A guide to video-first marketing for SMBs

It’s simple, really. If you want to grow your brand, your content marketing strategy needs to incorporate video.

Video has become the predominant medium by which your target audience consumes content. Especially if your customers are busy, on the go and most commonly, accessing the internet through their mobile devices.

As of 2022, video accounts for over 70% of all mobile traffic, and video traffic will continue to grow. Acknowledging the importance of video in reaching consumers is the first step to building a video-first marketing strategy. 

Video is easily accessible to consumers and allows brands to convey a lot of information in a very short space of time. But it’s not enough to simply use video. SMBs need a clear strategy in place to help grow their brand through video content. We explore how to do just that in this guide to video-first marketing for SMBs. 

What does video-first marketing mean?

Video-first marketing acknowledges the importance of video in engaging an audience, as well as its proven performance in comparison to other media. It is a content strategy that doesn’t exclude other media such as blog posts, infographics, podcasts etc, but leads with video. 

Plan your content around your audience

As with all content, SEO is an important consideration when creating and distributing video. However, it’s also critically important to plan your content around your audience. Viewers don’t want to spend five minutes watching a video about your SMB’s achievements (as impressive as they may be).

They want content of value to them, to help them solve a problem or make their lives easier. So, it’s advisable to plan your content around your audience’s needs, frustrations and pain points, whether you’re targeting B2C or B2B customers. 

Build a video marketing infrastructure

Once you have a clear plan in place for your video content, consider the necessary infrastructure for video production and marketing. Do you have the equipment, facilities, time and talent to produce your video content in-house? Do you want to outsource your content to a video production company? Or would you rather take a hybrid approach and outsource whatever you cannot create by yourself? 

Video production and marketing are modular by nature, consisting of several discrete phases:

• Strategy

• Pre-production

• Production

• Post-production

• Promotion

Each of these requires a different set of skills and tools. It’s up to you to decide what your internal team has the capabilities to produce and what might be best left to an outsourced third party.

Add clickable links to your video for seamless payments

Video platforms like YouTube and Video enable users to embed clickable links in video content. These can be used in a number of ways. They can help viewers transition seamlessly to another video they may be interested in, allow them to travel to your website or be taken to a payment gateway where they can make a secure payment. 

Alternatively, paylinks enable new customers to make one-off or recurring payments via instant bank pay. This is fast, convenient and secure for the customer, while also much lower in charges than accepting payment via credit or debit card.

Keep an eye on your video retention statistics

As with any content marketing, keep a close eye on the right metrics. Views are important, but retention stats help you to improve your future content and make it more engaging. Video retention data shows how much of your video viewers see, as well as where they click away. This can guide you towards producing more engaging content in the future. 

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.