How to Get Started With Video Marketing

As a small business owner, you’re going to be well aware of the effectiveness of creating video content for your business in terms of marketing, in terms of getting new customers, in terms of improving your brand and business awareness within the niche that you operate. But I also understand that video marketing can seem really daunting and you may not know where to start.

I want to walk you through how to get started with creating your own video content, or if you decide to go down the route of commissioning a production company, but either way, there are some steps that it’s really, really vital that you take, so that your video that you produce is as effective and as targeted as possible.

We’ll look at three things you absolutely must do before you press record on any kind of video content for your business. Video marketing is so powerful, but you must do some planning before you jump in and start creating content. Unplanned content just won’t be as effective as content where you’ve really considered who you’re speaking to, what you’re talking to them about and why you’re making the video, i.e. what goals are the videos trying to achieve for your business?

Set Goals

The first thing you should do is set goals for your videos. Whenever you’re creating video content, you need to know why you’re creating it. What are the business goals that you want your video to hit?

Well, there are so many goals that video can help you achieve within your business. For example, you can create videos to get more customers, to raise awareness of your business, to establish your credibility within your niche, you can use video right throughout your sales process. Obviously, we’ve just talked about some awareness kind of stage video creation, but also, you can use videos really, really effectively within your sales pipeline, so to get people to commit to a purchasing decision, to convert people in your sales process or in your sales funnels. All of these things are possible with video, but you must set the goals before you start creating your video content.

So, how do you do this? Well, quite simply, just sit down and think in an objective sense about your business and your business needs. What, quite simply, does your business need more of? What are the pain points in your business that you’re trying to solve by using videos and video marketing?

If you zero in on that, then whenever you’re creating content, you’ve got that in the forefront of your mind and therefore, you can go and look and research and create content that will meet those goals. Without doing that, you’ve got no kind of idea as to reason why you’re creating this video content and for example, if you’re wanting to put some calls to action within your video content, if you don’t know why you’re creating the video, you won’t know what calls to action would work within that video and also, the business goals that you set for your video creation will have a massive effect on the style and the type of videos that you go on to create.

There are so many types of videos you can create for various different roles within your business. Video testimonials are obviously fantastic, but they’re much better off being used later on in the sales process, rather than at the awareness stage. So, you need to have an overarching view and overarching strategy behind your creation of the video content you’re going to make.

Know who you’re talking to

The second thing to do, which is really, really critical is to know who you’re talking to before you’ve gone anywhere near a camera to press that little red record button. You really must know who you’re talking to, who is your audience? Go through the process of identifying who it is that you want to talk to. What are your target markets? Try not to produce video content that’s generic that is trying to aim at multiple different markets.

What you want to do is create messages that are tailored specifically to absolute identifiable groups of people. In that way, you can create content that’s really, really relevant and valuable to those people. So, you’ll get much more buy-in and much more engagement, and therefore your videos will be much, much more effective.

By creating generic video content, the danger is that you kind of have a scatter gun approach and you don’t really deliver a particularly effective message that resonates or lands with any particular set of people and therefore, the video overall is not that effective. The whole point with video marketing and the power of digital marketing is that you can zero in on specific groups of people and zero in on helping particular people with their particular problems. So with your video content, it’s always better to zero in on one or two problems and help a certain sector of your customer demographic solve those problems.

So, how do you work out who to talk to within your videos? Well, you just need to break things down and this is why the whole planning process is vital before you jump in and start creating video. You need to break things down, you need to be really, really clear about which videos are going to talk to which people about which problem, how you’re going to help that sect of people solve a particular problem. You need to create specific videos that solve specific problems for a specific set of people.

How do you get to know who these groups of people are? Well, quite simply, you need to take time, invest time in profiling who your business deals with, the different groups of people.

Identify who they are, where they live online, what are their pain points, how can you help them overcome those pain points? All that sorts of thing would allow you to create video content that solves problems. The whole point in video marketing is to help people solve their problems.

The reason everyone will be searching on Google is because they have an issue that they want to be solved and your content or your company has come up in the search results, so they think that you can help them with whatever issue it is that you can solve. So, make sure you’re creating content that illustrates that you can help them and how you can do so.

Work out what your client lifetime value is

The third thing I do definitely before you go anywhere near that camera with your twitchy finger to press record is to work out what your client lifetime value is because by doing this, you’ll work out how much money you can spend on client acquisition. You need to work out how long they stay with you and the value they bring to the bottom line of your business. Once you know that, you know how much you can spend on acquiring new customers. That is critical when it comes to working out how much investment you can put into things like marketing, of which obviously, video marketing is a part.

If you, for example, have a client lifetime value of three or 4,000 pounds, then obviously it’s fine for you to spend two to 300 pounds on Facebook ads, for example, to acquire new leads. If your client lifetime value is in the hundreds of pounds, then obviously, that puts a very different spin on how much money you can realistically spend on attracting new customers into your business and therefore, it will completely change your approach. Without this kind of knowledge, you’re not going to know how much money you could realistically spend on acquiring new clients and therefore, you may be in a situation where you’re spending more on marketing than actually your new clients are bringing in, which is a recipe for disaster.

Final thoughts

Well, I really hope you got loads of value from this. To dive into loads more detail about the strategy behind creating effective video content marketing as well as practical video production how-to’s.

We’ve also got loads of resources on our YouTube channel, so definitely check out the other videos that are all designed to help businesses get the most out of video marketing. I hope you got value out of this video. Let me know what you think in the comments below.