Videos have become the pinnacle of marketing for businesses across all industries. Static images and compelling writing alone won’t get you the results you are looking for. Video marketing has now become an essential part of any effective marketing campaign.
As a senior digital marketing strategist, I have spent the last three years at KWSM working with clients who may be unsure about the benefits of small business video marketing strategies but are wanting to make a splash with their campaigns. I had the pleasure of working with a US logistics company with over 20 years of industry experience shipping out of 12 cities that recently took the leap into video marketing.
In this blog, I will break down the small business video marketing tactics we applied to create one of the most effective campaigns in the history of their business.
Basics of Small Business Video Marketing
For many business owners, video production can feel like a daunting task they’d do anything to avoid. But a great marketing video doesn’t have to be Warner Bros. worthy. When approaching your video marketing strategy, think authentic and start simple. As we’ve seen on social media, Reels, Shorts, and Stories are taking over the video scene. Videos running 10 – 15 seconds on places like Instagram and TikTok are watched daily.
“Tell your story wherever your customers are,” says KWSM’s Video Producer, Casey Dean. “These days, that’s on social media. Reels have your customers’ attention with their addictive algorithms. Literally reeling them into your lead generation funnel.”
Case Study: How Small Business Video Marketing Helped a KWSM Client
At the peak of the pandemic lockdowns, consumers were shopping online for all of their needs. As a result, eCommerce businesses were booming! As these entrepreneurs tried to fulfill their quotas, their shipments and inventory were taken for a ride by many competitor logistics companies and supply chain delays.
Some business owners were suddenly paying triple the price for their products. Others struggled with lost shipments and damaged deliveries. Others outgrew their home-based businesses. All of these struggles gave birth to the “Oh Ship Moments” campaign.
With a customer base in the US, our logistics client aimed to gather the worst shipping and fulfillment stories from eCommerce sellers coast to coast and award the best ones a cash prize. This campaign ran for three months. We filmed and distributed a series of comical videos that reenacted small business owners being overrun by incoming and outgoing orders from their in-home operations. These videos were shared via paid and organic methods on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, Reddit, and YouTube. These videos were also included on the campaign landing page and in weekly blog posts. Let’s break down each channel further and review the performance.
Social Media Videos
At the time of this campaign, Reels and Shorts had not quite made their appearance on the scene. Instead, we focused on sharing our campaign video content on users’ feeds and in Stories. Here’s the breakdown we saw on each social channel.
Facebook was an average channel for this client before this campaign. As part of the campaign strategy, we ran paid and organic posts daily to boost engagement, reach more users, and ultimately drive people back to the website to submit their stories. In addition to our comical failure videos, we also created a video series called “Mean Tweets.” Within the series, the organization’s VP of Sales and Marketing stood in front of the camera and read a few sentences from a shipping and fulfillment nightmare story. Then, he responded with how that would make him feel as a business owner and how his logistics company was the solution.
Although we shared weekly blog posts and static images in daily posts, the nightmare videos were the best-performing pieces of both paid and organic content on this channel during the entire campaign. The paid ads we ran for this campaign reached 540K users, received 4K clicks, 2.6K landing page views, and nearly 50 form fills. The paid and organic efforts combined completely transformed the performance of this channel and directly supported the success of the overall campaign. You can see those before and after metrics below.
On Twitter, we used the same tactics to target eCommerce sellers. Daily we shared campaign posts that included quotes from submitted stories, our videos, and blogs that summarized the submissions. Before the campaign, this client was not active in Twitter advertising and received a low number of engagements on their organic feed posts. As a result of the paid video content we shared for this campaign, we were able to achieve 533K impressions and 33K link clicks back to the campaign landing page. This success in ads worked hand-in-hand with the organic content we shared daily on the main channel feed. As a result, this client’s Twitter account experienced additional growth in content link clicks and overall impressions on their channel’s Tweets.
On Instagram, we could not only showcase our video content in the main feed but we were able to run story ads for the first time in this client’s marketing. For both paid and organic content, all of our best-performing pieces of content were our video series.
On the ads side of the account, we saw huge success. This channel was very popular with small business owners facing the challenges of fulfilling a blizzard of orders successfully during the height of the pandemic.
As a result of our ads, we were able to reach 370K users, achieve 3.8K link clicks, 3.1K landing page views, and 20 campaign form fills. In addition to this success from ads, the channel gained new followers, reached thousands of more accounts, and sent these users back to the client’s website.
Before the campaign, LinkedIn was one of this client’s more successful social channels. Our goal was to drive their audience to take action.
Similar to what we saw on the other social channels, our posted videos outperformed all of our other pieces of content. Each video received more than double the number of impressions and website clicks. The ads alone achieved 46.2K impressions and 659 link clicks.
All of these efforts worked together to boost the success of this channel and reach new audience members in their customer demographic.
On this channel, there were dozens of groups of small business owners talking about the struggles of launching and maintaining their companies. Through ad targeting, we were able to reach this audience with our video series in popular eCommerce or business groups and lead them to the “Oh Ship Moments” landing page.
Our video ads on this channel had a lower CPC compared to all other social channels we were running ads on. As a result of our video efforts on this channel, we were able to achieve 685K impressions and 1.8K total link clicks.
Analyzing the Results
As mentioned earlier, this was one of our client’s most successful campaigns. This campaign boosted their social media presence and put them on the map as the top shipping and fulfillment company in the US. Comparing metrics one month prior to the campaign launch to metrics at the end of the three-month campaign, we saw these top improvements from our video marketing strategy.
- Facebook
- 144,783% increase in engagement
- 467% increase in website traffic
- 281% increase in organic reach
- Twitter
- 1,616,050% increase in website visits
- 115,900% increase in content link clicks
- 565% increase in impressions
- Instagram
- 2,778% increase in website visits
- 59% increase in engagements
- LinkedIn
- 1,078% increase in followers
- 362% increase in website clicks
Our video marketing tactics were the pinnacle of the success of this campaign and directly supported all other organic and paid content.
“This campaign really put a humorous spin on the pain points that many small business owners experience when they hit it big and have a massive amount of packages to ship at once,” says KWSM’s Vice President of Strategy and Client Relations Jeff Soto. “Video gave us a way to share their stories, and those frustrations immediately resonated with the audience, many of whom were experiencing the same challenges.”
As a result of our marketing strategy, this campaign drove over 100,000 users to our client’s website, aided in acquiring dozens of high-value new leads, reached 2.1M online users through paid and organic content on social media and Google, received nearly 50K campaign landing page views, and brought in over 400 submissions to the contest.
At the close of this campaign, our client reported they had outperformed their previous year’s lead flow since working with our team at KWSM. This huge improvement in leads and brand exposure also helped them increase their YOY budget.
Adapting a Video Marketing Strategy for Your Business
Videos can make a huge impact in the campaigns you are running. Small business video marketing strategies don’t only apply to companies that sell products. The logistics company I’ve discussed here sold services. If your company is service-based, you can explore these same tactics.
50% of businesses do not utilize video for marketing because of their lack of time and knowledge to create content.
KWSM has an in-house video team that will help give your brand a human face and generate the results you’ve been looking for.
Complete the form below to contact us and learn more about adding video to your digital marketing strategy.
