Startups are brilliant business models to improve your entrepreneurship skills. They are the fundamentals of the company growth and the shortest way to generate money from your own thoughts. The more innovative your offer is, the more profit you will gain. But product development mustn’t be the only thing to bother you. Nowadays, any idea can be promoted through a startup. The question is: can you promote the startup itself?
As an entrepreneur, you have to pay much attention to good marketing strategy and powerful content creation. There are loads of means to promote your startup – you’re free to choose whether you need a simple blog post or a bunch of images. However, never skip considering videos. Firstly, it is the most famous promotional channel nowadays, and its popularity won’t stop growing. According to Cisco video content will occupy over 80 percent of Internet traffic by 2021. Makes easy to stay up-to-date, huh?
Don’t forget that your audience is more inclined to visual perception. A one minute video can be worth approximately 1.8 million words according to Dr. James McQuivey. People can be lazy about reading a plain text while they watch videos with great pleasure. It is the most preferable and memorable content; meanwhile over 50% of marketers state it has the highest ROI.
Well, these are some general facts just to prove that videos will definitely lead to success. Now let us see how videos work specifically for startups.
A more persuasive pitch
There are various tools to finance your business. Crowdfunding and looking for investors are the most common ones. No matter how brilliant your idea is, you will need a good pitch, and if it’s just about a pile of words, it won’t get much attention. Business people love short videos because they are brief and to the point, they directly show the problem and the solution.
Besides, the online crowdfunding platforms such as Indiegogo or Kickstarter demand a video pitching. Coolest Cooler has reached over $13.000.000 funding due to its video. Volterman or Använda bag are yet other successful examples of video pitching.
No need for much money
Startups are usually low-budget; therefore it’s not possible to hire a professional crew who will take care of your content. But you don’t even need it! Shooting a no-budget video isn’t a great problem if you have talented teammates and a bit of creativity. You can just use your smartphone camera and some online video editing programs like Renderforest to get amazing content. Or maybe your friend has got motion graphics or animation skills? That’s exactly what you need: just a simple cartoon designed at home that shows all over the world how incredible the project is going to be. Sounds a bit pathetic, but that’s what videos do!
Brand ositioning
Any startup needs to develop a proper image not only for potential investors but also for
potential clients. You should use videos in different marketing campaigns as it considerably raises the efficiency. To be more clear, here are some simple statistics:
- Back in 2015, over 82% of Twitter users already were watching videos every day.
- Each day Snapchat users watch over 10 billion videos.
- 78% people watch videos online every week, and 55% people watch them every day.
- 500 million people watch videos on Facebook every day.
- Posting a video on Facebook generates 135% more reach than a photo or a text. Finally, according to Insivia research, audience retains 95% of information given in a video and only 10% of the same information written in a text.
Raising awareness
Startups are mostly unknown, so the brand positioning isn’t the only problem you will face as an entrepreneur. It’s equally important to make people aware of your projects and perspectives.
Well, who needs anything they don’t know about? Exactly. And here come videos again to get you to the hall of fame. There are so many tools to promote your startup via videos, but the best and the most popular is YouTube. You can simply open a channel and upload videos about different topics. This is not only a source of new subscribers, followers and potential clients, but also a space where you can advertise your product once more.
Having an “army of fans” will later make the production process easier and generate a high level of sales. Don’t forget that YouTube is the largest online video platform and one of the biggest networks. Precisely, it is the second most visited site after Google. People watch 1 billion hours of YouTube material each day, and this indicator grows by 50% year-over-year. People prefer this video platform to TV, and it is basically the second largest search engine in the world.
Don’t forget about other types of videos that can also get you an audience. For example, explainer videos are a trendy way to shortly introduce your product and your video production company. Testimonial videos can be used later to show all the positive vibes your product creates and share consumer experience. I would even encourage you to try live video shooting to interact with your potential clients and followers. The best part of all this is, apparently, the fact that everything mentioned above can be created with absolutely no budget. Adorable, isn’t it?
Now, take a look around you and try to find somebody who’d prefer to read a boring article instead of watching an amusing animation or explainer videos. There’s hardly someone like that, isn’t it? I mean, who would reject to warm up for a few minutes? Actually people like videos, everybody likes videos, even Google does so! That’s why videos in content will contribute to your SEO efforts as well.
As you can probably see, videos are the future. Moreover, videos are the present and they are the most powerful content type nowadays. So if you’re doing a startup, remember you have to be always up-to-date. And when you finally realize that a trendy content is all you need, videos will always be there for you.
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Bio: I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest, a Content Marketing Specialist and an Expert in SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Link Building who enjoys sharing the experiences gained along working as a marketer and helping other entrepreneurs succeed.
His works have been published on different blogs and mediums like Crazy Egg, Forbes, Upwork, ShareThis, etc.