surge and learn the audience's behavior.

For example, Instagram has reels that you can leverage to create video content. With a short time frame and abundance of filters and stickers, Instagram reels allow you to get creative in less than a minute.

You can also create YouTube shorts or TikTok videos to enrich your content and be more approachable to audiences, especially younger generations.

4. Keep Video Short and Sweet

Keeping your video short and sweet is the key to successful video marketing. As the human's focus span gets shorter, no one wants to watch a rambling video. So, keeping your video to less than a minute will be best.

With a tight time frame, you should leverage the first few seconds to engage audiences. The approach to engaging the audience from the get-go differs depending on your video style or the social media you use.

Using a hook as a starter will be great if you want to create YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, or TikTok videos. You can create hooks with funny or interesting text or an image.

However, if you want to create landscape videos for YouTube, addressing your target audience's pain point is one of the best options.

5. Focus on Story, not Sales

Getting your video squeezed up with promotional phrases is the first step to failure. So, don't over-mention your brand or product to avoid being pushy.

Focus on building a captivating story to capture the audience. You need to understand your audience well to do that. That's why audience research is crucial as the first step.

It will be a different story if you want to approach younger or older audiences or high or medium-income audiences. So, build a story that will emotionally impress your target prospects and put strong CTA to convert them.

6. Leverage Social Media

It's a sure thing to leverage social media as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok become part of our daily lives. Moreover, video and social media are inseparable.

Publish your video on as many social media platforms as possible and monitor your video performance regularly. Later you will know which platforms drive the most prospects or build a new strategy to fix any problem.

Tips to Win Bigger Competitors

The competition may be daunting for small business owners, but they always have an exit to win over bigger competitors. 

Here are more tips for completing your video marketing strategy.

Learn Competitors

Besides learning your target audience, you also need to research your competitors: how big they are and what kind of strategy they use to get customers.

You can start by creating a list of competitors and learning their sales funnel, such as clicking their ads, going to their landing page, and filling out their forms.

To enrich your competitor research, you may do analytics tests on several websites, such as SEMrush. You will know which of your competitors' ads are performing the best.

Optimize video SEO

Optimizing SEO is as vital as the video content itself. Invest in long-tailed keywords to target a more specific audiences.

Long-tailed keywords also help you to compete with bigger competitors. Put your keyword on the video title, tags, and description. 

Moreover, add your landing page link or a link where your audience can purchase your product whenever you post content on social media.

Takeaway

The above points can be your guide to building a robust video marketing strategy, especially for small businesses. Always take your time to research and plan your next step to build a solid foundation for your marketing strategy.

Other than implementing video marketing, a business should constantly be inventing new products to create exclusive benefits for their audiences. Moreover, good customer service and excellent reviews from buyers can also be decisive factors in a successful business.

Author

Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video production company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order). 

Twitter: @breadnbeyond

Email/Gravatar: andre@breadnbeyond.com   

LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro