Part 3: Video Content Marketing and Social Media
As we mentioned in Part 2, video content can be a great way to attract traffic and potential clients as a wedding videographer in Surrey. In this section, we'll go over some of the ways we've used video to market our business and how it's worked for us — this is not a step-by-step guide, just our experience.
I wasn't in charge of a video production company back in 2013, but I helped grow my wife's makeup business from a start-up to multiple employees in a year mainly using video content marketing, before it was widely adopted — creating video series for large companies at the time such as VideoJug, leading to an average of 3 job enquiries a day and 30,000 website hits a month.
Video content has changed dramatically since 2013, when you were almost guaranteed success if you created high quality video content and uploaded it to YouTube or your own website. In 2020 there was 500 hours worth of video content uploaded every second to YouTube alone; now with TikTok even that number has been dwarfed.
How we have found success with video content marketing: we use video to accompany written articles or as standalone content on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Even when our videos aren't reaching the thousands, we know from our couples that uploading useful content builds a connection and trust.
When Covid hit in 2020, live streaming of events became popular. We quickly produced packages for it, created a landing page with relevant keywords, and made a popular YouTube video on how to live stream your wedding. This took several weeks but led to bookings for over 40 weddings to live stream, with no paid advertising at all — just by providing value on a topic people were searching for. When weddings stopped completely, we also started live streaming funerals using the same approach, again with no paid advertising.
YouTube was successful for us in two niches: Ethiopian/Eritrean weddings and the Asian wedding market generally, more specifically Islamic weddings. We had over 30 bookings and many more enquiries from our YouTube channel (6K subscribers, but 95% of views from non-subscribers). Not many enquiries were local and we often travelled all around the UK to cover multi-day events. The issue we found was that in certain traditions the wedding is seen as a private moment, and couples weren't always keen on us uploading to YouTube — even those who agreed sometimes had pressure from family to ask for removal after a video had been seen by 100k people. From our most popular YouTube videos we've picked up at least 15 wedding bookings in the Asian wedding market.
We've found YouTube videos are easier to get to the top of search results compared to written articles, and if they're niche and being searched for, they can drive a lot of useful traffic and value. However, not all video content is successful — we've uploaded hundreds of videos that only received a few hundred or low thousands of views on YouTube and TikTok. You're at the mercy of algorithms and it feels like luck as well as skill.
So what works best? Behind-the-scenes content, funny or heartwarming wedding moments and speeches work well on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram — no one really wants to see another wedding highlight reel of someone else's wedding, they want to see genuine moments and emotions.
We recently set up a TikTok account and now have 2000 followers, with most videos getting 300-700 views. Some of our more popular videos have 200-600k views, leading to enquiries and 3 bookings. Our 3 most popular types of video content so far: 1) Wedding speeches, 2) Heartwarming moments between guests, 3) Funny dances/singing waiter surprises.
TikTok takes a lot of time and effort to get right, and works best if you're the face of the brand — something I'm still working on, as I'm much happier behind the camera or keyboard. In 2023 YouTube Shorts is definitely going to keep growing as YouTube pushes this side of the business and rewards creators with ad revenue in a way TikTok currently doesn't.
Video marketing is great, but takes a lot of time and effort to get right and you'll miss more often than you hit. Overall, the video content marketing aspect of social media has benefited our business, but it takes consistency and patience. Even if a video doesn't get a lot of views or engagement, it's still valuable for building trust and getting your name out there.
In Part 4 we expand away from video content marketing into other aspects of social media and why we haven't found success there yet, but where we see success coming from in future.