Why You Need to Start Using Video

If you’re like most tire dealers, you have a go-to list of marketing tactics to attract and retain customers. Emails, social media, direct mail – but what about video?


For years now, you’ve been hearing that video marketing for small business is on the rise. Perhaps you’ve been ignoring this trend for a variety of reasons:

I don’t like myself on video

I don’t understand video

I don’t have the equipment for video

My customers aren’t going to watch a video

This was me. Personally, I don’t watch a lot of video. I hate myself on video, and I don’t have any fancy equipment or editing experience with video. So I’ve been ignoring it.


But this was a mistake as the video trend keeps moving forward.

Take a Look at Some of These Statistics

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, by 2021 the global consumer internet video traffic will account for 82% of all consumer internet traffic, and this doesn’t even include video exchanged through peer-to-peer (P2P).

This data is backed by the increasing number of views video social networks are experiencing; During its 2015 Q3 call, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social network is generating 8 billion video views daily, while in April 2016, Snapchat said it was generating 10 billion daily video views. Those numbers have likely gone up since then.

It’s clear that video isn’t going away; it’s only going to become more ubiquitous. The good news in all of this is that it’s also becoming more natural and organic. The combination of social media and video is giving companies more access to their customers. And mobile platforms are providing more access because of the flexibility they provide in capturing and streaming live events.

This means that your customers don’t need fancy, high-dollar productions. Let me restate that: your customers don’t want high-end productions. What your customers want is a glimpse into who you are as a person, as a brand. They want the feeling of knowing you and being in relationship with you.

This means that regardless of how you feel about video, there is a way to make it uniquely your own without spending a lot of time or money. So the biggest obstacle in using video today is you.

Video Marketing Versus Video Advertising

Part of the reservation people have with video comes from seeing video marketing and video advertising as synonymous. They’re actually quite different.

Here’s a simple explanation from an article entitled “The Difference Between Video Marketing and Video Advertising” from business2community.com:

Video Marketing: The use of video as content in websites, landing pages, social media and email to inform, educate, and engage.

Video Advertising: Running video commercials online across all screens, and using advanced audience and geo-targeting to reach precise markets.

Video advertising gives you the potential to reach a huge audience that would be difficult to reach through traditional advertising channels. YouTube advertising has the potential to reach more than 800 million visitors worldwide.

The key distinction is in the “intent” of the video. Video marketing is more content, education, information, and engagement focused. Video advertising focuses more on the traditional brand building and call to action that we’re all familiar with. So with millennial eye-balls moving away from traditional television and over to social channels and on-demand video viewing, the use of video marketing and advertising to reach your ideal customer will only go up.

While a lot of that content may seem like cat videos and blooper reels, video marketing also presents a golden opportunity for your businesses to capitalize on the video marketing boom. Even if you know nothing about video, it’s not too late to get familiar with this strategy.

You Need a Strategy

According to an Adcend2 survey, nearly 48% of companies stated that the most challenging obstacle to video marketing success was lack of a video strategy.

Here are a few tips:

1. Who is your audience? I know, you’re tired of hearing this, but understanding your audience will get your video content in front of the right people.

2. What do they want to see? Focus on the questions they want to be answered, or focus on the top three or five problems you know your customers are dealing with.

3. What do you want to accomplish? Are you building awareness, or are you looking for customers? You may want customers, but you may not have established your brand well enough that potential customers are comfortable with you. If that’s the case, create videos that will prove your expertise, or create videos that will quickly solve customer problems.

4. Focus on creating an emotional response. While your product or service may have some awesome features, what emotion do you want your customers to feel? Frustration? Relief? Think about what emotions you want to trigger in your customer and then create video to better engage by triggering those emotions.

5. Distill your message down to a few core points. Keep it simple, brief and concise. Better to do a series of related videos if you want to cover more than a few concepts.

Keep it simple. Don’t overcomplicate this part of the process. Just focus on your ideal customer. What’s important to them? Educate, entertain, and help your customer find the right solution to their problem. Also use it to reinforce common recommendations given in store.

Don’t Be Scared, Just Jump In

Sooner or later, you will have to find a way to incorporate video into your marketing.

Don’t let all of these stats and ideas overwhelm you. Take a look at the info provided here, and then choose one idea you’d like to try. Maybe you want to do an interview. Or maybe you want to ask for a customer testimonial. It doesn’t matter. Just do one thing today, and do another thing tomorrow. Take one step at a time and before you know it,  you’ll be a video star.  TR

Ivana Taylor is a nationally renowned marketing influencer and publisher of DIYMarketers.com. She helps business owners and entrepreneurs like you save time and money by simplifying their marketing with low-cost marketing tactics and strategies. Learn more at www.diymarketers.com.

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