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How Short-Form Video Marketing Can Grow Your Small Business Significantly

It can be tough to grow your business using conventional marketing channels. PPC ads, long YouTube ads, and pop-up advertisements are often ignored by the public or too costly to make if you run a budget-strapped small business. But short-form video marketing might offer a solution. Let’s break down how short-form videos can help boost brand awareness and grow your small business.

It can be tough to grow your business using conventional marketing channels. PPC ads, long YouTube ads, and pop-up advertisements are often ignored by the public or too costly to make if you run a budget-strapped small business. But short-form video marketing might offer a solution. Let’s break down how short-form videos can help boost brand awareness and grow your small business.

What Is Short-Form Video Content?

In a nutshell, short-form video content is any video content between 30 seconds and one minute long. There are no 100% set rules regarding short-form video content, but it has to be short, sweet, and to the point. 

Generally, short-form videos are posted on social media or video marketing sites such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and even Twitter. Due to length constraints, short-form video marketing content is usually authentic, direct, and offers a “candid” feeling, even if it is planned and prepared by a professional agency or your marketing team.

Some examples of short-form video content include:

  • User testimonials for a brand or business, which explain why they like the business or how the company fulfilled their needs

  • Candid videos, such as tours of a business’s office or manufacturing plant

  • Very short, snappy ads, usually accompanied by music or graphics

How Does Short-Form Video Marketing Grow Your Business?

Given decreased attention spans and the prevalence of young shoppers on platforms like TikTok, short-form video marketing has become much more popular in recent years. But how can it help your business specifically? Here are just a few benefits you might see if you start using short-form videos in your marketing campaigns.

High Content Engagement

For starters, your short-form video content will produce high engagement rates with your advertisements, calls to action, and marketing pushes. People love short-form videos because they are quick to consume and often snappy, memorable, and easy to respond to.

In contrast with longer videos that run for several minutes, it takes the average consumer just a few short seconds to watch short-form video content and decide whether they’ll engage with it. Plus, since short-form videos are shorter than average, you give your consumers more time for more interactions since you can push out more advertisements or videos in the same time frame.

Combine the short time duration of most short-form video content with excellent digital advertising design, and you’ll have a recipe for effective online marketing.

Fast Message Transmission

As touched on above, short-form video content allows you to transmit a chosen marketing message quickly and easily to your target audience members.

Imagine you want to drum up anticipation for a discount at your online store. Posting a quick positive testimonial from a previous customer, along with a call to action or demonstration of the product and its discount, can lead to many people visiting your online store or showing interest in the special offer.

Short-form video content can also be advantageous if you want to quickly transmit a relatively complex message. Say that you need to update the privacy policy of your software app. A short-form video marketing message explaining this change has a much better chance of being absorbed by your target users than a longer, more boring message that most people will click out of after a few seconds anyway.

Just be sure to make your videos in the right languages for your target audience, such as Korean, Spanish, Chinese, French, and so on. All short-form videos need to be understandable first and foremost to convey your message clearly.

Access a Massive Consumer Base

Perhaps most importantly, short-form video marketing gives you access to a massive and growing consumer base. TikTok is one great example.

If you start posting short video marketing messages on TikTok, you’ll be marketing on one of the fastest-growing online platforms (eight new users sign up every second!). Additionally, 90% of TikTok users log into their accounts every day, many of them young millennials or members of Generation Z, the prime consumers of today.

In other words, short-form video marketing can help you grow your small business by allowing you to market directly to a major consumer group. If you are having trouble reaching or converting these customers, short-form videos could be the solution.

Market on Multiple Platforms

As noted earlier, short-form video marketing can be posted on various platforms. TikTok is one obvious example, but there are other platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and more.

You should already be active on social media if you want to enhance your marketing reach. But when you make a single piece of short-form video marketing content, you can post it on multiple platforms simultaneously, reaching more people than on one particular platform. This is cost-effective and a great way to make every marketing dollar you have go further.

Cost-Effective Marketing

Now that we mentioned cost-effectiveness, short-form video marketing is usually quite affordable for small businesses. Since you only need to capture less than a minute of video footage, it’s often cheaper to produce high-quality, short-form video ads than longer advertisements that have more complex graphics, scripts, and actor requirements.

Developing a social media schedule and using free project management software that allows you to collaborate with team members with relevant skills will help you make high-quality, short video ads on a very tight budget. You can funnel the rest of the money toward other necessary business operations.

High Rankings on Google

On top of all that, short-form video marketing content often ranks higher in Google’s search engine results than alternatives, like traditional ads, pay-per-click ads, or long video content.

Since short-form videos can keep the attention of your visitors for longer, it keeps them on your platform or website for longer as well. Google records that and takes note of it. Given enough time, it may rank your pages more highly as it believes you provide more value to your visitors and customers. 

Community Growth 

Last but not least, short-form video marketing may boost your small business by helping you grow a community from scratch. This is one of the most challenging parts of growing a small business, but short-form video content makes it much easier.

For example, you can reach out to your consumer base and ask them to send you testimonial videos. Those whose videos are used in your marketing campaigns might receive a slight discount, another reward, or entry into your community forums.

By using short-form video marketing as an incentive to drive consumer engagement, you’ll bring your target audience members closer together and let them interact with each other. Building a community is a great way to bolster loyalty to your brand and inspire repeat or recurring purchases.

Wrap Up

As you can see, short-form video marketing is a great way to grow your small business, especially if you want to capture more online traffic and boost brand awareness. It’s cost-effective and helps build a community of loyal followers who may very well become long-term customers.

posted October 13, 2022
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