Instagram is one of the most popular apps on the market today. It has well over a billion users from all different types of backgrounds and lifestyles. While it is great for individuals to post and view photos and follow their friends and favourite celebrities, there are many benefits of Instagram for small business owners.
It is a great platform for sharing new products, reaching new people and marketing your product or company to the world. But in addition to simply using images, your company should also be using Instagram video in your marketing efforts. Let’s go over a few tips to better use Instagram video marketing to help grow your company and get more clients.
Your Thumbnail is Critical
When people are scrolling through Instagram, your marketing content needs to capture their attention. The feeds of most people are clogged with content, and you need to stick out. One of the best ways to capture attention and stick out is with your thumbnail. It is the first thing people will see, and you want to be sure to draw them in.
A standard thumbnail or whatever Instagram decides to choose won’t cut it. The thumbnail could be an interesting still from the video itself or even an overlay of the title. All of this should be aimed at piquing the curiosity of those who come across your video, so they will click on it and watch.
A thumbnail is especially important for the many Instagram users that browse with autoplay turned off. This is because they won’t get a brief glimpse of the video when scrolling past and only see the thumbnail.
Be Sure to Provide Value
In addition to simply capturing the attention of a person, your video also needs to provide them with value. If you get them to watch but provide them with no value, they aren’t likely to check out your page or products. There are a number of different ways that a marketing video can provide value. It can show off your products and mention the benefits, which can be a tutorial or even a short Q&A.
There are endless options to choose from, and don’t hesitate to test out a couple and see which has the best results. Do some research on some pain points that your customers and potential customers have, and find ways to address those in your video. The better your video and the more value it provides, the more likely people will check out your products and services.
Keep Them Short
With all of the content and marketing going on around us at all times, this overwhelming amount of information has narrowed our collective attention span. This is true nowhere more than social media. People are clicking from post to post so fast nowadays and hardly give anything more than a couple of seconds of their time. In a world like this, it is easy for content and videos you worked hard on to get clicked away from in no time at all.
Because of this, keeping your Instagram videos fairly short is often a good idea. The shorter they are, the more likely that people will watch them the whole way through. Easily digestible content is the way of the future and helps make sure your videos don’t get skipped over.
Be sure to get to the point quickly, and don’t anyone's time. Now, don’t randomly try to fit in as much content in 30 seconds as you can, but come up with a solid idea or script that will fit in a short video yet still be easy to follow.
Don’t Sleep on Going Live and Using Stories
While standard video marketing efforts can be fruitful, Instagram has so much more to offer than that. In particular, live videos and stories have changed the game for companies and marketers on Instagram. Going live can be beneficial for a number of reasons.
It is great for engaging with customers and potential customers, can help you answer questions, and builds a more emotional connection. Seeing a face behind the brand or account can really help people connect with your company and efforts.
Stories can also provide a lot of value for small businesses. Stories are especially great for publishing long videos but making it easy for people to skip through at the same time. Stories with polls, questions, countdowns and more can also be incredibly helpful in learning more about customers. This tool is also great for promoting sales, making time-sensitive announcements and garnering customer interest. This IGTV vs stories guide for 2021 will explain more about different options available for Instagram story marketing.
Use Calls to Action
Whether in video marketing on Instagram, email marketing or nearly any other variety, calls to action are incredibly important. They are all about encouraging your customers to take the next step and convert. This could be a call to follow you, a call to check out your site or even a call to make a purchase.
Calls to action on Instagram can be done in several different ways. You could ask people to check out the link in your bio, add a “swipe-up” to the video or even a “learn more” option in your video ads. You can get creative with these calls to action, but even simply asking people to complete an action in the video can often yield good results. Whatever type of call to action that you go with, it is a good idea to simplify it as much as possible.
Instagram Video is an Incredible Tool
Instagram is an incredibly popular app, and your business is missing an opportunity if you’re not on it. In particular, Instagram video offers a ton of value for small businesses. By using quality thumbnails, providing value, keeping videos short and using all different kinds of video content, you are well on your way to getting more clients thanks to Instagram video.
on
Hi Ashley,
Thanks for the amazing content, this would be really helpful for instagram marketers. Marketing on social platform brings quite instant results to us and people however find that useful. We should attract our audiences and should not make them feel bored by long videos. The content should be short enough to send the the message and call to action. I agree with you that we should not go live and post stories too often but people usually neglect that and fail to succeed. Anyways, keep up with the great work, cheers !