The short answer
Video earns its place where a customer is deciding whether to trust you: your Google Business Profile, your home page, the replies you send to enquiries, and the social channels you already use. You don’t need a channel or a stream of content. You need one good film, with one clear thing to say, in the places people already look. If you can’t name that one thing, or anywhere to put the film, wait.
People who sell video will tell you it always works. People who’ve paid for a film that sat unwatched will tell you it never does. Both are describing the same thing from different ends. This article is about the middle: when a short film helps a small business, when it doesn’t, and how to tell which one you’ve got.
What a film does that photos don’t
Good photos already do a lot. A film adds three things that a row of photos struggles with.
Order. A film tells things in sequence: here’s the problem, here’s what we did, here’s how to reach us. A gallery leaves the visitor to work out the story, and most won’t.
A voice. Someone saying “we cover the whole of the Wirral, and we’ll give you a fixed price before we start” lands differently from the same words in a paragraph. It’s the closest a website gets to a phone call.
Scale and place. A yard, a quarry face, a walk from a holiday cottage to the water: these are hard to judge from a single frame. Moving between shots gives a sense of size and distance.
What a film doesn’t add is proof you don’t have. If your photos are thin, your film will be too.
Where it pays off for local businesses
The businesses that get most from a short film tend to have something a customer wants to see before they ring.
- A scrap metal merchant, where a new customer wants to know the yard is easy to get into and the weighbridge is real. BP Recycling Solutions in Cannock is one example.
- A holiday let, where guests want to picture the place before they book. Bowness Retreats in Bowness-on-Windermere is another.
- An electrician or builder, where finished jobs are the proof. TM Electrical in Bangor, County Down, has a 30-second film, which is a useful length because it fits on a Google Business Profile.
In each case the film answers a question the customer already has. That’s the test to apply to your own business: what does someone want to see before they pick up the phone?
When it doesn’t help
Video isn’t worth it in every case. Be honest with yourself about these four.
No clear message. If the brief is “make us look good”, the film will be a montage that says nothing. Decide the one thing first.
Nowhere to put it. A film that lives only in a folder on your laptop does nothing. Before you make one, name at least three places it will go.
A channel you won’t keep up. Plans built on posting a new video every week tend to stop at week three, and a social account that went quiet in March looks worse than one that never started. One film used well beats a schedule you’ll drop.
The wrong job for video. If customers choose you on price alone, or come entirely through a trade directory that doesn’t show video, a film may not change much. Spend the money on the thing that does.
Start with one film, not a channel
The most useful first step is one short film, between 30 and 60 seconds, used in many places.
Length matters for practical reasons. Google’s help pages say a Business Profile video can be up to 30 seconds long, up to 75 MB and 720p or higher. Instagram lets you record reels much longer than that, but says reels over three minutes won’t be recommended to new audiences. A short film fits everywhere; a long one fits almost nowhere.
Shape matters too. YouTube’s standard on a computer is landscape (16:9), and phone apps are built around portrait. If you’re having a film made, ask for both shapes, each laid out for its own screen, rather than one cropped from the other.
Then put it to work:
- Your Google Business Profile.
- The top of your home page, or the page for your main service.
- Your social accounts, pinned where you can.
- Your replies to enquiries and quotes, as a link.
- Print, through a QR code on a van, flyer or shop window.
How to tell whether it’s working
You’ll see plenty of statistics claiming video lifts sales by some large percentage. Most come from companies that sell video, and you can’t check how they were measured. Ignore them, and measure your own.
Before the film goes up, note four numbers for the last month:
- views of your Business Profile, and calls and website clicks from it (Google shows these in the profile’s performance figures);
- enquiries through your website;
- visits to the page where the film will go;
- how many new customers said they found you online.
After a month or two, check the same numbers, and look for these as well:
- how many people played the film, on each platform where you posted it;
- whether anyone mentions it (“I saw the video of your yard”);
- whether enquiries come in better informed, for example asking about the specific job shown.
None of this proves cause and effect, because seasons and word of mouth move numbers too. But it’s your evidence, on your business, and it beats a vendor’s percentage.
Questions to ask before you spend anything
- What’s the one thing a customer should remember?
- Where will the film live, and who will put it there?
- Do we have real photos or footage of our work, our place and our people?
- Do we need it in both shapes?
- What will we count, and when will we check?
If you can answer all five, video is probably worth it for you. If you’re stuck on the first two, sort those out before anything else.
If you’d rather not make it yourself, VideoWorks makes 30 and 60 second films for small businesses, from £299 + VAT. You can watch some on the films page.
