A Brief Update on Video Marketing for 2022

Con­trac­tors! Are you ready to up your con­tent mar­ket­ing game? It’s time to get into videos.

My clients know how hard I push for qual­i­ty pho­tos. You’ve got to take those pics and make it part of your whole job process. That’s still key, but videos are becom­ing just as (maybe even more!) impor­tant these days. 

If you find peo­ple in your indus­try who are crush­ing it on social media, you’re going to find a LOT of videos on their accounts. On Insta­gram in par­tic­u­lar Reels are wild­ly pop­u­lar, giv­ing you a short-form plat­form for get­ting in front of peo­ple in a quick and cre­ative way. 

But before we get into the uses, I need to pump the brakes. As a busy busi­ness own­er myself I know exact­ly what you’re think­ing and feel­ing: ​“Okay, this all sounds good, but how do I make the time, and isn’t video mar­ket­ing crazy expen­sive if it’s done well?”

Two types of video mar­ket­ing for contractors

Think of your video mar­ket­ing efforts as two buckets:

• Buck­et 1: rou­tine social media content

• Buck­et 2: pol­ished videos

It is SO EASY to over­think Buck­et 1. Have some­one on your team cap­ture 8 sec­onds of a painter spray­ing a door. Take a 6‑second video of a rooftop view while you’re lay­ing shin­gles. Take a quick video walk­ing through a bath­room you just remodeled. 

Just grab the video. Short, quick, and easy. You have more tech­no­log­i­cal pow­er in your smart­phone than NASA had to land on the moon. Don’t over­think it. As long as your video rep­re­sents you well (no safe­ty con­cerns, messy job­site, pro­fan­i­ty, etc.), cap­ture the con­tent and start post­ing. You’ll see what peo­ple respond to most and then you can go and get more of it. 

Buck­et 2 is the pol­ished videog­ra­phy used for spe­cif­ic mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es. If you’re going to pay for ad place­ment on TV or a stream­ing ser­vice, obvi­ous­ly you want a high-qual­i­ty video with good light­ing, edit­ing, voiceover work, etc.

Get­ting start­ed with video marketing

Keep these ideas in mind:

• Local TV sta­tions will typ­i­cal­ly pro­vide your com­mer­cial spots free of charge if you com­mit to a cer­tain spend. If you real­ly don’t want to pro­duce it your­self, or man­age your own video pro­duc­tion, work with the local TV folks. Qual­i­ty can be a hit or a miss, so def­i­nite­ly look at exam­ples they have pro­duced and make sure you work with a good script writer!

• Hire a local video­g­ra­ph­er to shoot a cou­ple spots for you. I’d keep it sim­ple to start and ask the firm to give you sev­er­al options for fin­ished com­mer­cials that are :15 and :30 sec­onds. You can then take these videos and look at a few ways to mar­ket them: YouTube Ads, Face­book, or OTT (stream­ing devices). You can even deliv­er these to a TV provider to use.

• YouTube tip: one of the cool things about YouTube video adver­tis­ing is that you can use skip­pable or non-skip­pable ads. When you do a skip­pable ad, you only get charged when some­one watch­es the :30 spot. This is a great way to see how well your com­mer­cial is work­ing — test and verify!

• Cre­ate ​“shorts” for social media, like I out­lined above (Buck­et 1). Reels, YouTube shorts, sto­ries, and Tik­Tok are all pow­er­ful tools, but just remem­ber to keep your audi­ence and goals in mind. For exam­ple, if you’re cre­at­ing con­tent for 55-year-olds with plen­ty of dis­pos­able income, you prob­a­bly won’t find them on Tik­Tok. Face­book would be a bet­ter fit. But if you have an awe­some hir­ing video and you’re try­ing to attract new appren­tices, Tik­Tok would be an ide­al plat­form for launch­ing your recruit­ing efforts.

The take­away?

Video adver­tis­ing is more afford­able and acces­si­ble these days than in pre­vi­ous years, depend­ing on the plat­form where you are pro­mot­ing your brand. For a long, long time, tra­di­tion­al TV was out of most of my clients’ league. It was only for the very large firms who could do a few com­mer­cials. I now have quite a few cus­tomers using all sorts of video on cable TV, stream­ing ser­vices, YouTube, Hulu, Face­book, and more for $500 – 12,000+ a month (depend­ing on goals).

Let me know how you’ve been using more video in your marketing.