My Top 7 Video Marketing Tips For Small Business Owners
I’ve made over 400 videos, as of this writing.
This may seem like a long blog post when you start going through it, but when you remember that it took me over 400 videos to amass this knowledge, you have to acknowledge that the time it takes you to read this is a bargain.
You can take what you learn here and start producing great videos from the beginning and avoid making all those bad videos that I made in the beginning, just like everyone else who has to start with no guidance and figure it out as they go.
These 7 tips will help you avoid having to figure it out as you go.
I started learning how to make videos
to better market my photography business. This was at the start of 2017.
It was clear, at that time, that video marketing was going to become something that all small business owners were going to have to do.
No different than when the Internet became a tool for commerce and you first had to have email, and then later you had to get a website.
Those things were, at one time, not necessary to do business. Now, you wouldn’t be taken seriously without them. Imagine telling potential clients you have no email address because you don’t use email.
This change happened very quickly, as things tend to when technology is involved.
The same thing is happening now with video
It didn’t used to be a requirement.
Now, it is.
The small business landscape is going to become increasingly competitive when it comes to video marketing.
Everybody always needs more clients, more bookings, more appointments, more consultations.
Video marketing is an incredibly powerful tool for achieving those marketing objectives, and those who don’t learn how to use it are not going to be able to compete with those who do.
If you’re publishing blocks of text and your competitors are publishing videos along with their text-based materials, you’re not going to remain competitive with them for very long.
This Top 7 Tips Video Marketing Tips
is for small business owners who want to get started with video marketing, but don’t know where to begin.
These are the things that I think will be most relevant to small business owners who don’t really know anything about making videos, but do want to learn how to develop a video marketing strategy for their business.
Video Marketing Tip Number 1
Everybody thinks they can’t do as well as somebody else who they think is “a natural talent” at video.
That’s just not the case.
Most people can become good on camera fairly quickly. But you have to make that first video to get yourself started and that’s where most people get stuck.
The first video is disproportionately hard to make because that’s the one where you have to overcome all the obstacles you’ve created in your mind.
Those imaginary obstacles are just that: contrivances of your mind. If you let them, they just get bigger and bigger until making a video is impossible…in your mind.
But if you give it a try, despite your misgivings, you’ll immediately find out that all those things that were stopping you were imaginary concerns.
Your second video is way easier than your first
and it just gets progressively easier.
If you do fine talking to people face-to-face, you’ll do fine talking to a camera if you do it a few times and give your brain a chance to adjust to it.
It’s not going to feel natural at first, but if you present something to your brain more than once, your brain will adapt. It’s called “learning” and your brain is pretty good at that when you give it exposure to new things.
Once you’ve stood in front of a camera for a couple of hours, the fight or flight response is long gone and your normal personality will come through on camera. This is why you look at other people’s videos and think they have natural talent that you don’t have.
They very likely have no natural talent. Very few people do. Far more likely, what you’re seeing is the results of someone just like you who did it scared the first time and put in the work to get better.
Putting in the work is something we’re all capable of.
Video Marketing Tip Number 2
There is no such thing as a perfect video.
Too many people set out to make a perfect video and it paralyzes them.
They want their first video to be perfect, which, in their mind, often equates to the need to build a Hollywood production studio in their home before they could possibly begin to think about creating a video.
And, as you might surmise, that Hollywood production studio is never going to get built, so that perfect video is never going to get made.
This doesn’t even make sense as an objective. What have you ever done in life that you were perfect at on your very first attempt?
What have you ever done so well on your very first attempt that there was no room for improvement in the future?
So how are you going to start out making a perfect video?
You just have to get started
and then you’ll get better, but you will never make a perfect video.
There’s a saying in videomaking: “projects are never completed, they’re only abandoned.”
What that means is there’s always something additional you could do or do better, but if you want that video to ever see the light of day so it can do its job and you can start on your next video, you have to publish it and move on.
Your goal is excellence, not perfection.
Excellence is consistently achievable. Perfection is an unattainable illusion.
Video Marketing Tip Number 3
Most people talk way too long. Don’t do that.
Without video coaching, people tend to ramble.
It’s great that technology has made it affordable for all of us to broadcast to the world and video is no longer accessible only to professional broadcasters.
But I encourage you to hire a coach so you can learn the fundamentals of professional broadcasting so you reflect well on you and your business. This is an example of putting in the work that will help you be consistently excellent.
Don’t be one of those people
who makes those stream-of-consciousness videos where they just hit record and start talking until they run out of steam. Quite often, those folks are making a video that they themselves wouldn’t watch if it were someone else talking.
Don’t be one of those people.
Respect people’s time.
If you’re making videos with the goal of attracting new clients, the long-winded ramble is likely not going to be a successful strategy for achieving that goal.
Stick to one topic per video and address it succinctly.
Plan your video content
and do some practice runs.
If you just hit record and start talking, you’re not making your best delivery.
Video Marketing Tip Number 4
Do not abuse the jump cut.
A jump cut is what you see when someone has cut out portions of the video, so the video just jumps ahead and it’s obvious that something was edited out.
This is a symptom of the symptom of talking too long, which is a symptom of the root problem of not planning your video.
Root cause analysis is something I learned during my previous career in Information Technology. Identify and fix the root problem and all the cascading symptoms go away.
Rambling on and on
and then doing a bunch of jump cuts to edit the video down to only what you should have recorded to begin with delivers a terrible viewing experience and can make a video unwatchable because it’s so herky jerky.
That looks bad on your business and there’s no point putting the time and effort into making a video that people can’t watch because it was done so poorly.
You can avoid this problem by following Tip Number 3.
Video Marketing Tip Number 5
Too many business owners make the mistake of trying to learn how to edit video.
Video editing is a time drain that you would not believe.
It takes A LOT of time to edit video. That’s true for professional video editors with years of experience.
Video editing is just a time-consuming process
Depending on the kind of video, it can take the better part of a day or even multiple days to edit a 5-minute video, for example.
You won’t likely be making those kinds of videos, but editing video still takes a disproportionate amount of time, relative to the length of the actual video. It’s just a huge time vacuum.
That’s why I don’t recommend it for most business owners.
Video editing is not a CEO task,
it’s something that you outsource to a specialist who will do it faster and better so you can put your video out into the world more quickly and it can make you money.
If you’re a business owner making marketing videos, then that is your objective: for your videos to make you money.
Don’t fall into the cheap trap
and “save” money by spending so much time editing that you save a dollar and lose ten dollars in revenue that your videos would be generating if you weren’t the bottleneck.
This is a task that I really encourage you to outsource to a teenager you have available to you or to a video editing professional like Darrell Stevens. Darrell’s a great guy and he’ll take care of you. Tell him I sent you.
As a business owner, your time is way too valuable to be spending it editing video. The opportunity cost is too great. Just outsource this task.
Video Marketing Tip Number 6
Dedicate one day per week to creating your videos.
I know that may sound like a lot, but bear with me because there are some real benefits to doing this.
Batching similar or related tasks has been proven to be a way to do those tasks better, faster, and more efficiently. You can look up the research yourself, but the short version is: you get on a roll and get a lot of stuff knocked out when you pick a lane and stay in it all day.
As I wrote in previous tips, planning your videos is a critical part of a successful video marketing strategy.
Maybe this shouldn’t be a video
Sometimes, after you’ve planned some of your videos by writing out a script, you realize that it works better as a blog post.
Instead of going to the effort of recording and editing a video, all you have to do is create a cover graphic for the blog post.
This is another benefit of properly preparing for each video, rather than just turning on the camera and letting loose a stream of consciousness.
So Video Day actually becomes Marketing Day
where you’ll create a variety of marketing materials, including original quote graphics, infographics, short posts, and full blog posts.
Marketing Day is the day where you create the content that you publish all week in order to attract clients.
Consistently attracting clients is how you stay in business. Marketing is a critical business function that does merit one day per week of your time.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in periods where you have lots of days to produce content because you don’t have any bookings.
The person who hires you today
is the person who started watching you 6-12 months ago.
If you wait until you have no bookings to do marketing, you’re setting yourself up to always have periods of no bookings.
Marketing is an every day activity.
A weekly Video Day helps you accomplish that.
How do you do it?
You block out the same day each week and that’s what that day is for.
You protect that day and never schedule any calls or appointments on that day because that day is the day that ensures you always have calls or appointments on your calendar.
Nothing else is more important to the success of your business than your marketing strategy.
Another huge reason
to have a weekly video day is to maintain your proficiency and build momentum.
As I wrote earlier, that first video is the hardest one to make.
If you keep making videos, it quickly becomes just another thing you know how to do.
But if you take off a month or two or six or twelve, you’re setting yourself up to have to make that first video all over again.
It will take you less time and effort to make videos regularly and you’ll get better results than if you only do it once in a while.
Video Marketing Tip Number 7
Way more people are watching than you realize and this is a very good thing.
These people are called “lurkers” as opposed to “stalkers.”
Stalkers are up to no good.
Lurkers, on the other hand, are going to drop out of the sky one day ready to hire you.
They will have never engaged on a single post you’ve made…never hit the Like button, never left a comment.
But they will have seen everything you’ve done and when the time comes for them to use your services, they’ll contact you.
So don’t worry about engagement
Just do what you know you are supposed to be doing and the work will pay off, over time.
That’s how marketing works.
Where Do You Go From Here?
Start with making your elevator pitch video.
It’s a very simple video for you to make and it’s one that can attract new clients for you right away.
More importantly, your elevator pitch video will get you from having never made a video to having successfully made a video.
Those two places are worlds apart.
The hardest video you'll ever make is that first one. Once you get that one under your belt, you'll be off to the races.
