Grabbing the attention of customers has never been as difficult as it is in today’s fast-paced digital marketing landscape. When customers are skipping through TV commercials, using ad-blockers, or choosing ad-free radio providers, it can seem impossible to cut through the noise to reach them. That’s why businesses have to get creative. Building a content strategy that offers information rather than an interruption is imperative to running a successful small business in 2021.
Why Content Creation?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: content is king! That’s where your content creation strategy needs to be in play. Every piece of a digital presence needs written content, whether it be a website page, a blog post, or even the script for a video.
Content creation is especially critical for maintaining a social media presence and cultivating a blog that helps businesses rank in the SERP.
Only 33.9% of companies publish blog posts or articles, but almost every business would benefit from having a blog!
By adding content creation to your business plan, you’re filling in a lot of gaps that businesses are not. Having content like blogs and ongoing social posts is a great way to quickly grow your revenue with new and existing customers.
Your Guide To Content Creation
Social Posting
Social media is the perfect medium to help your business engage your customers and increase your brand awareness. Craft social posts that cover a variety of topics to keep your customers informed and engaged all while maintaining your brand and company story.
Blog Posts
With blogs, your business can really build an expert voice and communicate your value with your customers. By utilizing a blog, your business can share its knowledge and expertise, without losing tie spend on building your business.
Website Copy
Does your business have a story but not sure how to share? You can build your business’s website and fill it with relevant, informative content that your customers will love.
5 Ways to Win Big with Online Video Marketing
In the early 2000s, there was a running gag that mobile phones would get smaller as technology advanced. The joke was that eventually, phones would become a speck of plastic.
Of course, that didn’t happen.
Instead of getting smaller, modern mobile screens accommodate one of the most popular forms of content on the internet: Video.
The tools we use today are designed with video in mind. This is why digital marketing efforts should always leverage video to reach goals, such as more conversions, backlinks, and brand awareness.
Video is big, and it’s still making waves in the digital marketing world. Here are the video statistics we know today:
- YouTube has over 2 billion active monthly users or about a third of all people on the internet. (YouTube)
- In 2020, online video is expected to account for 79% of all internet traffic. (Cisco)
- It is projected that there will be nearly 10 devices per household by 2023, and 47 percent will be video capable. (Cisco)
- “How-to” videos are one of the four top content categories watched by YouTube users. (Google)
- A whopping 68% of YouTube users watch YouTube help make a purchase decision. (Google)
- The number of SMBs that advertise on YouTube has doubled since 2016. (YouTube)
Founder and Chief Strategist, Chris Beckwith-Taylor, knows a thing a two about video marketing. Here, he shares five strategies with actionable steps on how to achieve results.
1. Social is Made for Online Video Marketing
Does your brand have a personality? Great, it’s time to share it on social media through branded videos. The way a business presents itself through its posts, interactions, likes, and follows speaks more about the business than the “about” section of a website. And video takes this concept to a whole new level.
Along with showcasing personality, social media video marketing can breathe life into an otherwise stale industry. As a fun exercise, I took a company that is well known for its bombastic and spectacular visual content (Old Spice) and photoshopped out all the visual content from their Twitter page.
The result was boring and outdated. I encourage you to check out what their Twitter page normally looks like to see visuals cranked up to 11!
But to get the most out of your efforts, know what’s trending right now. Here are two types of video content for social that work well for small businesses.
- Live-streaming – Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all make it easy for a business to share its most exciting and special moments with its audience in real-time. This form of video content is great for offering “insider access.”
- Storytelling – Almost all big social media platforms have built-in tools to help you create visual stories and post them temporarily. Businesses that take advantage are reaping the rewards. Plus, because of the brevity of the content, there is room for experimentation, creativity, and humor.
Actionable Step: Experiment with basic video-making tools on social media platforms. For example, use “boomerang” to shoot a video for Instagram and upload it as “my story.” Use the process to get comfortable with how simple and easy sharing videos on social platforms is.
2. Incorporate Video Marketing on Your Website
If creating video for social gives a business personality, featuring video on a website gives the business an air of professionalism. Interestingly, it can often be the same video content (context is everything).
With the effectiveness of video clearly demonstrated, here are two ways to get it done and examples of websites doing it right.
Embed Video into Your Homepage
What Green Stick Marketing does can be hard to explain, but a video allows us to communicate that information quickly. For businesses that also exist in industries that can’t be described in a sentence, a “welcome” video could be the ticket to informing customers.
Integrate Video into the Background of the Web Design
This is more prevalent in creative industries, but I would push businesses to think outside the box and start a trend among their competition. Just be careful, the wrong video can end up being a distraction from your message.
If you’re offering web services, consider adding video marketing services, too. Building in a video option for your clients is a great way to boost the effectiveness of their website and build client trust.
Actionable Step: If you provide web services like design and hosting, take a closer look at your options for integrating video into your client’s products. Is it possible to have video backgrounds? What about just embedding a video on the homepage?
If you answer no to one or both of these questions, consider expanding your offerings with the right video content marketing services. For the cost, WordPress offers the most options in terms of video integration into websites.
3. Video Marketing is Great for SEO
At the most fundamental level, video content is in step with Google’s main goal: Deliver highly relevant content that enhances the user’s experience online. As a result, when Google sees the video, it rewards the page that hosts it.
SEO video marketing enhances your site’s metrics around page sessions and bounce rates, both of which help significantly towards SEO.
Video makes your content more shareable, and shares lead to backlinks—the backbone of increasing your rankings.
Often times SEO priorities and creative marketing ideas have trouble aligning. Lean too far one way and your content loses its soul, lean too far the other and you won’t reach your target audience.
Actionable Step: If your clients are planning on getting started with video, get them to start a YouTube channel. This will get them the quick win of the backlink for their website in the channel description. Plus additional backlinks with every video they post by adding their URL in the video description.
4. Video Email Marketing Campaigns
Email campaigns are like elevator pitches in the online space. If you are lucky enough to find yourself in an elevator with someone willing to listen, you’ve got very limited time to sell them on your idea. Unless of course, you take advantage of video email marketing.
Fortunately, using video in your emails not only increases your ability to find an interested party, but it also buys you more time to tell your story. An initial email with a video gets an increased click-through rate of 96%, according to WordStream.
Actionable Step: Look at your previous email campaigns, and choose the ones that may have missed the mark. Translate the copy from the email into script format. Describe how the message would sound and look if it were produced for video in as much detail as possible. Would it be a talking head? Would it be a voice-over with a photo slide-show?
This brief exercise demonstrates how easy the process of shaping your messages for video can be. Again, we don’t need the next masterpiece—the goal is to realize how achievable solid video email marketing and video messaging can be.
5. Video Content Marketing
We know that a strong content strategy is great for SEO. We’ve also shared how video can be a huge value for SEO. So it feels like building a content strategy around producing video content is a match made in SERP ranking heaven.
While it’s valuable to create funny and clever videos, informational videos are very popular among shoppers. YouTube users are three times more likely to watch a video tutorial than read instructions. (Google)
Video Content Marketing can take many forms, but my favorite is making easy-to-follow how-to videos that give the business a chance to showcase expertise and gain consumer trust.
Actionable Step: Work towards answering these questions:
What are the most visually interesting aspects of the business?
List which aspects of the business are most challenging to showcase in writing?
What does the business do that’s most helpful to its customers? (This is likely not simply what the business sells). For example, a formal menswear company can provide quick tutorials, such as how to tie a full Windsor, or set your pocket square.
By getting specific answers to these questions, a direction for video content strategy will begin to reveal itself.
Video Content Marketing Wins
Much like content marketing, video content marketing should be useful to your customers and add value to their lives. At Green Stick, we use video as a breath of fresh air for our customers because they prefer watching videos. At the same time, we use it because Google loves it, too.
Content Creation With Green Stick
If you’re learning about video marketing services for your business, we’ve got you covered. Green Stick offers video marketing services for a variety of different businesses.
In addition, we offer a variety of content creation solutions. From monthly blog posts to a monthly calendar of social media posts. Our experienced content writers can help you build your business’s audience by creating an engaging and unique storyline for them through original blogs, and expand your online audience through highly engaging, timely, and relevant social posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.
Our team of experts can help your business build brand awareness, generate higher converting leads, and develop better relationships with your customers, all without you needing to lift a finger. Learn more about our marketing services today!
