Fashion

Let me explain you why online video are one of the best tools for your business right now which is worth putting all these excuses aside.Smaller business are always agile. They are known for being innovative and creative. They are able to test and try things far easier than a larger company. As a small business, you want to use this to your advantage. Yes, I know you are swamped with limited resources, but so many of the great things you can do for your company don’t actually require that large an investment. You just need the nerve and foresight to try them. Have you tried out something like starting down the road of using online videos to connect with and engage customers and boost your search engine rankings.

But…we don’t have time for that!

As a small business, you can use videos to engage your customers and make more personal connections. While your competitors are trying to sell with text on their barely functional Web site, you establish yourself as a company who gets it. Using videos allows you to speak directly to your customers, looking right at them and using your real voice to tell them why you’re the best at what you do and how you can help them. It’s the difference between picking a name out of a phone book or calling up a friend.

How do you use online videos for your company?

Create informative content and online video tutorials that you can market to help you get links and visibility. For example, if you run a local pool company, create videos explaining how to do all the in between maintenance that’s required before your next visit. Show them how to use that new vacuum, how to set up their filter, how to winterize or summarize their pool, how to chlorinate their pool, how to set up the perfect pool palace, etc. Take all the questions you get from customers every day and turn the answers into video content for your Web site. It’s a powerful differentiator that will set you apart and make you even more useful to your customers. But that’s not all it will do.

At yesterday’s Google Searchology event in Mountain View, Google’s VP of Search Products & User Experience Marissa Mayer informed everyone that Universal Search results are present in 1 out of 4 Google searches. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Universal Search was a change to Google’s algorithm that put media content like blogs, online video, images, news, etc, right in with the regular Web search.

That statistic is important because it means if someone does a search for [how to winterize my pool], the videos that you created online and uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo may begin to rank very competitively, gaining your business a considerable amount of traffic and links that will help you rank in local search. And if the searcher lives in your area, then you can be pretty sure they’re going to contact you for services. Because now they know you. They know your name, they know what you look like, they’ve heard you explain to them in a friendly tone all the benefits of using your company. That’s how you differentiate your small business from all the other “me toos” out there.

But… we don’t have the budget for that!

Yes, you do! This is the Web. You don’t need pockets of money to do impressive things. You don’t even need the best video equipment. You don’t need to download those expensive video editors and then spend more money in learning how to use them. These days, the internet is offering you some wonderful and easy “online video editors” which are relatively very less expensive, in some instances free too. Agreed, that they don’t offer all the features that the advanced desktop based editors would do. But they give you just enough to do what you want with your videos.