You’ve decided you want to shake up your marketing strategy a little with something attention-grabbing. A promotional video is an ideal choice.
Video is booming. It’s actually the fastest-growing digital marketing tool, boasting a predicted CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 6.5% by 2025.
So it’s fair to say that video marketing could be an exciting step forward for your organization!
There’s only one problem – you’re on a budget, and traditional video marketing is notoriously expensive to produce.
Maybe your business is still in the startup phase and there just isn’t that much money available.
Perhaps the budget does exist, but you need to prove that video marketing is the way forward for your brand before funds can be allocated.
Whatever the situation, never fear; there are some easy ways to create a video marketing plan on a tight budget. Let’s explore them below.
Consider your customer
To stand out in a sea of competitors, you must make sure you’re reaching and engaging with your customers. What’s your current demographic? Pick a theme and adapt your content, tone, and message to resonate with this.
Are there specific social media platforms on which your existing audience engages with you more, or which your target audience is known to enjoy?
Promoting automated customer service for business use will likely go down much better on LinkedIn than it would on TikTok. Understanding your audience is critical to creating an effective marketing plan and driving engagement.
If you truly want to emphasize the customer experience, think about what your customers most need from your business: perhaps they would benefit from a series of educational videos to talk them through your product in more detail. Or, maybe the social proof of reviews or testimonials will build trust with new clients.
Consider your brand image
A promotional video gives you a super short amount of time to establish your brand image. You may have USPs, your own set of beliefs, and a message you’re keen to get across. You need to communicate all of this through your video content…and quickly!
If you aim to present your brand as personal and relatable, you might produce a video with a mother’s day theme that tugs on the heartstrings and sets your product up as the perfect gift.
If human rights are a cause you champion as a business, set this as a backdrop to your content. For example, embrace special dates, like Pride Month, to demonstrate your priorities as a brand.
Image: Unsplash
Don’t waste your budget on pro filming equipment
You might be picturing film sets and professional lighting equipment, but relax. You can create sleek and professional videos to align with current marketing trends without any equipment at all.
You don’t need to invest in professional cameras, sound, and lighting to make effective marketing content, and this certainly isn’t budget-friendly.
Sign up for the services on an online video maker and make use of existing video clips and music. These clips will include professional footage that’s been perfected by designers already, so you won’t have to worry about finding equipment, doing your own filming, or enlisting editors to polish up your content. This will all be taken care of for you.
One thing you shouldn’t scrimp on, though, is your cloud management. This hosts the videos you create and should allow them to stream to thousands of users at once – which is particularly helpful in targeted marketing campaigns.
Work out where you want to post this video
Where are you going to display this video? As mentioned, you should tailor the platforms you target to your intended demographic. But maybe social media is a whole new world for you. Maybe you’re only now delving into the world of Instagram reels to grow your younger following? Or striking out on Facebook?.
Videos certainly have a place in the social media marketing funnel – though it’s up to you to decide at which stage(s) you want to use them. Most of your customers will use some form of social media and if you can capture their attention and stop them mid-scroll with engaging content, your product might just stick with them
Of course, there are other ways to implement video marketing. You can include in your website development proposal to embed the videos onto your site and direct people there with social posts and email prompts.
You can even send videos directly via email to your subscribers. Email clients like Apple Mail and Outlook allow you to play videos in email.
And did you know that, on average, you increase your open rate by 6% just by having the word ‘video’ in the subject line?
In-email videos also boost click-through rates significantly, improve open rates, and trigger fewer unsubscribes.
This is where private cloud hosting is so crucial. If your aim is for all your subscribers to watch the video as they open it, your server has to be able to hold its own!
Image: Unsplash
Use keywords
If you’re planning to have your video found by organic search – rather than sending it directly in the form of emails or social posts – it’s essential to utilize keywords, just as you would if you were writing a blog.
These can (and should!) be in the video title, but a great way to use them and make your brand a little more accessible is to use subtitles in your videos.
Subtitles can serve as tags for your keywords, so Google and YouTube will suggest them in relevant searches.
And what’s more, you’ll be reaching an audience who is hearing impaired, as well as those who just don’t want to watch a video with sound.
As we switch increasingly to mobile, our internet browsing is happening more often in public places – where it’s rarely appropriate to play sounds aloud. People are much more likely to finish a video if it has captions simply because they’re more likely to be watching with sound off.
Try using a template
If you’re struggling in your search for video marketing ideas for your product or service, you should try using a template. Whether you’re creating Microsoft teams fixes explanations or employing other such technical languages, keeping your video design simple might help reach customers in the initial research stages.
And if you feel your brand voice lends itself to lightheartedness, plenty of fun and playful templates exist to show off your cutting-edge wit.
Either way, you don’t have to jump in at the deep end and start your video entirely from scratch. Try playing around with some templates and go from there.
They’re particularly user (and budget) friendly, and you’ll be crafting scintillating promo videos in no time! Videos take minutes to make, and you can customize the templates to portray your company’s message and unique personality with ease.
Pricing plans will start at a low, basic rate, so you can stay on budget while you experiment. This is the perfect way to save time and money.
Image: Promo.com
Think outside the box
Why not consider where you might be able to free up some budget elsewhere?
You could look into robotic process automation, thereby saving your team time on routine admin tasks to dedicate to other more judgment-based roles. Subsequently, the business as a whole will be more efficient and productive!
Or maybe you could divert some funds away from paid social or PPC campaigns – even if only for a practice run with video.
You know your business best, and flexibility is always key in sticking to tight budgets. Wherever there’s a little wiggle room, explore whether that money could go towards some Facebook or Instagram ads to boost engagement.
Image: Unsplash
Test, test, test
Customer churn: we’re all trying to avoid it. With any luck, your very first video will be a hit! But the more content and the more platforms you cover, the more likely you are to spread your brand’s message.
As with any aspect of marketing, testing your campaigns and using the data to inform future strategies is absolutely vital. Build a strong social media presence by producing videos for a variety of platforms and make use of data fed back from these to inform your approach in the future.
Using AI sales to collect data and track analytics is a wonderful approach to persuade the powers that video marketing is the way to go.
Get creating!
Have we allayed some of your worries about how expensive you were expecting video marketing to be?
It can be an effective and showstopping tool, but you don’t have to use your entire marketing budget on one video! Hopefully, you’ll be able to use these tips to create your very own masterpieces – and reap the benefits of a strong video marketing plan, all while sticking to your tight budget.
