Why Small Businesses Should Master Video Marketing for Success in 2023

Small businesses need to focus their marketing efforts on platforms and channels where most of their users are. For most businesses, this search culminates in video marketing. Here are some stats that will drive home the point:

• More than 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day.
• 500 million+ people watch Facebook videos every day.
• Snapchat generates 10 billion video views every day.
• 82% of Twitter audiences watch video content.

Here’s a guide that will help small business digital marketers leverage video marketing for supreme success in 2023.

Follow Each Platform’s Established Best Practices

Creating great video content will cost you money. To maximize returns on your investments in content, you will need to use it across platforms. However, what works for one platform doesn’t work for others. Let’s take YouTube for example.

YouTube continues to be the platform of choice for users to search for new video content. Particularly for niches such as DIY content, explainer videos, tutorials, reviews, walkthroughs, haul videos, and behind-the-scenes content, YouTube is a clear leader. Sharing rates for YouTube videos are exceptionally high, and mobile views are spectacularly high. Here are some best practices for your YouTube videos.

• Keep the aspect ratio 16:9
• Keep the duration of the video to less than 5 minutes
• Place your CTA at the 30 seconds mark.
• The advertisements prior to the video should be crisp and short.

In the same manner, understand the recommended video content best practices and rules of each platform. With this knowledge, you can smartly plan your video content production in a manner that makes the video to be used across platforms with manageable editing.

Stick to Native Video Functionality Wherever Possible

Because of the tremendous traction being enjoyed by video marketing, most social media platforms are expanding their capabilities of video playback. Whereas Facebook offered native video upload support for a long time, LinkedIn added the option only in the second half of 2017.

Whereas it’s much easier for digital marketers to upload their video content on YouTube and take its embedded link, and use it to share the video across other platforms, it’s not the best way to manage your video marketing. That’s because of some inherent benefits offered by platform-specific native video functionalities.

• For instance, LinkedIn native video is deeply integrated with LinkedIn Analytics; this helps you get valuable insights into the profile of the audiences watching your content (their designations, industries, etc.).
• Also, the machine learning-powered algorithms of these platforms are coded to prefer natively uploaded content.
• For Facebook, native video content enjoys almost 10 times more shares than shared video content.

Use Video in Email marketing

Now that you have already invested in good video content, why not use it in your traditional marketing ploys that have, till now, been untouched by the magic of video? Email marketing deserves the first go, purely because engagement stands to be improved manifolds because of video content. More reasons:

• Embedded videos in emails make it easy for marketers to communicate their thoughts clearly.

• Rich media engages audiences.
• Because most emails are opened on desktops, mobile-optimized videos are easy to view.
• Chances are that your competitors are not going to use this tactic anytime soon, which gives you the first movers’ advantage.
• Integrate your CRM and video email marketing to track engagement and click-through rates.

Live Video

80% of people prefer watching live video over reading a blog post, and 82% prefer live video over social media posts. What’s more, already, people spend 3x time on Facebook Live videos as compared to other Facebook videos. Live video, because of its organic and authentic nature, creates tremendous opportunities for meaningful engagement for brands and audiences.

Here are some points to remember to make live video a success factor for your video marketing:

• Don’t go live just because everyone else is; it needs meticulous planning.
• Prepare a live video content plan and schedule.
• Always promote your upcoming live videos so that more users know of them beforehand and hence participate in them.
• Use a specific hashtag for a live video, so that you can use it for cross-platform promotion and to make it easy for anyone to search.
• Behind-the-scenes videos, Q&As with employees, interviews with industry leaders, and visits to industry conferences and local events – these are popular content themes worth exploring for your live video marketing.

Webinars – An Innovative Video-Powered Marketing Method

If you have meaningful content to share with the world, all you need is some creativity and a script to deliver a terrific webinar. Leading internet educators to rely on webinars to generate massive numbers of leads, strengthen their brand equity, and push existing leads down one step deeper into their sales funnel.

• With webinar software and a basic webcam and a microphone connected to your laptop, you’re ready to deliver a webinar.
• Give yourself at least 2 weeks of promotional time to get a maximum number of invites.
• Promote your upcoming webinar on all social media platforms.
• Create a branded landing page for your webinar; software can help you with this, apart from helping you send scheduled reminder emails to prospects.
• Create your webinar script with a view to being able to use it as a blog post in the future.
• Make sure your audio quality is great so that your webinar’s audio extract can go as a podcast.
• Structure your webinar properly, so that you can then use the recorded video and break it into 1, 2, or 3-minute small videos that go on YouTube as episodic content later.

Note: Remember, 93% of users agree that when a brand’s leadership thought content is high quality, their perception of the business, on the whole, is enhanced.

Video SEO / Video Marketing

Take video SEO seriously. The key points to remember are:

• Go for descriptive, long descriptions for your videos.
• Use your focus keyword in the first half of the title.
• Consider the search intent of the audience, and then use related keywords in your video description.
• High retention views are important; look for opportunities to share your video link in a Quora answer, because it’s likely the readers will watch it till the end.
• Once you post 10 videos on Youtube, organize them into playlists, with a focus on choosing non-overlapping and search-friendly themes.

Many More Tips and Tricks for Video Marketing for Small Businesses

Here’s a mixed bag of tips, tricks, and methods that help small businesses maximize their returns from video marketing efforts.

• Pin your Twitter videos on top of the feed, so that subsequent tweets don’t push it down, out of visibility.
• Ask everyone to share your video content; it’s psychology 101 – if you won’t ask, they won’t do it.
• Use your video links in your email signatures.
• While commenting on public guest posts, posting in forums, replying to social media comments, etc., look for opportunities to plant a link to one of your videos (only if adds value to the conversation).

Concluding Remarks

It’s predicted that video traffic will constitute 80% of web traffic by the end of 2020. You don’t want to be in the other 20% of web content, do you? Now’s the time to raise your video marketing game.