Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience, especially when you are a startup. It is a cost-effective and compelling way to create content that you can use and repurpose on multiple platforms. Making the most out of your video marketing budget as a startup will be crucial in helping you achieve all of your goals since it may be more limited compared to larger businesses. This article will give you 8 tips that every startup should know so they can make the most out of their video marketing efforts.
8 Video Marketing Tips for Startups
1. Produce a video marketing plan
As a startup, you will need to produce a video marketing plan before doing any campaigns so that you can plan out how to spend all of your budget wisely and get the best possible returns.
A rigorous planning phase helps you have a smoother operation once your video marketing campaign begins. During planning, you should decide on things like the number of videos you want to create, what topics you want to cover, what platforms you want to upload to, how much you are willing to spend, and how you will track your objectives and goals.
This video marketing plan will be your main guide once you start your campaigns. When you are thinking of any change to your video marketing efforts, look back at the plan and see if this change is aligned with what you want to achieve.
2. Establish and learn more about your audience
One of the most important tasks to perform early on when you plan for your video marketing is to immediately establish and learn more about the audience you want to target. This will make it a lot easier for you to decide on what topics, videos, platforms, and content you will create.
Having an in-depth understanding of your audience will also help you establish when and how you want to target them. For example, if you want to focus on potential customers that know nothing about your startup, you can create explainer videos for them.
However, if you want to target people who already know you and have visited your website, you can create product reviews and testimonial videos to give them one more push so that they can convert into a customer.
3. Place a focus on creating entertaining video content
If you want to make sure that your video turns out to be successful, it has to be entertaining to a large number of people. No one will want to watch a boring video.
It is important that you create entertaining content because it lets you give viewers what they are looking for whenever they watch videos.
Entertainment isn’t simply limited to making viewers laugh. As long as they are interested in your narrative throughout the duration of your video, then they will be entertained.
Whether your video is dramatic, funny, informative, eye-opening, or educational, it will be entertaining as long as it engages the viewer.
4. Avoid hard selling in your videos
Just like what was stated above, viewers watch videos to be entertained. They want to watch something that they think will be worthwhile and valuable.
Blatantly selling your products in a video is one surefire way of losing not just viewers for that specific video, but can even make it harder for you to attract long-term customers.
If they can immediately tell that the video is an advertisement, they will be more likely to avoid it immediately or watch it hesitantly. Either way, they have already established a negative impression with your startup.
In video marketing, a soft sell works a lot better than a hard sell. It shouldn’t be all about selling.
5. Communicate using simple and clear messages
Since startups will usually have to work with a more limited budget, you should make the most out of it. This means that you can create great videos even without large budgets or dazzling effects as long as you can communicate using simple and clear messages.
If your video has too much going on in the story and looks overproduced, it will leave viewers confused and not understand your main points.
In a lot of cases, doing something simple like having one person talk directly in front of the camera or an animation video is all you will need. This allows you to focus more on your script and narrative.
6. Make sure that your videos aren’t too long
Keeping your video engaging all throughout its runtime is important so that viewers will be interested enough to see how your video ends and how you can call them to action. You will have a better chance of having engaging videos when they aren’t too long.
Your video length will depend on what the information, content, and video type will be but a good range for videos will be between 15 seconds and 5 minutes. As long as you communicate everything that you need in a specific time frame, you can stick with that.
7. Do your best to update your videos as much as possible
As a startup, you are still constantly evolving your product or your services. You should be able to also reflect these by also updating your videos as much as possible whenever you have new information and updates.
Replacing or refreshing older videos on a consistent basis allows you to communicate the most accurate and up-to-date information which all of your customers will appreciate.
When they see you put in that effort to constantly update them, you are making them feel important which will also make them feel more loyal to your brand.
8. Work with a professional video production company
Working with a professional video production company should be something that you will strongly consider when none of your team members in your startup have any experience or skills to create the videos that you want.
This may seem costly but working with professionals will be a worthwhile investment when they are able to produce high-quality videos that will help your startup succeed.
As long as you follow all of these tips, you will be assured of a successful video marketing campaign which will boost your startup.
