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Practical Ways Video Marketing Can Help Your Small Business

As a small business, your marketing and advertising budget is usually pretty tight. It may be hard to justify spending thousands of dollars or more on a video marketing campaign.

But video advertising doesn’t cost nearly as much as it used to, and you don’t have to shell out major league cash for a national TV spot when you’re just trying to get some foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar business.

In actuality, if you’re looking to launch a marketing campaign, video is one of the most powerful (and affordable) tools you can use because of its potential for re purposing, for optimization, and for showing off your location and atmosphere – two must-dos when it comes to video marketing.

But before we get into all that, let’s review how video marketing works.

What is local video marketing?
As a small business, you might already be familiar with local video marketing. If you’re not, here’s a quick recap:

Local marketing targets the community around your business, with messaging targeting the demographics of that community. While bigger companies with larger ad budgets can spend hundreds of thousands to showcase their ads on network TV and across the internet to demographics from countries all over the world, local business owners can’t – and actually shouldn’t. Unless you’re an eCommerce company, you should be hyper-focusing your small business marketing to customers geographically near you.

If you’re a store that requires customers to actually walk on-site to do business, this is doubly true. You need to plan your marketing strategy around hyper-targeting areas within a certain mile radius from you and incentivize locals to spread the word. You typically want to focus your target demographic to a radius of those customers who live within 10 miles or less.

In the same way your marketing covers a physical map, you need your business to cover a mental and emotional map inside the minds of those within your community if you want to turn them into repeat customers. This can look quite different from just programmatic ad-buys on social media. You might be sending mailers offering coupons for first-time purchases, sponsoring local neighborhood events, or even buying ads in… a newspaper?!

There’s a digital side to local marketing as well. You’ll want to optimize your Google SEO ads with your businesses’ information, including your business address, company contact information, and photos of your location online. This is where video can help.

How does video play into local video marketing?
Video is especially helpful for local marketing efforts because of its visual nature. In order for any customer to branch out and try your small business for the first time, they have certain psychological biases that need to be overcome. Visualizing a place can help anyone feel more comfortable getting in a car and going there, because they can imagine what the experience is like.

 

In a local marketing video, you can highlight the specifics that matter to locals, like the location, the size of your building, the opinions of neighbors in the community, the ease of getting there, and the overall atmosphere of your establishment.

Video is especially useful for franchise owners looking to advertise their specific location. Where the larger Kilimanjaro fast-food ad campaigns are targeting every Kilimanjaro fast-food customer, your local video will target those in your area to get them to come to your location. Show them why your Kilimanjaro fast-food is the best.

How can I start using video marketing in my local campaigns?
Using video in any marketing campaign is all about what your goal is and where you post it. For example, if you have an amazing new product video, but it’s sitting on your editor’s desktop, it doesn’t help you get new business.

If you’re trying to attract new customers to your business and your video is sitting pretty on your website homepage, it still isn’t going to help you. How is anyone who doesn’t already know you able to see it? Sure, visitors who find you will engage with the video once they’re on your page, but you skipped a vital first step entirely.

So let’s break down how local video marketing can help you depending on your goal.

Attracting New Customers with Local Video Marketing
If you’re new to the area, you’re going to want to establish yourself, and video is a great way to do just that. Start by taking a video of your new store, highlighting the renovated interior and familiar exteriors for the locals, as well as what your new business will bring to the community.

This could be presented in a couple of different ways:

You could shoot a day in the life video showing off the process of running the store from open to close or featuring behind the scenes footage leading up to your grand opening.
You can create a lifestyle video to show off the specific vibe your small business is going for.
You can even create a FAQ or product video to answer questions about your new store and what your selling.

Have a camera crew at the ready for any grand opening event so you can turn it into an event video to get the rest of the neighborhood excited about this new, cool spot in town.
Now, upload that video to YouTube, as well as to your personal website, and link it to your Google business profile. Make sure you include important local keywords and contact information so the video can be found by people in your area. This includes your zip code, specific neighborhood names, and other nearby locations. Optimize your organic search results by using video transcriptions and local info.

Next, try targeting your video with paid search ads specific to those zip codes and nearby locations on Google, so anyone searching for “new restaurants in [area]” will find you. If your ad budget allows it, expand this to social media as well, but keep the search radius super local. This may not be the most cost-efficient, as you’ll be getting fewer clicks per view, but you’ll know the clicks you are getting are actual potential customers.

Engaging and Nurturing Repeat Business with Local Video Marketing
Attracting new customers is only the first step. In order for local video marketing to be a success, you need to create repeat business. You’re probably already in a position where you’re looking to expand your number of regulars and grow your company’s revenue.

In this instance, you’re going to want to get creative with your video marketing. First step is creating multiple videos. Try to find a service or video partner that can create a series of high-quality videos for you at an affordable rate. This will usually involve a video team coming out and creating a lot of content in just a few short, efficient shoot days.

In order to engage with visitors and nurture locals into repeat business, you need to provide value to them with your video content.

Try creating social content videos for the locals who follow your business on social media. They could be about new dishes or drinks if you’re a bar or restaurant, coupon codes or time-sensitive offerings on select products, holiday-specific sales for fashion retailers, or other assorted perks for locals.
Make a customer spotlight video to show off positive results for a personal training or salon business, or highlight the camaraderie and good times between your patrons if you own a bar or restaurant.
Partner with friendly customers to create product review videos, where you poll first-timers or loyal patrons about your various products or services. You can even offer a contest for your followers to create their own product review videos and submit them for a prize, like a free meal or discounted product.
Try creating a tips and tricks or tutorial video if your business or service is new to the area. For example, if your small business is a new VR arcade, use these types of videos to teach newcomers how the games work, while showing off your gear.
Create welcome and thank you videos for the customers who do support you to show you care. By being an active and grateful member of the community, you’re more likely to earn their support.
Create local guide content for newcomers or tourists looking to learn about your area. By helping to create videos about your neighborhood, you include yourself in the dialogue, and can be featured (or feature yourself) as part of any must-sees or must-dos!
If you create any of these videos, you’ll want to share them on your socials, on your homepage, on YouTube, in search and re-targeting ads, and in any email marketing you might already be doing.

Additionally, you can even try for the coveted local TV spot, or find partners like a local movie theater where you can run your video ads before the movie trailers (as most small theaters do these days).

Most importantly, find where people in your community go on the regular. Are there any local blogs or online newspapers you can pitch your videos to? What about local influencers – can you get them to share or star in a video featuring your business? Can you host an event that will bring a local TV station to you?

Once the locals come to you and sign up for your email lists and follow you on social media, you become their go-to source. But until then, you need to get the word out. Video is the best way to do that.

How can I create videos for local marketing on a budget?
Work with us! We love creating videos for businesses of all sizes, and have done so ever since we began as a small business ourselves. There’s no reason why your business can’t create a series of high-quality, affordable video content, and our goal is to give you just that. We recommend creating multiple videos, and we deliver.

Schedule a call today to hop on the phone with one of our creative producers to learn how we can transform your video marketing goals into results.

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