Video content is one of the latest marketing trends that has vastly increased in popularity and usage in 2021 for marketing and sales purposes.
Firstly, video content is great for the SEO of your website, as search engines are prioritizing videos more than ever. You can use this to your advantage by creating video content with organic keywords that will draw the right audience. You can even use it for additional SEO optimization with other relevant keywords, instead of the main ones your site is already optimized for.
Secondly, when it comes to professional services businesses, video content is a tool that will make a difference in building connections with your clients. Communicating with your visitors through tailored video content will effectively transmit your message while boosting rapport-building. Video content makes communication more personal, authentic, and inspiring, while bridging the distance gap, especially in these times when we mostly collaborate remotely.
Here are some of the best ways to grow your business with video content, especially for small businesses.
1. Create Explanatory Video Content
It is important that the visitors on your website clearly understand what your business is about. Instead of using long paragraphs of laboriously written text, you can switch to explainer videos to talk about your services and introduce your company to your potential clients more effectively. Use videos to explain the process of how your service is provided and what benefits it brings to your clients.
Explainer videos will give you significant leverage over only using text or images to describe your business, as you’ll be able to express yourself more thoroughly.
Example: You own a brokerage firm that specializes in managing risk for smaller engineering companies. With a video, you can let your audience know who you are, explain exactly how you perform your services, and showcase your previous successes and proof of credibility.
In this explainer video example, viewers can immerse themselves more in the company, pick up any emotional cues from the speaker, and establish deeper trust with your firm after they’ve watched a live person talking about it and describing your services. Besides, you can still add images and text to your video to make it more appealing and informative.
What’s more, a video will add a face to your service and instill more trust in potential clients. You cannot do that to such an extent with only text. The reason is because we tend to form impressions by analyzing facial gestures, and videos convey them in the best way possible. Therefore, building trust with video is more effective than only having webpages with text and images.
By using videos, you can more effectively showcase the benefits of your services to potential clients by helping them clearly understand what’s in it for them.
2. Use Live Video Content to Promote Your Services
Another way to capitalize on the trend of video content is by using live videos to showcase how delivering your service looks like in real-time. That requires some preparation and willingness from your clients to be a part of the livestream.
In addition, using live videos is a strategy that could both promote your brand, and promote your clients’ business at the same time. By spotlighting your featured client, you can make them feel special and appreciated, thereby endearing them further to your company. As well, they are likely to be grateful for the exposure you’re lending to their business and may repay you in kind, such as by referring you to their friends.
Thus, this strategy can result in a win-win situation for everyone involved.
The most significant benefit of these live videos is that they’ll exude spontaneity while showcasing a real business situation. Many viewers love to watch unaltered content happening in real-time (just think about the popularity of reality shows). You can use this to give them a live preview of your services and invite them to take action (e.g. sign up for our service) at the end.
Example: You provide IT maintenance & repair services for SMEs, which mostly requires going into the field and solving problems on-site. You decide you will use the power of live video or live webinar to show your audience how the whole process of providing your service looks like. Your live video can cover these stages:
- How your team prepares to go into the field
- What happens while they travel to the client
- Arrival to client’s workspace and corresponding communication with them
- Performing the actual work on malfunctioning equipment or software
- Response from your client with testimonials
- Questions and answers from live viewers
Live video is an ideal opportunity to interact with your viewers by answering their questions and comments, introducing them to the members of the dispatched team, and further explaining the whole process. For example, you can use the commute time to interview each member of the team, who will explain what their job entails and how they perform it.
What’s more, if you choose to feature a client within your live stream, make sure to introduce them and give them some time to talk about their own business too.
The possibilities are abundant and all you need to do is create a short outline similar to the example above before the livestream starts, to ensure that you stay organized and on-track. The outline will help you keep track of important topics that you want to cover or share during your stream.
3. Enhance Your Website with Video Content
This might seem like a no-brainer, but let’s explain why it is so important and how you can make use of it.
Apart from search engine algorithms that prioritize video content, your audience may also prefer to consume content through video format rather than browsing through pages of text.
If your webpage mostly consists of text, with a few images here and there, it will be more mentally-demanding for your audience to take in. Add in the short attention span of today’s average human to the equation, and you can end up with visitors who leave your website within seconds because it wasn’t engaging enough.
The solution is to revamp some of your web pages by incorporating new video content which will make your site more engaging and relevant.
Example: Recreate your “Meet the Team” page by enriching it with video content. Make the pictures of your team members clickable, where each click opens a short introduction video of each member. You can leave details like contact information, team members’ names, etc. in text format, and offer additional information about their bio or credentials via a link.
4. Use Videos for CTAs
A CTA (Call to Action) is a clickable button or link that tells the audience what action to take next. CTAs should be visually appealing, large, and properly positioned to stand out. They should also come with compelling words that will instruct the audience to take action.
CTAs for the professional services industry can come in the shape of a:
- “Subscribe to our newsletter” button
- “Contact us” form
- “Call us now” button
- “Hire us” button
- “Get an offer” form
- “Find your dream home” search bar
…and many others, depending on your area of expertise.
You can use video content with CTAs to maximize the chance of viewers taking the step to learn more about your services or connect with you. The idea is to make it simple and use interesting videos to inspire visitors to take action.
Example: You own a real estate business. You can put a short video that showcases some of the best and most attractive homes from your website, along with satisfied client testimonials.
Top it off with an encouraging, personal message like “Let’s find your dream home together” at the end of the video and a CTA button below it.
By incorporating these tips, you will leverage your experiences and distinguish yourself from the competition.
5. Incorporate Client Video Testimonials
Client testimonials can fully harness the power of video content and build strong social proof of the quality of your services. Video testimonials will give a face to your clients’ experiences, and will often answer questions and concerns that site visitors (potential clients) want to hear.
Furthermore, visitors will experience your clients’ testimonials like personal recommendations, and using video for testimonials can contribute to the reliability and authenticity of their stories.
Example: You provide digital marketing services and you have dozens of satisfied clients. You know your services are proven to bring value, but you need to share that fact with potential clients.
Therefore, you could make a dedicated client testimonial page where you will share various experiences of your clients using video format. Include a CTA somewhere on the page, since viewers may feel inspired to take action after watching the testimonials. Add at least one tailored video that showcases various snippets of your clients finding success (ex. after using your digital marketing services to improve their landing page, they experienced a spike in visitors).
Investing in video testimonials will noticeably transform the way others see you and your services, and you’ll undeniably get more clients ready to work with you. Simple, but effective video testimonials will help establish deeper trust with your clients, as well as relevance and perceived expertise of your business.
Final Words
Video content will improve and grow your business in multiple ways. It is best to use more than one technique from the above list to utilize the full power of video content. That way, you’ll be more likely to get multiple positive effects — such as better ranking of your site and more visitor traffic, while increasing the conversion rate of visitors into clients.
Choose which strategies to combine depending on the type of service you provide and the goal you want to accomplish. In general, adding more video content to your website will help it rank better, and make the visitor’s experience more interesting and immersive. Reinforcing that with CTAs and client testimonials will be sure to pack quite a punch.
Finally, dedicate time at the beginning of your planning process to gauge what combination of these techniques will be the best fit for the services you provide. You can also get creative and devise some of your own methods to grow your business with video content! If you do come up with your own ideas, please share them in the comments below as we’d love to hear them.
About the author: Oli Bridge is the CMO at Bonjoro, an app for sending personalized videos to convert and support your customers. He joined Bonjoro in 2016, and has helped build Bonjoro into one of Australia’s fastest-growing startups, with over 50,000 customers using the tool today. To stay updated on what Oli is doing, follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
