How to Leverage Video Marketing on a Budget

For the past few years, digital marketers have shouted from the mountaintop that video is the platform of the future. Well, the future is here and has been for quite a while. Video marketing used to be for the few who had huge budgets, but thanks to digital technology, video is available to the masses. In the video below, we will share how you can leverage video marketing even if you’re on a tight budget.

A few stats to perk your interest:

• By 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic (Source: SmallBizTrends)
• Facebook generates 8 billion video views on average per day (Source: Social Media Today)
• YouTube reports mobile video consumption rises 100% every year (Source: Hubspot)

Slide Deck

Video Transcript:

Hey. What’s up, everybody, welcome to Hack My Growth. Thanks for tuning in today. We’re going to be talking about how we can leverage the power of video marketing when we’re on a tight budget. All right, let’s go.

Hey, thanks so much for joining us. If this is your first time or maybe you’ve been watching a while but haven’t yet subscribed, please hit the button below. We would love to have you join our community.

So today we’re going to be talking about how we can market our business using video when we’re on a tight budget. We’re going to walk through a couple of pieces of gear, some editing tools, as well as some platforms we can use to market ourselves. These tools range from free, to a couple of hundred dollars and just under a thousand dollars, between the different types of equipment we’re going to look at as well as platforms, so stay tuned, get involved. We will be using a slide deck that will walk you through some of these different pieces of information we have, and that’s another great piece. If you don’t have a good camera, or you don’t want to be in front of a camera, but you still want to do video, slides are a great way to do that. You can record your presentation and share that online. 

Alright, so let’s get into the slides and start talking about how we can use video and how we can use it for our business without spending an outrageous amount of money. Here we go.

Alright, so let’s take a look at the slide deck. Let’s go over some data. Let’s also look at some gear. Let’s get into the presentation on how we can leverage video marketing on a budget. 

Here’s what the data has to say. 42% of people say that they want to see more video content from marketers. People enjoy videos because it’s they are engaging. It allows them to see a different aspect or connect emotionally with a company and it’s easier to read, let’s just be honest. Right?

It’s a lot easier for people to digest. 51.9%, or let’s go ahead and round that up, right? 52% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content that delivers the best ROI. Again, I believe it has to do a lot with the emotional connection that video enables. In 86% of business-related videos used, they take place on desktops, not mobile, only 14% are done on mobile. This is something really important to understand and I think a lot of people get confused with this big investment in mobile lately. We see a lot of push from mobile and it’s true, in the B2C space but when we’re talking B2B, it’s still desktop heavy, desktop dominant. Business is still done on computers, so those are some data points that are very important to think about and remember. 

So what else?

• 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter.
• YouTube has over a billion users. That’s almost a third of the total users on the internet.
• 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week
• There are more than 500 million hours of video watched each day on YouTube.

People are consuming video at a rapid rate, and in order to be relevant, we need to be giving videos well, showing videos, and creating a video that speaks to our audiences.

Alright, so let’s talk about how we do this if we don’t have a huge budget. The goal behind this is to show you a couple of different avenues that you can use, but none of the options are going to break the bank. 

Alright, so talking about gear. This is the DSLR that I use. All the gear in this video is gear that I’ve personally used, that’s why I’m recommending it. This is a Canon EOS 70D and the body typically runs for about $750 dollars. This is a very good camera but what makes it awesome is the video capabilities. It’s a great video camera. It has a great touch panel LCD screen. It shoots wonderful, wonderful footage and for $750 you’re going to get a very professional-looking video, that looks great on any platform you upload the video to, and if you’re burning a DVD or whatever other form you would like to share your video in. This is a very good camera at a very reasonable rate, but you’re going to need some other gear than just a camera. If you’re choosing to go with the DSLR, you need some lenses.

So, my lens of choice is the Canon EF Zoom 24-105 millimeter. Now, this retails at $799. I didn’t pay that for mine. What I recommend you do, if you do go this route, is to find people who you know that are getting rid of some lenses, see what they have and test them out. I also recommend trying eBay and some of those other places where you can get a little bit of a better deal for that lens. This is a great lens. It’s one of the best lenses I’ve ever used, and it shoots amazing footage, and you can do some zoom with it as well, which is really nice.

Now, we also have another camera that I love to use. This is one of my new favorite cameras to use and it’s one I typically do most of the YouTube videos on. It’s called the Mevo. It’s created by Live Stream. It’s a very cool little camera, right here we’re just showing, at the top of this side, you’ll see it’s just the camera part, but you can get a bundle kit for $799. So the camera itself is about $500. The bundle is $799, $800, and it comes with an extra battery charger and it also comes, I believe, with a tripod and a carrying case. Now this is a 4K video camera, a very, very, very good video camera. It captures 4K resolution. 16×9 aspect widescreen. 30 frames per second. Great little camera. Easy to travel with. The battery life is exceptional, and it uses a micro SD card so it’s very compact and easy to carry around.

What’s cool about the Mevo is it syncs with your phone, and you use a smartphone app. You can also stream live video straight from this camera through your phone. You can set up, I believe, 9 different shots on the camera, so you don’t have to have one still looking at you. You can shoot different shot angles from this one camera to give a totally different experience, so it’s really like a video studio inside of your backpack. Very cool camera, if you want to invest a little bit of money I highly recommend Mevo.

So one of the things you want to make sure that you have as well, is not just good video, but you also want to have good audio, and this is the microphone that I used attached to my Mevo or even attached to my Mac when I’m doing video presentations like this. It’s from Blue, and it’s called the Snowball. It’s a USB microphone. It’s a great little microphone. It’s $50. You can get it at Best Buy. You can get it online. It plugs right into your PC or Mac and uses a USB cable, it’s awesome. Use it. Get yourself a microphone. Better audio quality will help your viewers to want to watch your video.

So maybe you don’t want to spend extra money. Well, the good news is smartphones have become very good. They’re great for shooting YouTube videos. They’re great for shooting other types of videos. Heck, you can even use these to shoot real movies. I mean, that’s how good the cameras are on smartphones now. One thing I recommend is you get a tripod. You need a tripod for any camera you’re using. You want to make sure that your video shot is still, it’s focused and it’s very clear, and don’t just settle for a cheap tripod. Make sure that you invest in a good tripod that is going to hold that shot the way that you want it to and make it look awesome.

Alright, so that’s some of the gear that we’ve been talking about. Now let’s get into some of the other things around our video. After you’ve shot your video, the next step is you need to edit that video, so let’s take a look at some of the editing software. 

So you have a couple of ways to go. Adobe Premier is what I use 99.9% of the time. Now there are different subscription levels. Right here I have $49.99 a month. I believe there’s even a cheaper one at $29.99 a month for the creative cloud with Adobe Premier, a great program. Filmmakers, YouTube, videographers, designers, really anybody that wants to tell their story. It’s a great program. It’s pretty easy to use. There are tons of tutorials, and there is a huge community of people that use Premier that can give you advice if you get stuck.

So another good program is iMovie. There are a lot of nicely built-in features here. You can create some cool stories and trailers within the tool. I would say stay away from some of the “Cheesy” filters you may have or titles that you could use, but if, you know, you keep it straight, you keep it simple, and you keep it focused, you can create great videos with iMovie. And iMovie’s free, just like Windows movie maker if you’re on a Windows computer. It’s Windows’ version of iMovie. I wouldn’t say it’s not as good but you can quickly churn out videos, and it’s not going to be any extra cost, so if you use a smartphone and you use one of these built-in video editors, whether it be Windows movie maker or iMovie, you’re going to be able to do it right now for no extra cost except maybe buying a tripod.

So another cool software by Adobe is called Adobe Spark, and it’s usually just for making social media videos. You can do movie graphics, and it has some audio built in so you can get some music backgrounds and a lot of things, really cool program. $99 a month or I believe $99 for the year, and you can also try it for free and play around with it, but when you usually use these programs for free, you’re going to get a watermark on your videos, so keep that in mind.

Another video editing software similar to Spark but allows you to do some animations as well as infographics is Biteable. You can also upload your videos. It’s very, very simple. It’s very easy to use. I’ve used this to create some explainer videos, and infographic videos, animations. They have a lot of built-in features as well as the ability to add your own footage, and it’s $99 a year for this software.

Now a new software we’ve been using is Lumen5 and this is really cool because it uses AI to actually see what your content is, so you post a blog link in there, and it’ll run your content and say “Okay, here’s some blog content.” You can create a video or you can take a blog you’ve already written, repurpose it and create a video within literally minutes. Really cool video tool and it’s free and up to $49, $50 a month. It’s a great tool. It’s used by a lot of brands to make some great, engaging videos. Typically what I use Lumen5 for, is after we create in-depth or a little bit longer videos for YouTube, we’ll take Lumen5 and run it through our transcription and then create a shorter video that we can use on social media, like Facebook or Twitter, and then link back to the full video because a lot of times people on those other platforms won’t watch as long as they will on YouTube.

Speaking of YouTube, now let’s get into platforms. These are places where you can ship your work. Now, there are a lot of places you can do this online. My favorite is YouTube and the real reason is well, YouTube has a billion users. It’s also the second-largest search engine in the world. This is owned by Google but it’s separate from just the regular search engines. It’s its own search engine and it provides a ton of content.

YouTube on mobile, just mobile, reaches more people in the US than television now. That’s crazy. Right? More than half of the YouTube views come from mobile devices, so it’s a lot of B2C content but don’t let that scare you away because there’s still a lot of B2B momentum to be built on this platform. YouTube has launched local versions in more than 88 countries. You can navigate YouTube in 67 different languages. If you’re an international company, literally it’s covering 95% of the internet. It’s a great platform. Tons of people are engaging on this platform and using this platform to find answers to their questions, whether it be in the B2C space or the B2B space as well.

Facebook is another platform that is growing. They’ve invested a lot of time and energy in video and they’ve increased 94% annually on their video clips. There’s a potential audience of 1.7 billion. You’re not going to see that, especially with the way Facebook has their algorithm set up. You know? It’s very selective in who sees what, but you have a large audience out there. 85% of Facebook videos are viewed without sound, so keep that in mind. These are videos that people are usually just scrolling through their feed and they see a video play, and they haven’t really clicked and engaged with it, so a majority of people are going to watch that video clip strictly from a visual standpoint, maybe read the text, so that’s something important to know when you’re creating videos for Facebook specifically.

Facebook Live is watched a lot longer than other videos and they’ve been able to actually increase 360% across everyone’s newsfeed videos. Facebook has been putting that into the algorithm to push videos into people’s newsfeeds, so that’s another thing to keep in mind if this is going to be your primary platform.

You also have Twitter. Twitter, again, is a great social media platform. It’s a very good content platform. It’s one of my best-performing social media tools. I drive a ton of traffic and more importantly, I direct traffic that engages with me on my website, that downloads our content that connects with us from Twitter. We use video on Twitter as well to help do that and 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. Twitter’s made an investment in the NFL, with a number of other cable news networks and such, where they do live video all the time on Twitter. You can usually see it right there on the right-hand side of the screen if you’re on your desktop or you can watch Thursday night football. There are a number of things that Twitter’s doing to really push video.

90% of Twitter views happen on mobile. Most people are using Twitter on their mobile devices, that’s even B2B space. Typically people are on the train, in a car, in traffic, on their way to work, or maybe at lunch, they check their Twitter feed. 41% of users believe that Twitter is a great place to discover videos and Twitter users are 25% more likely than the average consumer to discover video first among their friends. Just the way that Twitter works. It’s a fast-moving platform and people are able to digest content a lot quicker than other platforms.

So a little insider tip for those of you who want to take video to the next level. You’ve chosen your gear. You maybe chose your platform. One thing about platforms I want to say before I do this slide fully is to focus on one platform and become an expert on that platform and then work your way back. What I mean by that is that YouTube is a platform. Use YouTube and get invested in YouTube and once you have it nailed down, add Facebook later, but don’t do everything at once or one, one, one, one at a time where you’re spreading yourself thin and not really growing that audience. But focus on that platform. And then what do you do? Don’t just post on the platform. Also, use that video on your blog.

One of the tools we use is a tool cause Rev. Its Rev.com. Rev.com. A dollar a minute to transcribe your video. I don’t get any kickback for this, it’s just a great service. They’ll transcribe your video for you. You can then write a short intro and post that video, input that video into your blog, post the transcription, and share it with people. It’s a really great way to add value to your own website as well as grow engagements. We use YouTube weekly because we want to increase our YouTube viewership and our YouTube community, so take the time to take advantage of these platforms.

Honestly, you can do this if you have a tripod, you have a phone and you have a computer with editing software. You don’t have to spend any money. All you need to do is take some time to create videos and then make sure that you leverage those videos in more than one location. Post them on a social media site, on YouTube, go all in, be consistent, and then make sure you take the time to add them to your website as well.

Alright, so I hope you guys learned something. If you have any questions about the video, creating videos, video marketing, or how we use YouTube and leverage it to grow our business, please comment below. We’d love to help you out and point you in the right direction.

Until next time, Happy Marketing.