If you’re looking to beef up your content marketing mix, more video can add a great deal of value. Videos are powerful marketing tools – on average, they get 1200% more shares than images and text combined. Other research shows that even just adding a clickable screenshot of a video to an email can boost click-through rates by as much as 300%.
Unfortunately, there’s a misconception that video content is best left to companies with the hefty marketing budgets needed to hire professional video producers. But there’s plenty of valuable video content that you can create in-house without huge costs. Here are five ideas to get you started.
- Product Demonstrations: Product demo videos are a fantastic way to show your product in action while also making potential customers feel like they are getting an exclusive inside look. Demos tend to highlight key features and answer common questions to get shoppers to see how they can get value and move them closer to buying.
- Vlog: If you’ve been creating high-quality content for your blog, why not put it in a video format as well to give your audience a wider variety of ways to consume your insights. These are some of the easiest types of videos to produce and they tend to get high engagement. If you’re not sure where to begin, take some cues from some of the top YouTube celebrities who have been able to capture and hold the attention of wide audiences.
- Company Culture: A major goal of content marketing is to showcase the vibrant, human side of your brand. One of the best ways to do this is to give viewers a peek at your company’s employees and culture. You don’t need to have a quirky, Google-esque culture to make this work. Company culture videos can include interviews with employees, company parties, birthday celebrations and more. The key is to show that your company isn’t a faceless entity but a mosaic of real people and personalities.
- How-To Tutorials: People tend to be visual learners and how-to tutorials are some of the most sought-after videos on the Internet. In fact, the number of YouTube searches for tutorial videos soared by 70% in 2015 alone. Providing helpful instructions and tutorials builds long-lasting customer loyalty and it also reaffirms your credibility and product knowledge.
- Webinar: A webinar can be a highly effective way to engage with your audience, especially for marketers in the B2B realm. In fact, a report from the Content Marketing Institute reveals that 66% of B2B marketers cite webinars as one of their most powerful content marketing strategies. Since webinars require users to register, they can also act as valuable lead-generation tools. As an added bonus, the content from a webinar can also be repurposed into blog posts.
Video can be a powerful addition to your content marketing toolbox; it creates great rapport between you and your customer, and helps you drive engagement and leads. Videos made in-house also tend to have an authentic vibe, which can be just as effective, and sometimes even more effective, than big-budget professional pieces. So, give in-house video production a try and watch your business stand out from the competition.