The 2 Biggest Obstacles to Video Marketing & How to Get Past Them

What do you see as the biggest obstacles to video marketing? If you’re like a lot of other small- and medium-sized business owners, you’d probably say time and money.

In a 2015 B2B Video Content Marketing survey, Flimp Media and ReelSEO found that time and money were the biggest challenges holding back video production by a landslide, with 55% of respondents naming limited budget availability as a challenge, and 45% naming the time it takes to product quality content (followed by measuring the ROI of product investment, which clocked in at 37%).

There’s a mountain of stats out there that confirm that video marketing works, and if time and money are the only things standing in your way, we’re happy to share that video marketing doesn’t actually have to be as time consuming or expensive as you think. Read on for a few tips and tricks to help get past these roadblocks.

Making time for video marketing

A common misconception about video production is that it takes days, or even weeks, to create a video. As a small business marketer, you’ve already got too much on your plate to make such a time-consuming addition to your marketing strategy.

But the truth of the matter is, while some videos may take days or weeks (like complex animation or episodic web series), you can actually create professional video in a matter of hours (or even less). Here are some tips to help you create professional videos quickly:

• Repurpose photos and videos you already have. You may not need to shoot anything new, which will save you big time on the production side. Here are some places to look for photos and video clips:
  • Your Facebook page or other social pages
  • Your website
  • Customer photos on Yelp or Instagram (be sure to ask for permission to use these photos)
  • Photos that you and your co-workers have taken in  your workspace or at events
• Rather than learning to use professional editing software (which can take months, or even years, to perfect), opt for an easy-to-use DIY tool like Animoto that provides templates so you can drag and drop your way to a professional video using your photos, video clips, text and music.

Make videos on a budget

Video production also doesn’t have to be as expensive as you may think. In addition to using an affordable DIY tools (which we mentioned above), here are a few tips and tricks that can help you save money on your video production:

• Shoot photos and videos on your smartphone. It’s probably got an HD camera — take advantage of it! You don’t need to pay to buy or rent expensive gear.
• Use natural light so you don’t have to pay for a fancy lighting kit.
• If you don’t have a microphone, rather than purchasing one you can use text titles to tell your story while playing music in the background.
• Speaking of music, you don’t need to pay a ton to license great tracks. We’ve got over 2000 licensed songs in our music library for users on our Professional and Business plans.

Ready to dive into video marketing? You can find a variety of resources on our blog. Got questions? Feel free to reach out to us in the comments below or find us on Facebook or Twitter.

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