Making a video marketing

Everyone is talking about video marketing nowadays. 

Recently we explained why current video marketing trends matter to GoodFirms portal: Top 6 Video Marketing Trends in 2021 For Small Businesses. Today we will have a look at what exactly we did regarding video marketing at Code Inspiration software development and consulting company. 

Video marketing for a software development company

Well, we decided to pay more attention to video marketing at the beginning of 2020. On the background of the COVID pandemic and lockdown strike, we face the decrease of workload. To address the issue, Code Inspiration’s top management decided to change the overall development strategy. The basic idea was to utilize the forced pause in business activity, focusing on some actions which in other circumstances we might not have done. 

In fact, we decided to focus our future marketing activities on the following directions:

  1. Website complete update: new design, new positioning, motto, simple explanation of benefits of working with us etc. 
  2. Content marketing: doing best to generate more useful content and less promotional one, elimination of old unpopular articles and update of most read ones.
  3. Online presence: continuation of work on SEO issues, creation of profiles in alternative search engines, creation of profiles in major and minor business aggregators and listing services.

Actually, the mentioned directions are connected with each other. And video marketing has also become an integral part of the updated marketing strategy, passing through all mentioned directions


Video marketing, what exactly did we do?

Well, let’s dive into details now. 

In fact, we had started to produce videos long before we decided to distinguish making videos within the frameworks of an overall video marketing strategy. What did our first attempts look like? So, there were a couple of videos created for the upcoming blog posts, here they are:

We didn’t think about the fact that this chat animation video is not very easy to perceive at that time. A user doesn’t open a video to read some text, does it?

These 3 videos were made, in fact, “just because we could”. At that moment we didn’t realize completely the benefits of video content and created these in unawareness, just to insert in a blog post because “video is cool, you know”. Surely, we almost didn’t think about target audience, video usefulness and other important aspects. 

The second step was made when we prepared a visit for a potential client from Kuwait. We wanted to add some visual content to our presentation and created this video, showing the geography of our clients. 

WILL BE UPLOADED LATER

This ends a series of our videos made in unawareness, before adopting a video marketing strategy.

Making videos, but already within the framework of the strategy

Well, we decided to start with a promo video that will be placed on our website’s main page. Our goal with this video was to reflect our philosophy and approach to work. What’s more, at that time Mr. Elon Musk was,  as they say, “leading a hype train” with his rockets and upcoming plans, so after some brainstorming we decided to reflect a similar approach in our video. Here is the result:

Videos for portfolio

After the promo video for a main page, the task was to create several videos explaining completed projects, because updated design of a portfolio implied a section with video. 

Here is a series of videos created for completed software development projects:

As you can see, the videos are very simple. We refused to organize long and expensive shooting with relevant video production, and simply took the developed software, demos, screenshots and added text explanations. Anyway there are videos where we used some footage provided by our clients.

As a result, a user visiting a project page has a choice: to read a project’s text description or watch a video, depending on what he likes best. Have a look at a video calling mobile app project – an example of a project page with video. 

Videos for blog posts and other pages

After the promo video and videos about projects were ready and published, we created some videos for blog posts. We started with the most popular article in our blog about iOS. Video for this page was created because we wanted to:

  1. Add some content to this page and offer users an option to watch video instead of reading a text.
  2. Benefit to SEO strengthening this page’s behavioral factors.

Here is the video we created:

Other videos created for blog posts

The following video shows what aggregators any business should create profiles on to boost online presence. Took us about 20 minutes because we used Canva tool with a ready template:

We analyze startup ideas in our blog, and created the following video to strenghten the page with a content. This video also took us 20 minutes to make, gaian thanks to Canva service.

And this video was created to revise all our achievements in 2020. Simple infographic plus a ready “New Year Congratulations template” from YouTube. However, this video took us longer that 2 previous ones, it was created by our inhouse motion designer using Adobe After Effects app with the support of all the team who provided numbers:

Here is the video we are also very proud of. We got an invitation to take part in a flashmob #ShoutoutatTimesSquare organized by PureVPN. The task was to make a photo or a short video with a positive/motivational/business message. The aim of the flashmob was to demonstrate the unity of a digital community in today’s pandemic times of crisis. We decided to invest in this video and carried out some professional shooting with video production. Here is the result:

Just in case, here is a detailed story of our appearance on the Times Square made possible by the video above.

Recent video marketing activity

In summer 2021 we saw that the promo video created a year ago looks outdated. Additionally, we wanted the main page’s video to become shorter and easier to perceive. After some brainstorming and processing of dozens of ideas, several video productions iterations we published the following one:

This video is also somehow distancing from reflecting our philosophy and approach to the software development process. It simply explains that software development was like building a rocket earlier – durable, complicated and expensive. Today, after a series of advancements related to software development, software has become available enough. 

We would also like to show you this video about the Sun:

The idea was brainstormed, and the team liked it very much. After we made the video, we didn’t like it as much as its idea  Anyway we decided to publish it in socials. 

Right now we continue elaborating ideas for new videos and plan to create and publish several more ones. We do our best to form a “video production funnel”, that is generating and evaluating multiple ideas at the entrance and getting ready videos at the exit.


Video for small business

Ok, thanks for the story, but what have you learned? – Let’s have a look, what experience can we share after 2 years of making videos!

How to get video for small business

There are some options:

  1. Find a video producer on a freelance platform.
  2. Use shareware online video making tools, for example Canva, DesYgner, VimeoCreate, DesignWizard
  3. Study some video production courses and start doing videos on your own.

Video ideas for business

Video marketing for small business. An image with a title textHere are some video ideas options for almost any business:

  1. CEO’s introductory word.
  2. CEO/Managers sharing company’s philosophy or explaining what value can the company deliver.
  3. Introduction of managers, explanation of the area of responsibility.
  4. Manager(s) explaining what issue for which you can contact them.
  5. Video describing your products or services.
  6. Guide how to use your product.
  7. Production process video.
  8. Guide how to get to your office. 
  9. Clients’ reviews.

How to get ideas for videos

If you have already made videos based on the ideas above, here are some options to generate more video ideas:

  1. Brainstorming – all the ideas are in your head. You just need to take them!
  2. Check what your competitors do – but not to repeat. Make a better video!
  3. Think outside the box – make a video describing your negative experience or failure story. Even though it is not related directly to your business.
  4. Elaborate the most common questions of your clients. Record video with answers.
  5. Check popular search requests, for instance, using KeyWordTool.

We highly recommend having a “video production funnel” which means generating and evaluating multiple ideas at the entrance and getting ready videos at the exit.

Final thoughts about video marketing

Well, what have we achieved doing video marketing? The results are:

  1. First of all video appeared on the website;
  2. Users can watch videos instead of reading long texts;
  3. Website’s SEO improved;
  4. Users started to spend more time on the website;
  5. Website traffic increased.

Actually, the growth of the website traffic is not based on video only. Like we mentioned in the beginning of the article, making video was one of several directions. For 2 years our website traffic almost tripled, thanks to video, design update, useful blog posts and other activities. 

So, carrying out multiple activities simultaneously, we cannot say what results exactly the video led to. We are, however, sure the results are positive 🙂

Summing up the article, we want to say that video marketing really matters. Being among multiple other trust triggers, video is capable of building trust in your products or services, answering questions of potential clients and convincing them to buy from you.

Video is available for anyone who has a PC and internet access for free or at a low price. And there is no need to go and pay for someone who will make a professional video. There are plenty of video ideas, including already mentioned ones, which can be simply recorded on a smartphone and published. Smartphone camera recording in Full HD is really enough. Actually, many users like such a “default”, transparent video format showing everything as is, instead of expensive video with excessive post-processing, color correction, effects, etc.” 

One more advice we can share is to promote your videos on alternative platforms: do not stop uploading a video on YouTube! Do not forget to upload it in socials – exactly upload, because social networks promote “native” format of content, and they dislike embedded videos from YT. Pay attention to such platforms as Xing social network, your business profile on Google My Business and Microsoft Bing Places, BisVue video and other aggregators.  

We hope this is helpful. Make video work for your business!