Starting a business in the modern world is easier than ever, with the internet providing many solutions to get started and get online quicker and cheaper than ever. What this means for your business is that while it is easier to get started, there is also a great deal more competition simply because it is so much easier to start a business.
This is where the difficulty in modern business comes in —not getting started, but differentiating yourself and achieving the level of success to keep going and keep growing.
Never wait to learn more about how your company can employ video marketing to help you achieve your business objectives, whether to grow your business by connecting with new customers or deepen your business by establishing more meaningful connections with existing customers.
Long-term success comes through a carefully constructed strategy that accounts for the realities of your market, your customers, and your business. Learn how you can use video marketing effectively to support your business and how an IT business solution like Nicolet Creative can help.
If you are still on the fence about pursuing video marketing options for your company, look around and see what your competition is doing. If you search for nearly anything, from shoes to a toilet part, a video will almost always accompany the product’s listing.
For shoes, this might mean a video of a model wearing the product, close-ups of the model walking around in the shoes to show how they look in motion, and panoramic shots of the entire product. If we are talking about a toilet part, the video may show how to install it.
Video marketing can better expose your product to a prospective consumer, which can lead to superior sales conversion. Customers want to buy products they feel comfortable with, and seeing them on video can do a significant amount towards this end.
As noted above, the market for business in the modern world is much different from the past. While it was once incredibly difficult to launch a product, once it got moving, it was simpler to find an audience given the limited competition. This is no longer the case.
Today the success of a product largely depends upon how well it differentiates itself from the competition and cultivates demand. There are hundreds of brands of shoes to choose from, dozens of brands of toothpaste even, and what makes consumers choose one brand over the other depends largely upon brand recognition and value determination.
Consumers in the modern world are increasingly interested in supporting brands that they know but also feel some sense of a connection to. Video marketing can function to build upon your brand identity and help to differentiate you from the competition so that when customers have a choice between your product or one of the many similar products on the market, they will purchase yours.
Not all brands have the level of recognition of more established companies on the consumer market, and this can make it difficult to break into consolidated markets. A new product entering a crowded marketplace can break through with the support of a unique video marketing campaign to introduce it.
Take, for example, the disposable razor market, which for many years was dominated largely by Gillette and Mach. These companies grew large enough for one of them to have the Patriots’ stadium named after them. Despite the strong success and market share of Gillette, the company known as Dollar Shave Club not only broke into the razor market online but eventually got onto the very shelves that used to carry Gillette.
Using video marketing to present a unique brand identity or a unique product offering can differentiate your brand and support success. Dollar Shave Club is a prime example of this. The company pursued a creative, comedic, and entertaining video marketing campaign both on television and online advertising to show its unique take on razors—a mailing service where customers subscribe to razors, receive them at a discount, and can cancel anytime. The success the company achieved through the mailing service led to the company squeezing Gillette out of shelf space in stores.
Through video marketing, a new brand entered a consolidated market, created a new outlet for sales, then achieved enough success to compete in the consolidated outlet of stores. You, too, can achieve this level of success for your business with the right marketing, which includes well-informed video marketing.
A part of building a brand identity is establishing not only what your brand is about, but what kinds of products your brand offers, and specifically what products your brand is most proud of. Using product-specific video marketing can be an invaluable tool in presenting your product to customers in such a way that they feel more comfortable with the product and thus are more likely to buy it.
A still photo indicates to your customers what the product looks like, but a video of a product in motion, performing as it should, can make the difference between a window shopper and a purchasing customer.
Video marketing to show off the unique characteristics of your product highlights not only the functionality of your products but also exhibits the unique elements of your brand.
Something that you might have noticed on Facebook or YouTube lately is the growing popularity of how-to videos in all different areas of products and industries. Make-up, for example, is an incredibly popular product segment, and if you search online for “make-up tutorial,” it is likely that you will come across thousands upon thousands of videos showing you how to apply various types of make-up in differing styles.
The majority of these videos will also advertise to the user what products they should use and offer links to them so that the consumer can purchase them after learning how to use them.
Educating a consumer on how to use one of your products through a how-to video is a highly effective way to put video marketing to work in support of your brand. Teaching your customers how to do something provides them with skills and knowledge that they will keep with them for their entire lives. This also establishes a connection to your brand, and if the customer has any interest in performing the task they learned and knows your products can provide for it, they are likely to make a purchase.
When entering a consolidated market, it can help directly address your competition and what makes your product different through video marketing. As you’ve seen in many commercials for paper towels, for example, the company advertising will explain how to use the product, its performance, and how its competitors’ products compare.
The video might show how the competition performs, then how the advertiser’s product performs better. Seeing live on video the performance of a product and how it performs better than the competition is worth more than a book of words explaining what makes the product better.
Use video marketing to show the consumer how your product is different, better, and most importantly, that it can perform the task the consumer buys it for.
When you are first getting into video marketing, it can take some time to build a content library. What is most important in building up a library of your content to support your brand is patience and consistency. While it might be difficult at first to get a video out once per month in support of your brand, after the first few months, you will get used to the process, and it will come easier and faster to you.
Most importantly, after a few months of regularly posting content, you will begin to build a library that consumers can reference. Establishing a video library for your brand will help increase your online presence, your search engine optimization, and your brand exposure.
Regularly posting content for your customers is also a great way to showcase new products as they are released. While your customers will eventually come to know your product catalog and ideally become repeat consumers, you cannot expect that regular customers of one product will actively research your site for new products.
By having a regular production schedule for your video marketing, consumers will know or learn from your email list that you released new videos. In those videos, you can introduce new products, show how they interact with your existing product line, and how they can improve consumer experience.
One important factor in video marketing is SEO, or search engine optimization. This is how search engines like Google or Yahoo determine which websites to place at the top of the list when consumers search for a particular product.
There might be five hundred soda companies actively selling cola online, but Coca-Cola and Pepsi will show up at the top of Google—not only because they are older and larger, but because they have effective investments into SEO-optimized content. For instance, when your content uses particular keywords in a certain level of consistency, search engines pick up on it and might rank your website higher in the organic search rankings. There are also many other factors that search engines consider for SEO purposes.
To SEO-optimize your video marketing content, make sure to carefully name the video so that key search terms your potential customers might be using are in the title. For example, if you are selling a repair part for a Ford car engine part that is easy to install, you might name your video “Our New Easy-to-Install Do-it-Yourself Ford Engine Part is Outstanding!”
In that title, you captured consumers who are not only looking for the particular engine part you advertised, but also consumers who want to do it themselves and need an easy-to-install part. As mentioned above, educating your consumer about how to use a particular product is a great way not only to expose the product, but increase the likelihood of converting customer interest into a sale.
Knowing how to leverage technology to improve the output and profitability of your business can be extremely beneficial, although it is a complex process. Hiring Nicolet Creative to assist you in choosing what works best for your business, producing it, and ensuring that it connects with your target consumer can prove incredibly valuable.
By hiring us onto your team, you can rest assured that we cover your needs so that you can focus on your core competencies and make the most of your business while we make the most of your marketing needs. Reach out to Nicolet Creative at (612) 431-8939 to discuss how we can better serve your business needs!