01
Introduction
Marketing within SMBs is a tricky subject.
Budgets are generally tighter, and marketing personnel more scarce.
Small businesses need to prioritize and properly determine approaches that are most likely to yield higher conversion rates and guarantee ROI.
Enter video marketing.
Consider the following:
- Featuring a video on a website landing page has proven to increase conversion rates by 80%.
- Google is 53% more likely to feature your website on the first page of a search if features videos.
- Emails containing videos boast 2-3X click through rates.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s 2020; the average consumer more or less expects to be engaged with video content when reaching a company’s site, even if that company is tiny.
87% of consumers want to see more video content from brands and companies they are considering engaging with.
25% of prospects will actually lose interest in your site if it does not feature videos.
‘OK, you’ve made your point’ is what most of you are thinking at this point.
‘But producing video content, and having it be a focal point of our marketing strategy is going to be expensive. Didn’t you just highlight how small businesses have limited resources?’
Well, creating video content doesn’t have to be costly.
That’s what we’re here for.
In this guide for small and medium business video marketing, we’ll cover:
- Everything you’ll need to know about producing and hosting videos on your site, in a way that is tailored to SMBs.
- How pairing video to marketing automation, and properly utilizing video analytics will become your go-to marketing weapon.
- Small businesses that are leveraging the power of video marketing right now.
- How video supercharges sales efforts, as well.
02
How can videos benefit me?
The reason videos are so effective is their immediacy.
No other form of content enables you to convey who you are, what you do, and how that can help someone more concisely and clearly than video.
Let’s breakdown the essential benefits videos will provide your business:
Relevant search traffic
Google structures its search engine results to reward sites that feature videos. Any given video in an index of searchable keywords has a 50 times higher chance of appearing on the first page of a Google search result, compared to a page featuring only text.
Syndication
By syndicating videos to multiple sites and multiple devices –including mobile– more and more people will see them. Videos present a cost-effective method to maintain brand reliability and strengthen consumer awareness. A company that has distributors , for example, can upload one video and share it on all its distributors’ websites.
Major boost to mobile engagement.
72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video.
Given that 75% of all video plays are on mobile devices, it would be extremely advantageous for you to exploit that. You can effectively leverage video to expand your prospects’ engagement with your business via mobile.
Far more effective branding and messaging
People don’t like reading, especially when there is a far more engaging and easy way to consume the same content.
Viewers are 95% (!) more likely to retain information gained by watching video, compared to a mere 10% when reading it.
If you want your brand out there, video is as close as a sure thing there is.
Conversion
The success of a marketing initiative has increasingly been stripped down to a single metric:
Lead conversion.
Adding video to your business’s website makes your site 6 times more likely to convert a “browser” into a paying customer.
03
How to achieve Avengers: Endgame-level video content with an indie budget
Alright. we’ve made our point about videos being awesome.
But how can you produce a top-quality video with limited resources?
Here’s how:
Keep it simple
Marvel-themed title aside, your first priority is to understand the implications of a tight budget. Focus on POV, single narrator presentations. These can be produced quickly, and virtually for free, using almost any smartphone manufactured after 2018. The end result will range from respectable to flat-out amazing, depending on your script.
Keep it short
Expecting a prospect to watch a 2 minute corporate video all the way to the end? You might as well expect a 7 year old to sit through the Godfather trilogy in one viewing without him begging for it to stop. Whatever you do, try and keep your videos under two minutes. The drop in viewership past that point is significant. Knowing that the longer a video is the more it will generally cost, will see you aiming for this anyhow.
If it works for the MCU- it should work for you.
You know how almost all the Marvel movies follow a (very) similar pattern and still almost always seem to generate at least $1B? That’s not a coincidence. Building segment blocks or themes out of successful content properties is standard practice within the video production world. If you come up with a cool video concept, make sure to stylize it in a way that will allow for it to be serialized. Consider shooting a few in bulk and keep them in the can. That way, you can disperse them at opportune junctures (like before holidays or at the end of a season).
Lean heavily on social media and email newsletters for distribution
Instagram has established itself firmly as the top dog among social media platforms.
People actively seek out video content on that platform. View Instagram as your own distributing network. If you are active on Facebook, make sure to push your videos on there as well. 100 million hours of video are watched on that platform every day.
When sending out a newsletter, it would be very advantageous to include your video within it. As mentioned above, CTR rates when an email features video content are much higher. A video host, such as Cincopa, will allow you to analyze and track exactly who and how your video content was engaged with (more on that later).
04
How to blend video with marketing automation
Most popular forms of marketing automation rely on the principals of inbound marketing. The standard M.O for inbound marketing entails the following cycle:
Using SEO, PPC and social marketing, prospects are drawn to a company’s website or landing pages. Once there, they are engaged with content; they will be gently driven to fill a form, becoming an identified marketing lead (or contact) in the process.
Then, a nurturing process begins. The newly-branded contact is added to email campaigns until he or she reaches the marketing version of the promised land: Obtaining marketing qualified status (i.e. they reach the point where they are ready to be handed over to sales).
So, where does video come into the mix?
Let’s break it down into 4 main channels:
1. Lead generation
Some video marketing platforms, such as Cincopa, allow you to capture a viewer’s email as he watches the video as an “on-video form” experience. Then, they enable you to create a new contact on your MAP (marketing automation platform) as he or she engages with video content, producing an increase of over 43% in conversion rate.
Instead of through a white paper or ebook (which are standard, but somewhat tired methods), why not try and convert them through a far-more enticing form of content?
Gating video content (i.e. stipulating access to those who fill a form) has proven to yield conversion rates that are 40% higher than standard web forms.
2. Nurturing leads using video
Lead nurturing is greatly enhanced when done with video content.
You can set up a workflow that will send out nurturing content based on a variety of video-related metrics. These would include watching up to, and beyond a certain point, revisiting a video within a defined time frame, whether the device was first viewed on mobile, and much, much more.
3. Segmenting leads using video
You can set up groups of prospects according to the ways in which they consumed your videos.
As not all of your contacts are at the same buying stage, it is imperative they receive content that fits their position along the buyer’s journey. This is critical if you hope to successfully push them down the funnel.
4. Qualify and score leads using video
Lead scoring is an advanced strategy companies employ to set quality leads apart from those whom will probably not mature to a contact, or whom are not yet ready to buy.
By attaching numerical values to potential prospects, automated lead scoring rates each interaction a lead has with your company.
These include watching videos (including a breakdown of percentage watched), video emails opened, video emails clicked, on-video interactions such as form submissions, CTA clicks etc.
This is possibly one of the most powerful yet less understood features of video marketing automation. Every company needs to assess for itself and learn how to score specific viewing actions.
There is no one-rule-fits-all regarding how a prospect must score in order for him or her to be qualified as marketing qualified (MQL), or to be handed over to sales after being deemed sales qualified (SQL).
05
How to measure success with video
So you’ve gotten a good idea about how to go about automation and videos.
But how do you define desired outcomes for these videos?
How can you tell whether a video is successful?
This is critical to the steps we elaborated on in the section above. You will need to define certain benchmarks and goals regarding your videos’ desired performance.
Here are a few key factors you should be paying close attention to:
- Views (the number of times people click on a video – different platforms have different viewing durations that count as views). To get a view on YouTube, viewers must watch for at least 30 seconds.
- Play rates (divide impressions by views). For example, a video with 5,000 impressions and 500 views, would have a play rate of 10%.
- View length (the amount of time a viewer watched).
- Drop-off viewing rates at half, three-quarters, and end of video
- Engagement rate (the number of people still watching at point x divided by the viewers who started watching).
- Number of shares, likes, and comments per video
- Percentage of viewers who shared, liked or commented
- Preferred device types and operating systems.
- Viewer location (where in the world your viewer watched your video).
- Source of view (the platform the video was seen on).
- Conversion rate (viewers who take action, such as clicking on a CTA or submitting a form following a video).
Here are some practical tips:
If you’re losing viewers right at the beginning of your video, work on making it engaging right from the start.
If viewers are skipping over certain parts and watching others more than once, you have a great indication of what they find useful. You may be able to place more emphasis on what’s useful and cut out what’s not.
Make sure the copy within the video accurately reflects its content. If viewers expect an explanation of how to use your product and instead you give them an advert about why they should buy it, they’ll probably stop watching.
If you can see that a high percentage of viewers drop off at the same point, it’s a strong indication that your video could be too long. If you have anything unnecessary in your video, cut it out. We can’t stress the 2 minute limit strongly enough.
Paid video hosting services offer excellent video analytics, precise performance metrics, and high SEO (search engine optimization) benefits. They facilitate channel-specific video content and help you publish it on various social media platforms from one location.
Cincopa, for example, offers an advanced analytics suite. It provides demographic information and directly tracks viewer engagement. You can get data such as how long visitors watched and what actions they took when they finished watching.
06
SMB video marketing done right
‘This sounds great in theory’, you might be thinking. ‘But can you point to a small businesses that has excelled at video marketing before?‘
Here’s a fantastic example:
McGilligan MD
Evoking true emotion from viewers is a challenge for medical organizations, especially in the US, where the price of health insurance is staggering. When medical entities try to woo prospects appealing to their emotions, it’s hard for many not to view these attempts as a somewhat cynical, exploitative approach.
That’s what makes McGillian MDs video so unique. It showcases a real physician who manages to relay a passionate, personal message without resorting to excessive shmaltz. The doctor shown throughout speaks in an eye-level, straight-to-the point manner. She explains how the clinic operates in a transparent, professional way, and that thanks to its size, patients will be given more personal treatment.
There was no need to travel to a remote location to film; the clinic itself serves as a perfect, effective backdrop.
The clinic gets extra points for having the captions appear as a default feature. Given that the overwhelming majority of mobile videos are viewed with the audio muted, it would be a shame not to account for that. This is a great way of enabling the audience to connect with their message without having to hear the doctors speak.
Oh, and just as importantly, it’s done all in a minute and forty seconds.
07
Next steps
As lengthy (and hopefully useful😃) as this guide is, there is still so much more to explore and discover in regard to video marketing.
We highly encourage you to invest in a video hosting platform, such as Cincopa. You would be making a major step toward unleashing the incredible potential videos can have on your company’s bottom line.