Video marketing for startups: why and how to do it?

In recent years there has been an increasing use of video marketing for startups or within the strategy of brands.

Video marketing for startups and companies is a great tool to connect with existing and potential customers, and video is one of the formats that generates the best ROI In fact, this is what a Wyzowl report, ‘The State of Video Marketing 2020‘, states among many other benefits. According to this report:

92% of video marketing professionals say it is an important part of their marketing strategy. (Up from 91% in 2019, 85% in 2018, 82% in 2017, 88% in 2016 and 78% in 2015.)
People watch an average of 16 hours of online video per week, a 52% increase over the past 2 years.
86% of people would like to see more videos of brands.
87% of video marketing users recognize that video has increased traffic to the website.
81% acknowledge that the video has increased the average user stay time on each page.
95% of companies using explanatory videos say they help users better understand their business.
83% of companies see video as a useful tool to generate leads, and 80% of respondents saw an increase in sales.
43% said customer service calls decreased.
95% of users say they would maintain or further increase the budget allocated for video marketing.
89% conclude by saying roi is good.

The data previously reported show that investing in video marketing for startups and companies can generate great added value, contributing to the achievement of business objectives. In fact, the latest trends indicate that video marketing is agrowing strategy.

The big change compared to a few years ago is that videos have become part of our lives in any form, just think of how different social networks have implemented the function of “stories” and the success that this function has had, especially on Instagram, allowing people to narrate their daily lives and influencers to advertise content more naturally than with a post. Another phenomenon is that of Youtubers, whose number is growing more and more. So, it is evident how the need to tell one another has become a priority and this is why more and more brands have adapted to this new way of experiencing social media, also starting to tell themselves, entering more and more into people’s daily lives and interacting with them.

In this article, you will learn how to do video marketing for startups and what benefits it can bring to your digital strategy.

What is video marketing

Video marketing for startups and companies is one of the most effective content marketing tools with a potential that is constantly growing. Using this medium in your marketing strategy means creating content to promote a brand, product, or service, or inform consumers and nurture the relationship with them.

Video marketing for startups and companies is one of the many marketing strategies and aims to communicate efficiently and directly, but also to entertain and educate. Therefore, all those techniques that use video as a multimedia form to convey a message to their audience are part of the concept of video marketing. From the funnel’s point of view, video marketing is at the top when used for the acquisition of new customers, but as we know, it also allows you to fortify and nurture a relationship of trust with customers.

What is a video marketing strategy

Let’s first clarify what a video marketing strategy is and how to decide which one to adopt.

As in all areas of digital marketing, there is not a single strategy of video marketing for startups and companies but there are various optionsto consider. It all depends, for example, on what you need to sponsor, such as an event, or your business with its products and services, so what you want to communicate to your target audience. Do you want to post content on the blog, or on social channels, or maybe on both?

First, you need to make a video marketing plan, where you allocate the budget for creation and promotion on the platforms you think are interesting for your possible consumers. You will need to consider relying on professional film-makers or get organized to manage this process by yourself.

In addition, among the elements to be evaluated, you must decide whether to focus on emotional, informative, or more institutional videos. But a lot comes from your reference industry and the type of market you turnto. In fact, if your company is in the B2B, you will create more formal audiovisual content and publish it on platforms where you know that there are other professionals, such as LinkedIn, or if you work in the B2C you will have to focus more on the emotions of users and the testimonies of customers already acquired, or even on influencer marketing, or viral videos.

Why should a startup focus on this strategy?

Video marketing for startups and companies is an amazingly effective way to share a message and tell a brand, as you can generate a strong emotional impact in viewers, much more powerful than the one you can generate with a simple static text or image. Using the power of video marketing, companies can do corporate storytelling and increase their brand awareness, customer consideration and, consequently, sales and turnover.

To date, video marketing is becoming increasingly important, and it is talked about more and more. In fact, it is difficult to think of a platform that does not use it and it is precisely with the advent of social media and the desire to tell one another that the world of video marketing has become more and more accessible, so a mobile phone and a good light are enough to make high quality videos. It has therefore become a tool within everyone’s reach, that is, video marketing for startups is now possible, it can be implemented by all those businesses that have at their disposal even an extremely limited budget.

In addition, video marketing for startups is an increasingly fundamental tool because it represents one of the few effective digital marketing strategies able to meet the needs of every small business, such as promoting a brand and expanding its network and customers.

Videos are the best tool to demonstrate what values a business is based on, demonstrating reliability and credibility. If you are a startup, one of the main objectives is to promote your business and establish communication with your target audience. To achieve this, there are certainly several strategies that you can adopt depending on the product or service you offer, but video marketing is for many an effective and secure tool to rely on. In fact, there are now many startups that have decided to use this tool within their promotion strategy, also thanks to the costs that are not necessarily high. You no longer need to have a large budget to integrate this tool into your marketing strategy, because today there are several tools that are simple to use and low cost to create your own video content, video marketing for startups has become something accessible today.

Let’s see below some benefits of video marketing for startups:

Stand out from competitors: most businesses use video marketing and the reason behind it is that it is an effective strategy and can be even more so for a startup, which in this way can build its brand identity and integrate it into a coordinated marketing and communication strategy, in which it can highlight what distinguishes it from its competitors.
Improved google ranking: Videos strengthen SEO ranking, in fact Google loves videos. Well-structured video marketing content brings more visibility to your webpage and generates more traffic. If SEO keywords are essential, videos are therefore also of considerable importance. Inserting video content within the website and optimizing it using the appropriate keywords allows you to improve your ranking. This will make it easier to reach the website through organic searches as well.
Amplification of brand awareness: we know how difficult it is for a startup to make itself known on the market as it cannot rely on an already known brand, so videos are an excellent tool to use to make themselves known and remembered by their audience. Videos, in fact, now have the recognized power to create a strong impact, also creating a connection with the target that feels like it knows the brand. We spend a third of our time online just watching videos that can go viral, which means that they can reach millions of people. Therefore, the benefit of videos for startups is obvious
Video content builds trust: Trust is the basis for growing a business and increasing its earnings. That’s why cultivating trust should be one of the main goals of a company. Part of your digital marketing strategy, therefore, should be focused on building trust relationships and lasting relationships with potential customers. Video content is one of the best ways to connect with users and generate an emotional Therefore, hundreds of YouTube channels manage to attract thousands of followers and record millions of views. Likewise, brands can bond with their users using short content that produces a story.
Increased conversions and sales: these are a consequence of the previous point, that is, a good knowledge of the brand leads the audience to trust and, therefore, to buy. People are much more enticed to buy if they have the chance to watch a video that describes the product and its operation. In addition, even a video presentation within the landing page can help to give greater transparency to your brand. It is now widely shared that video work better than any other form of content for conversions and sales, so incorporating a video that talks about your product or service into a landing page improves the conversion rate. Most users who saw explanatory videos of a given product or service then made a purchase. It is also important to remember that sight is the dominant sense because the brain tends to work precisely using images. So, if a photograph already has a huge impact on the user, the video can enhance this effect by multiplying it. As for conversions and sales, a particularly important metric to consider is the Click-through Rate (CTR), that is the number of users who click on the call to action and is the second most important data after the viewing time because it indicates that you have been able to engage users.
Increased engagement: Videos are among the items that are most easily shared on social media, and there is no better way to expand your network and customer base and build a community around your product/service. Speaking of engagement, the metrics to be tracked are the Likes and positive reactions and Viewing times.
More effective e-mail marketing campaigns: It is now difficult to entice people to read emails, so a good way is to stand out, and a video is preferable to a long text, which takes away more time than a video.
Return on Investment (ROI): If until recently it was thought that expensive equipment and special skills were needed to make video marketing, this is no longer the case today because everything has become much more accessible, thus also favoring economic return. In addition, it must also be said that although professional videos can elevate a business to other levels, amateur videos will make the audience feel closer to the brand, increasing their confidence.

How to integrate videos into your marketing strategy and create an effective video

From an operational point of view video marketing is implemented through the video-making process, and here are many tools that can help us, but it is important, to do video marketing for startups, to understand the strategic process behind it.

The steps to follow, to build a good strategy of video marketing for startups, are essentially linked to the ones in your wider marketing strategy. Here there are some tips for you:

Know your audience.
Analyze competitors.
Evaluate different options depending on your budget.
Make good planning.
Focus on one message.
Make short videos.
Use call to actions.
Brand the video.
Use SEO.

Videos are the best tools to capture your audience, but there are also various alternatives to consider. But first let’s focus on the fact that it is important to insert keywords in the title and description of the video, and also insert subtitles to optimize SEO. Then you need to choose the best video sharing channel. The first solution that comes to mind thinking of a video channel is YouTube, there are, however, several other channels where you can share videos that you cannot underestimate, think for example of Facebook and Instagram. In video marketing strategy it is also important to think and evaluate to diversify content distribution. To proceed you need, first, to identify the target users and do surveys to understand what they want and by testing you can understand what works best.

People love videos, a format that is suitable for keeping your attention alive. A content of great value alone can be useless if it is not conveyed correctly. The first step to convey your message is to be able to transmit it completely to your audience, but to do this you have to adapt to its needs. But how can you do it? By testing.

To create an effective video marketing strategy for your audience, always keep these 3 goals in mind:

educate
entertain
inspire.

If you realize that a video does not achieve any of these goals, then your video probably will not be effective.

Video strategy and planning during the year

To be able to implement a good video marketing strategy for startups or even for companies, you need to consider video planning throughout the year.

According to YouTube, see the article Think With Google, the 3 types of videos that creators must produce during the year are:

Help
Hub
Hero

Video help

Once you have identified your target audience, you need to understand what your target users are looking for. There are several tools that can help you at this stage: Google trends, Answer the Public and Ubersuggest. Once you have found several popular topics in your niche, you can make educational videos that fully respond to that specific request. Help content, sometimes referred to as Help content, is content that is almost always created within the company, such as financial news, business reports, press releases, and new product announcements. This category also includes content that is often produced for marketing and communication activities, such as product demos and tutorials, quality, and level “how to” of quality, research, seminars, technical analysis, and food for thought and work. This type of content cannot be missing from the editorial plan.

Video hub

Video hubs are contents that you develop regularly and give your audience a reason to subscribe to the channel and go back to watching videos. The ideal is to design formats that allow you to give an up-to-date perspective on the interests of your target. Hub Content is a content that has a peculiar purpose and that is to create conversation with the audience already reached by the company communication. The hub content creates an important and deep engagement with your audience and defines the tone of voice of the company. Hubs are quality contents, designed to be created regularly and generate value. They need to engage people, entertain them, they are published continuously. The purpose of this content is to add value and retain the target more and more, an example is social media membership and follow themed blogs. For example, one opportunity to create Hub Contents are contests and competitions that require users to create contents. You could do Vlog, where you can entertain or inspire people by showing your life and teaching them something. This will strengthen your brand identity and create discussion around the topics that interest you.

Video hero

What content do you want to reach a larger and wider audience? A brand can only have a few hero moments in a year, such as product launch events. Hero videos must be out of the ordinary such as a special video for a particular event or an important announcement. To intercept the best moments in your industry to create such content you can use Google Trends, but you will also need to monitor social media, communities and talk to your audience. Of course, these types of videos also need to be in line with the message you want to convey. The goal must be to reach as many people as possible to increase brand awareness. Hero content is a content that requires a considerable productive contribution in terms of resources and time. It is aimed at broadening the base of the corporate communication target and serves to acquire new audiences. In terms of metrics, it potentially must generate a lot of views and shares. Another aspect not to be underestimated is that it must give originality: the users that this content must hit are “occasional” frequenters of company communication channels or even “first time visitors”. Hero content requires a higher investment than the other types of content: it must be “dosed” correctly and used at the right times. Storytelling contents usually use videos, and they work on the emotional components of the target to get strong reactions.

The type of video

We can safely say that video content is an integral part of the digital content marketing strategy, and the future gives video an important space. Multimedia will soon dominate every channel. No matter what type of video you are creating, if the video content is not fun, informative, or interesting, it will not show up. The first step in any content marketing process is to determine the purpose that the content will have. For example, if your goal is to increase engagement, authority, or education with a short video, you will most likely want to create one to distribute on social media. If you want to inform your audience, you will do so with a longer video, thinking about YouTube. However, each type of video content requires different time and budget to be created, so it must be well embedded in your marketing plan to achieve the goals with your means at your disposal. If you are a startup and you are wondering which is the best type of video you can create to develop a good strategy of video marketing for startups, you can have a look at the list of the various types of videos below, and have a look on it in details, to choose the right one for you:

Videos on teams, mission, vision and values, business presentations and the “Behind the Scenes”
Vlog
Video – interviews
Question & Answer, webinar and lives in streaming
Video reviews of product /service – Testimonials
Tutorials, video blogs and guides
Video advertising

Videos on teams, mission, vision and values, business presentations and the “behind the scenes”

The value of the brand is also the sum of the personal brand of its people. A company’s trust also goes through the trust that employees will be able to build with customers. Videos can become a powerful sales tool using the company team. Your potential audience and consumers want to know your brand and the people behind it. One of the best ways to show your audience your values, mission and vision and team members is with video content. These videos give your customers the opportunity to learn about what sets your business apart from others and why your brand deserves their loyalty. These videos can include backstage moments in recording, employee interviews, birthday parties etc. The goal of these videos is to show that your business is more than just a product or service and revenue. You can show that the people behind your company are working for a common goal. Also adding impactful videos to your corporate presentations will get better results than classic business presentations with static slides! Videos that tell everything that happened pre-production humanizes your business. Most audiences like to see how the content they love is made. These are usually less refined than traditional videos and incorporate a lot of raw footage. As a pro, they work well for both B2B and B2C companies and to your audience you will give a less revenue-focused image and you will be friendlier and more accessible.

Vlog

Instead of the classic business blog, you could create a format with a series of business videos, with which you create and engage the community. One of the most popular types of video content on the web is the Vlog. This type of short video often shows a person telling his daily life. For companies, showing their day-by-day work is a great format. Vlogs are cheap to produce, they are driven by the personality of the protagonist of the video and probably have the best value for money in terms of engagement value. This video is a great means to create or generate even a certain hype around a product and/or service.

Videos – interviews

The contents of the video interviews compared to the one in written form are in the involvement that only the personality of the interviewees can give. Words are a powerful tool for conveying a message, however video content is the best way to give emotions. Interview content is relatively easy and cheap to produce, and if you invite other experts of your field in an interview, they could share this content on their social media channels and present your content to a brand-new audience.

Question & Answer, webinar e lives streaming

Videos that have questions and answers format are usually used on social media as well. You can ask your followers to send you questions, select the ones you want to answer, and then record the video, or you can also try live streaming a Q&A session. With pre-recorded videos you can edit the video in post-production if necessary, and therefore are more suitable for the less experienced. These videos also allow your audience to speak directly to your business and demonstrate the transparency of your business. Webinars and live streams are used to establish a live dialogue with the public and are used by companies that sell services, or by professionals who organize courses or work with consultancy.

Video reviews of products/services – Testimonials

Now very few consumers buy products without consulting another source like their friends or reviews on the Internet, so videos are a great way to highlight a product or demonstrate a specific feature and may seem more authentic, encouraging purchase by customers. Product presentation videos are therefore useful to show the unique features of the good you produce.

Tutorial, video blog and guides

The goal of helping with video is one of the largest in the content landscape. It is important to identify the right topics that are in line with the goal of your company. The video downloads all its multimedia potential when used to explain how to do something. Do you have to launch your product on the market? Explain how to use it, give your customers more information to feel safer and take more consideration for your brand. Tutorial or demo videos are videos through which you explain how to use what you sell and are especially useful in the pre-purchase phase.

Video advertising

What is a video marketing campaign? And how can I promote content? It is about advertising through videos to spread your messages online, so that as many people as possible see them. So, in your strategy you also need to consider investing in advertising to do video advertising.

If you posted audiovisual content on static pages or articles, you could run Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns to bring you qualified traffic.
In case you have disclosed the videos through social media, you should campaign on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, considering all the formats supported by the different social platforms.

Create video campaigns as well as text and image ads to engage more viewers, emotionally, and engage them. Whether you are sharing a new product or service or hosting a new event, a video ad helps you convey the message to your audience and grow hype. It is important to note that the ad is eye-catching though, so keep your video content short and simple.

State of the art video marketing tools

It is now necessary to make an in-depth analysis of the cutting-edge tools, available today, for the creation and analysis of videos, to be able to devise an effective and efficient video marketing strategy: we are talking about all those tools born with the application of artificial intelligence to this field.

The integration of Artificial intelligence into video and images platforms is certainly one of the most interesting elements among content marketing trends. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world of video with a big impact on digital video marketing. Of all the forms of content, video is the most profitable and that generates the most ROI. Adopting AI in your video marketing strategy can bring you great results, creating content that is more relevant to your users who will feel certainly more involved.

Artificial intelligence is not only able to determine the video that generates the most response but based on the data collected by customers it also determines the duration or type of video to be adopted. This allows you to create increasingly personalized video content that can generate much stronger and emotional engagement with users, because it is perceived as something that speaks directly to them.

AI-powered video marketing software helps marketers:

Determine which types of content generate the strongest positive or negative reactions
Reduce campaign implementation time
Conduct investigations into large-scale reactions of possible content
Gain insights into potential customer preferences
Create more video versions in less time, allowing for relatively fast testing periods
Reduce test costs
Improve sales by increasing the conversion rate on their ads

The video is also becoming a powerful SEO-friendly content. Google uses artificial intelligence to determine and understand the contents of audio tracks in videos, and if we then add subtitles, we will have video content that performs beautifully in SERPs.

Note among other things how easy it is to “translate” a video into a single audio, a podcast, or even transcribe it, thus making this type of content agile and versatile, which allows you to use the same project in various forms and in different moments.

Conclusions

In summary, a video marketing strategy consists of good planning, analysis of competitors, analysis of the buyer person, creation of quality videos, use of SEO and call to action.

Once you have developed the strategy, you must decide which platform to focus on and how to advertise the videos and, only at this point, you can start tracking the metrics that are most in line with your business goals.

To conclude, video marketing is the marketing strategy that currently looks most to the future and that each brand should consider because the benefits are manifold, and the growth numbers of this market cannot be ignored. Above all, video marketing for startups is a very recommended strategy because authenticity always rewards, so no matter how simple or not creative the video is as long as it arouses emotions in the viewers, and it is possible to perceive the values on which the brand is based. In fact, making video marketing is not so different from storytelling: you must make sure that the user is told a story that can talk both about their products or services and how the brand was born and how the latter stands out.

If you are interested in Video Marketing, please read more on:

Video Creation: top 10 tools for startups and Video making for startups: why internalize the process

For more information read also the related white paper that you find on this page Digital Marketing for Startups