Video Marketing for Small Business: 6 Basic Rules

By Caroline Manning

If you aren’t already using video to promote your business's products and services, it's time to consider it. Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world after Google? Imagine the reach your business can achieve if it learns how to do video marketing well.

Unlike written marketing materials, however, video can be very expensive and time-consuming to produce. So before you add video marketing to your overall digital marketing strategy, be sure you understand these fundamental rules for successful video marketing.

The 6 rules for small business video marketing

1. Don't produce videos just for the sake of having videos

No matter what industry you’re in, you have seen countless articles goading you into producing video content for your brand. The truth is, until you have identified a specific problem that video content can solve, it’s better to wait until you can flesh out your wider marketing strategy, and then flag the areas where video fits in.

Video can be a big investment of both time and resources, so don’t just reiterate the “About Us” page of your website. Instead, answer the questions your sales team is asked frequently, show customers using your product successfully, and explain your unique selling proposition (USP) in the least technical/jargon-free way.

Bottom line for successful video marketing: Know your why.

2. Have a plan in place to measure metrics

Beyond simply knowing why you’re making a video, you need to establish what is going to make the project a success. Just like any piece of marketing material, simply pushing a video live is not the end of the story.

Luckily, the digital aspect makes video marketing relatively easy to track. If you are using video as part of an email campaign, you’ll want to reach a certain open rate or click through rate. If you’re creating a video for social platforms, then you’ll want to know how many people who see it then visit your site. If a video is hosted on your website, perhaps success will be a certain number of contact forms completed.

Every campaign will be different, but no matter what you’re tracking, it will be more difficult to do after the fact, so make sure you have a plan in place to gather video metrics before you begin.

3. Decide where you will distribute your videos

The internet is a wild and wonderful place, and with over 36 hours of video uploaded to YouTube alone every SECOND, there is a lot of content to compete with. This is why you need to formulate a watertight distribution strategy from the get-go.

First things first, ask yourself: Who is my ideal audience? Are they more likely to be spending their time on LinkedIn or Instagram? Is it better to reach them by email or through another channel?

It is vital that your team knows which social media platforms you will be using to distribute the video, and dedicates some time to build up your audience (with real followers, not bots) in the run-up to publishing the videos. While it’s not totally necessary, it is definitely beneficial to dedicate some of your budget to paid advertising and, once the videos go up, engage with your viewers.

4. Analyze what competitors are doing, and then do something different

Odds are you’re swimming in a red ocean right now (meaning all of the sharks are fighting for the same fish), but even if you’re a unicorn in a blue sea, it’s tempting to follow what the kings and queens of the internet have deemed to be the “top trends for (insert industry/year/medium here).”

Before you join the pack, consider how your potential customers feel while clicking through a number of very similar videos in their pre-decision phase. Which video is going to stick in their head? Probably the one that is most off-the-wall.

It’s okay if your brand isn’t necessarily funny or colorful or poignant. Your video still can be. Remember this sage advice, which you can easily apply to a successful video marketing strategy: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.”

5. Follow the advice of the “creatives”

Maybe you’ve hired an in-house producer to take the lead on your video strategy, or perhaps you partnered with a video production agency. Either way, when you start on a video marketing journey, it is best to find out what you don’t know.

In other words, you have vetted and entrusted these people with the task of creating a beautiful and intriguing image for your brand online—now let them do it! Know that when a video marketer gently suggests a slightly different direction, it is likely rooted in not only experience in the field, but also in an artistic aptitude which you, the entrepreneur, may not fully grasp.

This is not to say you should blindly follow all outlandish suggestions. As you are definitely the most knowledgeable person on the topic, it is important to get your business message across. But when it comes down to the “creative” side of the project, let the creatives take the lead.

6. Don't try to fit everything into one video

It is not uncommon for B2B companies to have multiple branches or products that cater to a variety of roles. Rather than trying to “smoosh” all of this information into one long, tedious video that is likely to get paused a quarter of the way through, a successful video marketing strategy involves giving each different customer message the room it deserves.

It should go without saying that CEOs, HR professionals, and marketing experts each have different priorities. Therefore, there will be certain points that will be more compelling to some companies or roles than others. While you don’t need to worry about fitting everything into one video, be sure to showcase the full breadth of what you offer in your wider video marketing strategy.

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