7 Easy-to-Create Types of Videos to Grow Your Small Business: Plus How and When to Use Each Type
You know you’ve gotta create more videos to grow your small business. It seems like everyone else is doin’ it. But the last time you hired a professional videographer to create a stellar company video, you shelled out several thousand dollars. You’d love to have professional help with all your videos, but you’re a small business and that would tank your entire marketing budget. Sound familiar? That’s why I’m writing this 5-part article series. For busy small businesses like yours who need (perhaps want) to create more engaging videos — to share with your existing audience and grow an even larger following — but know there’s gotta be a cheaper, quicker way to do it.
You can simply record your talking head using a smartphone and then blast it out onto your company’s Facebook page, but that’s a shotgun approach—wild, pointless, and often scattered. Don’t create videos just for the sake of creating videos. Instead, we need to first talk about strategy. Video marketing strategy is what will help you focus your efforts, conserve your money, and most importantly get a better ROI in what you create. Today I encourage you to look at your video marketing as a means (the medium) to which you will execute your objectives. I’ve organized the types of video into what I believe to be the three business objectives of video marketing.
How the Sales Funnel Relates to Marketing Videos
Each business objective for creating video fits into the typical sales funnel, either primarily in one band, or spanning across more than one.
Brand awareness is at the top/open part of the funnel where your videos are meant mainly for a cold audience to learn that you exist. Trust & likeability is also near the top of the funnel (for a cold audience) but also exists near the middle of the sales funnel where your audience is a bit more familiar with your company but is not yet ready/convinced to buy your product or service. And finally, conversion is the bottom of the funnel where your audience is aware of your brand, likes and trusts your brand, and is therefore in a place where they might be receptive to buying from you.
A Look at Each of the Three Business Objectives of Video Marketing
Here is a graphic showing the three business objectives for any of the types of videos you might create for marketing your business.
Let’s look at each objective in more depth.
Objective 1: Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a fancy marketing term referring to our efforts to let new prospects (typically customers) know we even exist. If your goal is brand awareness, then your video needs to be focused on a cold audience (one that isn’t familiar with your brand and isn’t apt yet to buying from you). There are many types of videos that are suitable for brand awareness, including: explainer videos providing solutions to commonly-experienced problems, slideshow-style videos that showcase a series of slides telling your brand story and what makes your business unique, recorded screencast demos where you teach a how-to on solving a problem or educating a cold audience on something they care about.
Objective 2: Trust & Likeability
Sometimes we create video when you have people’s attention, they know about you, and you’re working on developing their trust and establishing yourself as an expert in your niche. This is a great place to create videos that establish your credibility. If you’re creating a video to establish brand trust and likeability, then educational or how-to videos are your biggest asset.
If you’re creating a video to establish brand trust and likeability, then educational or how-to videos are your biggest asset.
Your prospect customers crave videos that provide solutions in the form of tips and hacks to their burning questions or problems. A video that short-circuits the learning curve for your audience and helps them understand something with simplicity will definitely set you apart from the competition. Empowering and arming your tribe with information is one of the keys to establishing your credibility with your audience.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you run a chimney sweep business which also specializes in cleaning out dryer vents. You have a decent Facebook following. Now that peeps are becoming aware of your brand, your objective might be to gain more trust and likeability with your established tribe. So you create a series of videos to educate and empower your audience. A great video topic might be a live-action video where you educate viewers about steps they can take themselves to routinely clean out their dryer vents to prevent a house fire. Then the call to action is urging your audience schedule an annual dryer vent deep-clean service with your company. It’s similar to an HVAC company advising homeowners to change out their HVAC filter monthly, yet advising customers to schedule an annual HVAC maintenance visit with their company for a thorough service.
Objective 3: Conversion
Conversion is another weird marketing term. It reminds me of the Spanish Inquisition…I digress. If you have a warm audience, they trust and like your brand, and you want to create videos to turn lookers into buyers, you’ll want videos aimed specifically at converting. Videos with a strong call to action. If your video is going directly to your website, perhaps as the main call to action sales video on your website, you may need to call in the “big boys” for that effort. There is a time and place for calling in the professionals to make super high-quality videos. I’m not going to pretend that DIY video is the solution to every situation.
So when is it appropriate to create a DIY video to convert? Social media is a great place to make conversion videos. Let’s say you want to convert your Facebook followers into joining your mailing list by signing up for your newsletter–make a video to compel them to jaunt over to your site and sign up for the goods! If you’ve created a cool giveaway (AKA “content upgrade”) and you want social media followers to come get the freebie, then a quick DIY video enticing your audience to take that action is just what the doctor ordered!
This is certainly something you can and should create quickly and cheaply on your own with one of the methods we’ll discuss below.
Follow This 3-Step Process for Creating Various Types of Videos
After you identify your business objective, choose which type of video best fits your objective, and lastly, select a software or tool(s) to mechanically create your marketing video (this one I’ll discuss in my next blog post, the fourth of this 5-part series). Here’s a graphic showing the thought-process for how this should work (in case you’re a visual learner, like me).
7 Types of Videos You Can Create to Grow Your Business
How-To Videos: Educational videos don’t have to be as boring as the term might imply. In fact, educational videos can be quite fun to watch when the style is a how-to video, especially when you use animation. People love watching short how-to videos that quickly solve a common problem. For example, Project Better Self uses 5-minute how-to videos to raise brand awareness. With more than 25k YouTube followers, Project Better Self shares free educational videos to help solve everyday questions/problems for people wanting to better themselves. By doing this, they position themselves as an expert in the field. In this how-to educational video, they provide solutions to people who are curious about how to make wise beginner financial decisions. To date, it has received nearly 300k views!
Explainer Videos: Speaking of finance videos, Millionaire Mindset Hub is able to grow their online audience with this 6-minute animated explainer YouTube video called “What Is Bitcoin? – How It Works and How To Get Them.” It’s educational, it’s interesting, and most importantly it solves a problem (a lack of understanding problem) the audience has about Bitcoin in an entertaining way. Explainer videos are a great way to take otherwise boring educational topics and make them interesting to a broader audience. This is a brilliant way to increase brand awareness. Explainer videos can be talking heads, screencasts, or animated (like the Bitcoin one), to name a few ways to execute one.
Brand Story Videos: We use a brand awareness promotional-style video on our homepage at CommunicationHackers.com to share a bit about who we are, how we help businesses, and what makes us unique. The best brand story videos connect with the audience using some form of emotion and refrain from being salesy.
Promotional Event Videos: Promotional videos that pitch an event can easily be used to generate more invitees when you use the video as part of a Facebook event promotion. Here’s an example Facebook promotional video one small business used to generate leads for an acupuncture webinar. Promotional event videos can be used for any or all of the three business objectives.
Product Highlight Videos: When you have a warm audience, you can create a product highlight video that pitches your product (or service) to them. Want people to try out your product or service? Use a product highlight video to give details on the features and benefits of your product/service. The best product videos heavily focus on the benefits that the product or service will provide the customer.
Testimonial Videos: Making a testimonial video takes more work than a text-only customer testimonial, but the benefits can definitely prove worth it. Certain target audiences are more receptive than others to watching video testimonials, but one thing is certain:
Video testimonials are as close to word-of-mouth referrals as you can get.
Social Videos: I love social videos. Here’s why: Social videos don’t have to always be polished and perfect. Your audience wants to see your real company personality shine through. Videos you create quickly and candidly allow your viewers to connect with the real you, unrefined. Viewers are more apt to trust you if you share behind-the-scenes social videos, candid cellphone impromptu tips videos, etc. Social videos don’t have to include your face at all. If you’re camera shy, this will appeal to you! Social videos can be embedded into your blog (as vlogs); they can be simple screencast videos (perhaps made with Camtasia); the possibilities are endless. Social videos can be made for audience members in every stage of the sales funnel. Social videos can be super affordable, or even free, to make!
Social videos can be super affordable, or even free, to make!
You’ll hear us repeat often at Communication Hackers: perfection is the enemy of execution. I challenge you to lay aside that desire to make perfect videos and try out the super-affordable DIY video software and tools that I share in part 4 of this article series for sharing on your social platforms. That’s the beauty of social videos; you can quickly and candidly bring value to your followers with video tips and insights without costing you a cent.
Review: How to Choose Which Types of Videos & When to Use Each Type
I like flowcharts, process diagrams, and basically any type of visual to help reinforce a concept. Here’s a review of the steps to take for deciding which of these types of videos to choose based on business objective first and foremost.
We only touched on the types of videos today — is this leaving you curious of the exact software tools and mobile apps that I personally have tried and recommend for making DIY marketing videos? Then you won’t want to miss part 4 of this 5-part series. In the next article I’ll give all the juicy details of cheap (and some FREE) tools for creating short videos to help you get more online traction without breaking the bank. I promise, it’s coming very soon so stay tuned, friends!
-Talk to you soon.
P.S., The full series of DIY Video for Marketing is: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
Laura Hsu
Latest posts by Laura Hsu (see all)
- My 5 Favorite Tools That Make Videos Easy to Create - May 22, 2018
- 7 Easy-to-Create Types of Videos to Grow Your Small Business - April 3, 2018
- How to Make Social Media Videos That Get Liked and Shared - February 25, 2018
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