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A Guide by Torrey Tayenaka and Alyssa Lahham at Sparkhouse

We all know that a video is an essential tool in today’s marketing landscape. It’s the most effective way to connect with your audience and advance your goals, especially as video traffic continues to rise. Estimates show that by 2019, consumer internet video traffic will make up 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic, and having a video on your site keeps viewers eyes on your page for twice as long as without a video. So why wait? Here are 10 tips to get you started. Pick a few ideas that work for you, and get after it!

1. Share your knowledge and establish yourself as an industry expert.

Creating a how-to video or a video blog with helpful tips will show your expertise and build trust with your customers. This will help with more leads, more conversions, and better SEO (up to 53 times the likelihood of page one Google rankings!). Check out our Entrepreneur 60 Second Solutions video with Mark Kohler for some inspiration.

2. Simplify a complex product or service with an animated explainer video.

Animated explainer videos are powerful, popular tools for marketing almost any business, product, or service. You can still be in the prototype, manufacturing or concepting stages of an offering and present an animated explainer video to get your audience excited about its debut — effectively targeting potential customers, investors or even partners in your quest to get the word out. One study showed that animated explainers increase conversion rates by 20 percent! Here’s one animation that we made for EvaDrop while it was still in the prototype phase.

3. Boost downloads by promoting your mobile app’s launch.

Video is a great tool to market mobile apps because it allows you to show the full user experience of the app more than screen shots and words can alone. They are also easily shared and make it easy to include a CTA. We helped Playworks create this video to promote their Playbook App.

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4. Recruit new members to your team.

Recruiting the right talent is a crucial piece of growing your business, and a strong recruitment video can help! From a company overview to employee profiles, there are many ways to approach a recruitment video. For Corvel’s recruitment video, we had actual employees talk about why the like working there.

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5. Promote a contest thrown by your brand.

Contests are a great way to market a product, service, or brand. They get consumers excited about your brand, and they are especially shareable. However, you have to promote the contest for it to be effective. Video is a powerful strategy to help promote contests. Here’s one contest promotion video that we made for Wet Seal.

6. Make your Ecommerce move with product open-box videos.

Product open-box videos allow you to introduce new products with unique features, showcase your innovative designs, and demonstrate various uses. Share open-box videos on your site, on relevant forums, in e-newsletters, and via video blogging for optimal reach. Check out this open box video we made for Vizio for one example.

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7. Build your brand with customer lifestyle testimonials.

You could settle for a written testimonial, or you could step up your game with a video lifestyle testimonial. You’re not just selling a product or service, you’re asking your target audience to buy into the lifestyle that comes with it. Lifestyle marketing engages your potential customers by showing them how others are benefitting from your company’s offerings — which gets the viewer to picture themselves in the scenario and helps begin building an emotional attachment to your brand through the human connection. Here’s one video we made for DICE to help give their brand some flare.

8. Reach the masses with a TV Commercial

Television commercials have been around since the beginning of the traditional marketing world. TV ad strategy involves an intentional message that either directly or indirectly benefits your bottom line. Tools like age-based segmentation and cross promotion across social media and online outlets improve the reach of your and profitability of your TV commercial and serve to build brand awareness, one viewer at a time. We used these strategies in our USAA Insurance video with RG3!

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9. Use video to help raise funds and awareness for a good cause.

Whether you are a nonprofit trying to fundraise or a business trying to raise awareness for your corporate responsibility efforts, video allows you to clearly show potential donors the impact they can make by giving to a good cause. In one study, 92% of nonprofits said that they value the investment they have made in video. Check out this example that we made for Playworks titled, “Why We Play.”

10. Make a big splash with a new product launch.

Why just tell people about your products when you can actually show them? Product videos done right can be a fantastic tool to help your target audience understand your product and the philosophy that sets your company apart. You can use your product video to engage your customers in every step of the launch. Here’s an example new product video we made for Liquipel.

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