Small Business SEO: How You Can Use Videos Even If You Can’t Afford Them

Small business SEO is a delicate balancing act between needing to improve your income and not being able to spend a lot of money to do it. That’s why SEO companies love to encourage small businesses to engage in certain high-value, low-cost practices like local internet marketing. But the world is a large and complex place, and few SEO companies know even most of the tricks that small businesses could be using to leverage inexpensive assets to get profound results.

Most small businesses shy away from video marketing, for example, because making a video is an expensive proposition. You have to hire someone to organize the whole affair, and assuming that he can run the camera as well as take care of storyboarding, scriptwriting, preproduction, postproduction, and distribution (good luck with that), you still need actors, a camera, and a few weeks.

OR…

…you can use one of those leveraging tricks. This one comes to us from the world of late-night commercials like those original 5-Hour Energy adverts from back in the day. These 1.5-minute commercials were marvelous feats of splicing in that they used 100% stock video clips available from various websites for what had to be a total of nearly (gasp!) eighty dollars.

Neatly spliced together to tell a story and given an appropriate voiceover, these supercheap commercials helped launch an entirely new category of product — the energy shot — into existence. Yes, it was a good idea whose time was ripe, but without these late-night promos to spread initial awareness of the product, it’s quite likely that 5HE would have taken years longer to become commonplace.

So ask yourself — what kind of story would you like to tell your customers? Can you find a series of video clips that will tell this story if you give it an appropriate voiceover? (If not, can you hire someone to do it for you?) If you could build a series of marketing videos for only a few hundred dollars, would you?