7 Video Ideas For Your Small Business

My fantastic colleague and BizIQ Digital Media Specialist, Alex Taylor, recently gave you and small business owners everywhere great advice on how to use video to market your small business online in his two-part how-to video series. If you haven’t watched his fantastic videos or read the blog posts, I suggest you take a few minutes to check them out.

Now that you know how to start making marketing videos for your business, what kind of videos should make first?

Below are seven types of online marketing videos and digital ads your small business can make with little to no marketing budget and a smartphone camera.

1. Funny Video Ads

Research on advertising shows that a person’s emotional response to your ad is what influences whether or not they’ll buy what your business provides and not the ad’s content. 

People will remember the company whose online videos brought a tear to their eyes or made them laugh.

1. BizIQ How Your Yellow Pages Budget is REALLY Being Used

At BizIQ we finally got the courage to start using humor in our video marketing campaigns when we recently launched a series of video advertisements for a social and YouTube ad campaign that pokes a little fun at advertising in the yellow pages phonebook.

2. Chuck Testa – Official Ojai Valley Taxidermy TV Commercial

A small business that went viral with their low budget and hilarious local ads is Ojai, CA taxidermist, Chuck Testa.

Funny online commercials are digital videos people will share with friends and family on Facebook and other social media sites, making them a great addition to any video marketing strategy. Furthermore, both the BizIQ YP video and the Chuck Testa Ojai Taxidermy video make audiences laugh which means they will remember the brands who made them.

2. Explainer Videos

Explainer or how-to videos and other educational content are a useful piece of any small business video marketing strategy.

Educational content is a great way to reach customers who are in the awareness stage of their journey.

These people are online, searching for a solution to a problem or who want to learn how to create marketing videos or better online content. They might not have a lot of time, but they will watch videos as they search for answers.

1. BizIQ How To Use Videos For Online Marketing

Remember my colleague, Alex and his explainer video about online videos. Although he uses some humor, his how-to video is an excellent example of informative how-to content. If you have the budget for just a few pieces of professional level equipment, then it’s not hard to make something similar.

2. Moz – Rand Fishkin – Whiteboard Friday – How to Create 10x Content

However, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to create great informative video content for your business. One of my favorite ongoing how-to video series is Whiteboard Friday over at Moz. Started by Moz founder, Rand Fishkin, this series is one of my favorites.

The online videos use a simple set and camera set up and are mostly one person, often Rand, standing in front of a typical office whiteboard, talking about an essential aspect of SEO and content marketing. For example, the now famous Whiteboard Friday episode where Rand Fishkin first coined the term, 10x content.

3. Problem Solver Videos

A close cousin to the explainer and how-to video formats is the problem solver video. This type of digital marketing video takes a frequently asked question from either your customers or from an online forum where people like your customers hang out. Here at BizIQ, we’ve made a few.

1. BizIQ – 7 Reasons Your Google My Business Listing Has Been Suspended

The video below is one of our most successful business videos. It answers the common question – Why was my google business listing suspended. It features, another colleague of mine, Kandice Ginger. This particular BizIQ marketing campaign video has received thousands of views and still brings us new customers. Again, it’s a straightforward talking head video, filmed in one of our offices.

2. BizIQ – How to thrive on Facebook After the 2018 Newsfeed Update

Alternatively, if you like animation, and you or one of your employees loves cartoons, you might consider making an animated explainer video like this one below. Even if you don’t have a ton of animation experience, there are cloud-based low-cost solutions like Biteable where you can create your own high quality animated problem solver explainer videos.

3. New Product or Service Video

If you have a new product or service you want to announce, then a video is the ideal way to do that. Remember, most people remember a video they’ve watched, but not most blog posts they’ve scanned. In fact, the human brain processes video 60,000 times faster than the words we read. Plus, landing page video can increase conversion rates by as much as 80%.

Sometimes a new product might not be your own, but something your customers have heard about. Because they see you as experts, they ask you for information and expect you to have the answers. Hence, the Google Project Beacon unboxing video we created after small business owners started asking us about them.

BizIQ Google Beacon Unboxing – We Got A Google Beacon! Unboxing & How It Works

4. Company Story Video

There’s a business proverb that states people buy from people they know and like.

However, if all they find about you through your digital advertising efforts are how you’re the best and you provide x, y, and z plus superior customer service, then to them you sound either generic or worse, untrustworthy.

That’s where company story and CEO profile videos come in. As humans, we love a good story. Your customers want to know you and feel they can trust you. The example below is from Dollar Shave Club. You’re probably familiar with their famous original ad, but they’ve gone on to produce other entertaining ads and marketing videos, including the funny company story video below.

Dollar Shave Club Razor Tales

5. Customer Testimonial Video

Word-of-mouth advertising is significant, and much of today’s word of mouth occurs online.

Social proof in the form of customer reviews and social media shares on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as customer testimonials help build trust with potential customers.

A customer testimonial video is a powerful tool that helps you engage with more customers and is messaging they can relate to. Some of my favorite customer testimonial videos are in Google’s #MoreThanABusiness Stories series. The videos focus mostly on the Google user’s small business and its story and although how using a particular Google product or feature helped their small business is in the video, it’s not the main focus.

Google Small Business #MoreThanABusiness Story – Rev. Morgan-Thomas: Preserving an Artform

6. Sales Videos

What do we mean by sales videos? Aren’t all marketing videos and video ads “sales videos?” Yes, and no.

Sales videos are short video messages your sales staff can personalize to a recipient and add to their email signature in an email.

Stay tuned for content that details more about these videos which is coming soon. Studies show that emails with personalized video increase conversions by at least 500%!

Examples of personalized email and sales videos your company can create include:

1. Personalized meeting invites

This type of sales video is short, simple, and made with a webcam where a salesperson speaks directly to a potential client.

2. Personalized thank you videos

Thank you videos are short and sweet videos to acknowledge a potential customer for their time, and that include a recap of a sales call or product demo meeting.

3. Personalized Demos

Use screen capture videos to provide a website walkthrough or product demo to a sales prospect.

7. Company Culture Video

The seventh type of video your small business should consider making is the company culture video.

Use these videos in your efforts to recruit new employees, retain existing employees, and even as doubles for company story videos.

We love the video below from CloudLock. Form the screenshot of a deleted YouTube video to the redubbed classic KungFu movie, the video immediately establishes the company’s sense of humor and shows future employees, and customers vital information about the company’s brand and lets prospects judge quickly if the company is a good fit for them.

CloudLock Employee Recruiting Video – Do you have “The Chops”?

Using video as part of your small business marketing strategy is a powerful way to reach new customers

Whether you decide to invest in expensive video equipment, hire a local production company, or create videos with just your smartphone camera and a few apps, the above examples of some of the most common types of video marketing you’ll find online should inspire you with some of your own ideas.

What kinds of videos does your business plan to make? Let us know in the comments below. And don’t forget to subscribe to this blog for more small business marketing tips delivered right to your inbox.