In an age when many small businesses still aren’t taking advantage of online local marketing, can you imagine just how effective local video marketing would be for you? You’ve gone the extra step and invested in local marketing that resulted in a significant increase in foot traffic to your place of business. Now you are ready to step out into the virtual unknown once again to invest in local video marketing but before you go the extra mile with that one, you want to know just how to make local video marketing work for your small business. That’s a valid question, so consider the following.
Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves
There is no doubt that video marketing was the number one reason in 2020 and 2021 why consumers on the fence decided to buy a product or service. At least 92% of small businesses that invested in video marketing have reported that they can trace sales back to videos posted on Google and social media, and the most successful was video content on Facebook. As far as B2B marketing forecasts for 2022, local video marketing is expected to be the biggest portion of a marketing budget for this year. That’s how effective it has been within the past 24 to 48 months. (Statista, Wyzowl)
Why You Can Expect Video Marketing to Yield Real Results
When discussing this, there are two clichés that come to mind but in terms of video marketing, they are more than overused metaphors. The first is, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and the second, “Seeing is believing.” Consider for just a moment the millions of “how to” searches conducted on YouTube daily. Many of these are the result of frustrated consumers who can’t see the tiny instructions that come with products and others are the result of consumers merely wanting to know more about a product or service before taking out the check book or handy piece of plastic. To put it bluntly, video sells. There are no two ways about it!
The 4 “Ws” of Video Marketing
At this point we’ve touched on the “Why” and the “Where,” although not exhaustively. However, there are two other Ws in the mix, and they would be “What” and “When.” When you are targeting a local market with video content, these can also be extremely important factors. What do you want to show your local market? What products or services are in great need within your marketing area and when might they be needed? These are the two Ws that will tell you what you should market and when to hit the market fast and hard.
Let’s take, for example, a window painting service that does amazing artistry in shop windows. It is often in high demand around the holidays when every business wants to express holiday greetings or put shoppers in the mood to buy a few gifts at their retail shop. Unfortunately, no one bothers to ask who painted those lovely windows and that is specifically why you would want to hit your local market strong in the months leading up to Christmas. Now that you’ve addressed the “When”, it’s time for a quick peek at what. What should your video contain? Perhaps a collage of previous years’ shop windows or one of your artists at work on a window that gained special mention last year in a local online newspaper or periodical.
Should We Touch on the “H” (How) Borrowed from Journalism?
In a case of “how” in terms of local video marketing, it is rather like a crossover from all those Ws. Even so, “how” has the most to do with “where.” You are looking for organic traffic because that’s “how” Google ranks you and you want to be first on the local search pages, “where.” That is how you will get found on local searches so bear in mind that every time you post a video as a part of your marketing strategy, it will be discovered by the search engine’s crawlers. Those hits add up quickly and knowing that more people now search for local businesses online than in any other way, you’d want to rank very highly indeed in your local organic rankings.
Curtain Call for the Five Main Actors
Everything we’ve said thus far is in terms of a local video marketing strategy. Not much has been said about what happens after the show. If you consider those 4 Ws and the lone H as actors in a production meant to elicit a response in the audience, you will want to bring them forward for a curtain call when the strategy (show) has been written and performed.
In the scenes leading up to the finale, everything was an attempt to bring the audience out of the theatre thinking of what they just experienced. This is touching on something we haven’t mentioned quite yet and that is all about building a brand. When you leave your audience running what they’ve just seen over and over in their mind’s eye, that’s a solid introduction to branding. That’s who you are as a local small business and how you will be remembered going forward.
Now it is no longer why those actors should do something but rather, why did your local video marketing elicit the desired response? How are consumers going to react and when can you expect an increase in local traffic or sales? How and when can you expect the desired ROI?
Your Key Takeaway Depends on Theirs
If you are looking for a key takeaway in all this, the thing to leave you with is that in marketing of any kind, your key takeaway is going to be dependent on that of your audience. What did they get from your local video marketing? Did it identify any local wants or needs, and did you develop a visual strategy to show them you have the solutions they are after? If you have given them something of substance to take away with them, then that’s your key takeaway as well. Show your local audience what you have and that is something they can expect to be taking away in the very near future – all the way to the bank.