Portraying Your Brand: How to Advertise Your Business in a Video

If you’re looking to start advertising your business through video, it can seem like a daunting task. You want to be able to draw in new customers, but you also want to be authentic to your company, brand, and culture.

It’s easy to get caught up trying to convince customers to buy your product, advertising to everyone.

Instead of trying to force a connection with every customer, focus on creating advertisements that reflect your business’ goals, strengths, and attitudes. This strategy should help you find customers that are compatible with your brand.

Here are some tips to help you craft a more natural, but effective advertising video:

• Have Confidence in Your Business

You’ve developed a business that is filling a need in your community. The fact that your business exists, and that you’re looking to start an advertising campaign, means that there are more customers out there for you.

Now your goal should be to find the customers that are right for you. During this process remember what your company stands for and proudly stand by those attitudes and values.

• Identify Your Strengths

Before starting your video campaign, take time to reflect, talk to your employees and current customers. What do you do well, and what do you have to offer to others? What values does your business uphold? What is the story behind your business and how did you build the community you have already?

When making a video campaign, it’s not just about advertising your products, but it’s also about sharing your broader story. You want to be able to connect with people on a deeper level and build a community.

• Present Your True Self

Once you’ve taken the time to identify what values and ideas you want to get across, now you can actually plan and film your video campaign.

Get your community to join in on the video. If you can, film interviews with your employees and your customers. Show people actually engaging with you and your employees. You want to let people see what your community is like, so that when the right people see your videos, they know immediately they want to be a part of your business’ community.

The process of making a video campaign for your business isn’t easy, but it can be a rewarding process. Take your time and have fun with it!

If you’re still confused or need help starting your own campaign, check out some of our past projects, and/or contact us about your own project. We are happy to help you through any step of the process!

What is Micropillaring?

Micro pillaring, or creating “micro” content, is cutting down your longer form “pillar” content into shorter, more easily accessible content for social media. This could mean cutting 20-30 second clips from a 3 minute video and sharing those clips across various social media platforms, or pulling quotes from a recent article or blog that you posted.

When you’re looking to advertise yourself or business to a larger audience, often on social media, you want to be able to efficiently engage your potential audience and show them what your business is about.

On average, people use social media up to 135 minutes a day (Statista The Statistics Portal). Thus, using social media to market your content is the fastest way to reach people as they scroll through their feed. From there you can link the whole video and find your audience who is interested in what you do.  

Creating “Micro” Content

1. Make “pillar” content

   Before you start making any micro content, it’s important to remember what your business’ goals are, and what kind of content you usually strive to create. You want to continue to make this, often longer form, “pillar” content. The goal is not to change your content, but adapt what you already make into smaller pieces for social media.

2. Break it down

   Once you have some longer form content that you want to use to advertise your business, it’s time to break it down into smaller pieces. Take your time with this process, and really try to narrow down your content into pieces that, while small, still reflect your business’ purpose and values. If it’s a piece of writing, find a few quotes that stand out, if it’s a video, pick the most important narrative moments and transitions.

3. Keep it short

   Keep the clips short. Shorter videos have a higher completion rate than longer videos and our brains are better able to hold quick bits of information rather than long, detailed content. If they like your content, then they can follow you and eventually see your long form material.

4. Mix it up

   Once you’ve mastered taking your long form content and breaking it into smaller pieces to advertise on social media, now you can take it one step further. The last step is to diversify your social media accounts and post slightly different content in different places. Different social media platforms are better for different kinds of media, so adapt your content to each platform. On Twitter you can post quotes from articles or your clients and include links to videos. On Instagram however, you can directly post a 20-30 second “highlight reel” of video material, or share a few stellar photos from a recent event or video shoot.

Now that you have the tools, it’s time to start making your own micro content. Take one piece of content you have and derive something else from it. If you have a blog, take a photo that relates to it. If you have a photo that you’ve shared on facebook, change up the dimensions and share it to instagram.

Just have fun with it and find what works best for you and your business. If you need ideas, check out our website for examples.