Launching a startup is a responsible and hard work — you create an idea from scratch, and then put in effort and dedication to make it work. However, there’s more: How your startup is introduced to the public might be a crucial factor for whether the business will fail or succeed.
With the development of digital marketing, the video has become a popular tool for promoting startups. With more than 2 billion smartphone and 3.4 billion Internet users worldwide, automatic video playback on social networks and 4 billion videos viewed every day, video promotion is turning into a distinct marketing strategy with the highest ROI among other digital marketing strategies.
There is no need to spend millions of dollars on investing in a celebrity video: as long as the quality is not sacrificed, a low budget video can achieve great results. In this article, we will present some tips on how to promote your startup using videos without making huge investments.
Understand Your Goal
What is the aim of your video marketing strategy? Answers may be various. Whether you are seeking an explainer video for a new product, trying to acquire new website users or showing customer support, it is important that the content corresponds to what you are trying to achieve.
Know Your Target Audience
Depending on who your target audience is, your video content, format and topic may vary: In fact, audience changes everything. Do some researches to find out what topics will interest your niche and use others’ experience to learn how to attain your goals.
Explore Your Competitors
Watching your competitors’ videos will not only give you more experience for making your own ones but will also help you understand how to differentiate your video promotion efforts from them. Or, you can also integrate video marketing strategies from unrelated industries and make them work.
Create It
A couple of years ago, the creation of a video would be a big headache, but nowadays the technological innovation allows everyone to create great videos without a professional camera, only using a phone camera and some editing tools. Websites like Renderforest offer a wide variety of templates that will help save both time and money without sacrificing the video quality.
Keep It Short
Today, short videos have the majority of views on the web. It’s better to be less than 3 minutes, and the shorter, the better. If there is a lot to say, the message can be split into several shorter videos, because it is more likely that visitors will watch several short videos than a long one.
Use Micro Videos
You can also use micro videos on social media websites like Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine, as they have a large number of users and provide a lot of views (1 billion of loops are played daily on Vine). However, the maximum duration of the videos on these websites are super short — from 6 seconds to 60 seconds, which will significantly limit your scope. For this reason, you can make your original video promotion and then cut it into a shorter version designed mainly for these websites.
Include a Call-to-Action
A CTA is an action you want a viewer to do after watching your video. Include a CTA at the end of the video, because if a viewer has reached this part of it, he is most likely to be interested in what you present. So now it’s the viewer’s turn to do something, and a call-to-action is a prompt for it.
Depending on the type of your company, your audience, and your goals, the CTA may vary. Nevertheless, CTA mainly includes ways to contact you or calls to engage with more of your content: visit your website, watch more videos, etc.
Share Your Video
Once your video is ready, you need to choose where to share it. There are plenty of distribution sites on the internet, so you are the one to decide which are more suitable for your business. Websites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are proven platforms to increase visibility for all types of business, depending on who your target audience is.
On Twitter, make sure to provide the corresponding hashtags so that your video is easy to find. On LinkedIn, search for different groups that suit the topic of your video to increase audience. If your video is entertaining, chances are you will reach your audience organically for free. However, you can invest just a little on advertising to make it more visible.
Keep Track of Your Video
What now? Once your video is published, you need to keep track of how it’s doing. Use Event Tracking on Google Analytics to see whether the obtained results were worth the effort. This tool will show you several indicators, e.g. the number of unique visitors on you website, the number of video views, the channels that have provided the most views, etc. This information will help you understand what works the best and what does not so that necessary changes can be made.
If everything is done correctly, a video promotion can attract more customers without breaking a bank!
