People like to interact with video content. They like to watch it, they like to comment on it, they like to share it with their friends. Video content is the juggernaut of online marketing right now, and it’s not showing any signs it will stop its run anytime soon. It will, by all accounts, only get bigger. You only need to look at the advertising budgets of big companies. Year by year, video content has been getting a larger share.
The fact that big businesses are allocating more and more money to video marketing shouldn’t put you off of using video marketing to promote your own business. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small business owner – you can still produce good video content that will help your business be noticed in the digital environment. You don’t need the astronomical budgets of big companies to create great video content. But you will need a couple of pointers to get you going in a good direction.
Step #1 – Figure Things Out
In terms of content marketing, good video content is content that gets the job done. Creating content that gets the job done starts with research. You need to know who your target audience is. Be aware of your business’s unique selling point. Know what the competition is doing, and you need to know what the trends are in your industry. When you figure out these things, you’ll have the information you need to determine how much money you’ll need to spend on creating and promoting the content.
Step #2 – Create Your Content
Next, you need to make the best-looking content you can with your budget. You don’t have to hire a movie crew to film your content. Search for things you can use for the video content that won’t cost you anything – a friend with a good camera, a location for filming you don’t have to pay, free audio content for your video. Your goal is to create the most professional-looking product for as little money as possible. You don’t have to make a whole movie – your video content shouldn’t be longer than sixty seconds. Your audience probably doesn’t have the attention span for longer ads. And don’t forget to add subtitles or captions to your video content – a lot of people look at video content on social media with sound off.
Step #3 – Post and Promote Your Content
There are two social media behemoths you need to focus on for your video content – YouTube and Facebook. You should upload your video content to both, but remember that each of these networks has its own rules about how to optimize video content for optimal exposure. And also explore as many other social networks as possible. There’s Vimeo, Daily Motion, Metacafe, and lots of others that offer video hosting. You shouldn’t forget Instagram either – it sees more than half a billion active users monthly. And, once your content is posted online, don’t forget to add your video content to your emails. If you send out a newsletter to your clients, make sure that it has some video content in it.
Step #4 – Repurpose Your Old Content
If video content is not the first type of content you used for marketing, you should revisit your old content and see whether you can repurpose it for video. If you have a blog, for example, you can create a slide show video for your blog posts. Add some voice-over, including relevant images. You already have the majority of the content you will need. Furnish it with some visuals and some audio. If you want to create regular slide shows from your existing content, you can post them on Slideshare.
These are the very basics of getting into the video marketing game. Once some time passes and you’re able to analyze how well your content is performing, you’ll probably want to make some changes to the type of content you produce and your overall video content strategy. But for the beginning, remember that you need to create effective content and post it somewhere your audience will be able to see it.
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