How to Market a Business from Scratch – Creating Branding Videos with Ease

Today’s topic is a continuation in our many, many parts series of marketing business from scratch, and we’re going through everything, step-by-step—we’ve come a long way in the process. We just went through how to get the website designed and then get the content produced. 

The focus for today is around video and then how to leverage those videos to produce other pieces of content and why this is going to be a really important strategy to start now before you start some of the other tactics that we’re going to talk about in the near future.

So, video content, in particular, is the best content that you could produce for this new childcare business. The reason it’s the best is that while writing content and doing images and things like that is helpful, nothing can hold a candle to video and whether that video is done live or its video that is done pre-scheduled are things with iPhones, and we’ll talk about some of that. 

I’m not going to get into all the logistics of them and here’s the exact camera to use the video strategy that I want to think about is more around branding this business. And when you’re opening up a new business, and again, we’re leveraging the childcare example, branding and getting your name out there is absolutely essential. It’s a much better play and you’re going to get much more action, press, comments, and shares with putting a video out on social media and other places. 

Here’s what I want you to do with videos, and kind of how to start the process. So, the disclaimer that I’m going to give you is that part of this is not my strategy. I always give credit where credit’s due but then the other part is something that I’ve been using for quite some time. 

The first thing that I’m going to want you to do to create nine videos might be simple. You might ask, “Michael, I mean, are you crazy? I haven’t even created one video. So, what the heck am I going to create for nine.” 

While I said I’m not going to get into video equipment, the good news is this can be done using an iPhone or Android phone. Natural lighting if you have it or you can buy some diffused lighting—there’s plenty of lighting and all the different local places around Amazon, for example, to improve your lighting. 

I’m a big fan of the road wireless microphones and I can put a link in the show notes. That’s all that you need to start to move this strategy forward. These nine videos are meant to be engaging and they’re meant to kind of take people through the process of why are you doing, what you do, how, and what. 

It’s taking them through the awareness stage into the engagement stage and down into a conversion that leads to either a tour—a virtual tour phone leads something along those lines. This was started by a gentleman named Dennis, a great guy, whom I have shot a bunch of videos with. He created this three-by-three video grid and it’s my favorite strategy for starting branding, in a really cost-effective way. 

The first three are all going to be awareness-driven videos, the Y-videos, the second three videos, two videos four or five-six there—the engagement videos or the how. And on the final three are the conversion videos, or the “what”? So nine videos and they’re all meant to be short videos that allow people to move forward in the process—awareness. 

The first step and this is the most important step with a new business is we got to create awareness. They need to be the why videos—start with why and this should be your passion in stories and “Hey, everyone, I’m starting this child care center. Here’s why I’m starting this child care center. I have kids and I wanted to have a great place for them to go.” Give that whole story—the story stuff that we talked about earlier as well. You could refer back to in your earlier days, for example, and you could talk about the first time that you took your kids to the preschool or to the childcare center and talk about how that experience kind of helped drove you into starting this business awareness videos—story-driven videos—there’s always going to be stories or multiple stories about how this child care center is coming to fruition. 

By relating the story those families are in, they’re going to develop an emotional connection with the “why” of the business, they’re gonna want to then connect on a deeper level with your upcoming brand. 

These videos then are, they’re really around helping those parents understand your business, develop a relationship, and just start to relate. It’s all about building that relationship. So you could shoot those short videos with your iPhone and then in future episodes, I’m going to tell you where you’re going to run them. You’re going to run them on places like Facebook ads, for example, where you’re going to get really low cost, branding, and engagement. 

The next three videos are all about engagement—we’re designing these so that you can start to share your expertise online. You want to be able to record kind of a how-to video and maybe that’s how to stop a baby from screaming, how to sanitize toys like you want to be putting out helpful content, rather than this is how you engage with our center, that this is a helpful content that’s going to be kind of put out so that your audience is really gaining a positive connotation about you and your brand and it’s going to help them be more receptive to future interactions. 

You’re going to share tips, ideas, tactics, how to deal with stress as a parent, and other helpful things. Those sets of videos are the ones that most people don’t want to do. Those are absolutely critical to get to the next final three videos. And that is about the “what”—what do you offer? 

We’ve got a new childcare center, we’re opening an XYZ time, for example. So you can finally start to talk about promoting your services, such as scheduling, the tour, you can run specials, you can offer founding family discounts and all those different kinds of things. So you’re able to then transition people now here’s the piece that’s a little bit technical, but you want to make sure that when someone watches your first y-video, they’re then going to see the other y-videos, and then be able to start getting nudged to the “how” videos. 

You want to make sure that people are seeing the videos kind of in-sequence. You want to make sure that as prospects are consuming those, they can then continue to kind of go down the pipeline. 

So, they’re able to see the “why”, the “how”, and then finally, the “what” videos and you’re able to leverage different tools and technology and things like that. I love to see these short, one-minute or 90-seconds on the high side—it’s a great place to start. 

Lastly, these videos should be unique—they should be different, they shouldn’t be a continuation. So you’re creating the three different live videos and you’re able to test kind of which story is performing the best. You don’t need fancy lights or graphics sets. Literally, just a smartphone and just a minute of insightful content. That’s it. And what I want you to do, then as you start to get in the zone of producing these is that you’re then able to get more comfortable with shooting more content. 

You can start to do more branding videos, and you can start to do more helpful tips and look at doing Facebook Lives and things like that, but I want you to do these videos first. So. nine short videos that you’ll have that we can then start to get out in the universe and start to get your brand out there in already and pretty swiftly start to drive phone calls in leads well before your childcare center is open. 

Get out there, make a change, and take some action.