The Internet and video are becoming ever more important vehicles for small business promotion. It makes sense to me that the best product I can offer right now with my skill set, experience, and passion, is to make local small business videos. Why?
- First off, I love small business. On second thought, I don’t love small business. Love is something I have for my wife and children. However, I do spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about small business, so the desire to make them do well is there.
- I’ve owned and managed small businesses, so I know the struggles and constraints, the laughter the tears, the fun of it all.
- I produce videos, nice videos, so I can do the job and do it well.
- I specialized in marketing in university, which means less than you think, but people like paper work, especially fancy pieces of paper that you can hang on a wall.
I produce all sorts of videos, including promotional videos, as a subcontractor for video production companies. With a website, camera gear, and the right connections, I can be my own production company. The biggest thing holding me back was that I know it takes a lot of ground work and promotional effort to get your name out there and to set up shop. Once you get going, producing the videos is straight forward, it is something I already do.
In a sense, this plan is a mini business plan.
- I need to have financials in mind in terms of how much revenue I plan to bring in and how much expenses I will need to incur to get that revenue.
- I also need to have a marketing plan to attract the customers and figure out a pricing strategy.
- I need an operational plan that will outline how I will produce the videos and with what gear.
Marketing Plan
Identification of Need
When thinking of a new business idea, I usually start with the marketing, since if there’s no market for the product, their is no point in trying to make a business out of it. I’ve always felt video was a powerful communication medium and can pack more punch per viewer minute than text or photos. However, distributing videos usually made it too expensive for the producer or time consuming for the consumer. Previously, to get your videos seen by the public, you had to put it on TV. That’s expensive and not very focused. You could also mail it out in a physical format such as a CD or DVD. Again, expensive, but more focused. Although, what consumer would go through the hassle of popping in that CD or DVD. Only that consumers who was interested in your product or service.
With this new-fangled thing called the Internet, the landscape for videos changed, but not that drastically at first. It was expensive to have video online, the quality sucked, it took long to load, and that’s if you had the right software on your computer. It wasn’t great. Fast forward to 2010 and it is much different. Online video is everywhere. The greatest example is Youtube. It’s free, fast, has adjustable quality, and plays on most every computer and mobile device.
The demand for online videos is growing, and video is now a truly accessible and viable solution for small businesses trying to promote themselves. You have articles like this and guys like this talking about the growth of online video. That’s only two sources. I’ve read, but more importantly seen, hundreds of examples and there is no doubt that this is a growing sector, and more importantly, a great way for small businesses to promote themselves.
Marketing Strategy
Online. That’s the main crux of the strategy. Push eyeballs to an online website that focuses on promoting the small business videos that I produce. I have a url for a website, www.smallbizvids.ca. The more important part of having that website is getting traffic. That will be done in a variety of ways.
- Be active in the online community. Post articles on other websites with link backs to the smallbizvids.ca website. This not only gets traffic, but just as important, increases the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking getting me more targeted traffic, when someone searches for small business videos in a search engine like Google. I have sites that I currently post on which are the BCPVA (BC Professional Videographers Association) and this site (Small Business Doer).
- Be active in the offline community aka the real world. Attend networking meetings and events. This will help me connect with small businesses in the target market I want. One thing I want to do for the www.smallbusinessdoer.com site is to do interviews with small business owners, having them share their experience and expertise. This will help get links, traffic, and awareness to the small business videos that I offer.
- Initial product launch. Have a fantastic initial offer to do up 3 videos for companies. They get great value for the dollar and it will help build up a portfolio for my site.
Pricing Strategy
This one I debated with myself for a long time. I’ve come down to $1,000 for a basic, but fantastic, video. This is a half-day shoot in one location with one camera and would include the editing into a 30 second to 2 minute online video. Extra things, such as a second camera, voice over, actors, stock photography or footage, motion graphics, would be more. I liked the $1,000 price as I felt it makes the video a great value to a small business owner and would be a good wage for me for a days worth of work. My goal is that I’ll be able to deliver a product that is worth $2,000 for the price of $1,000. I plan to do this by keeping what I offer very focused as well as being very good at what I do. I want to be so good at this that it takes me less time to do the local small business video than the other video companies and produces better results.
Operational Plan
This largely involves getting the right equipment. The actual work is no different than what I already do with video production. The equipment I need is a HDSLR camera that shoots video (for those sexy film-like shots) and an editing system that can handle the HD footage. I spent several months researching this and finally took the plunge in July to get this equipment. Luckily, I already have access to a lot of additional equipment (microphone, tripod, lights) and only needed to make upgrades to my editing system. So the total cost was easily less than half, probably a third of what I would have had to pay if starting from scratch.
Financial Plan
The difficult thing for me was to define what time frame I wanted to give for recouping my investment in money and time. I figure that in 6 months, I would need to pull in double the amount that it cost me to pursue the local small business videos plan in order for me to consider it a worthwhile investment.
The video production equipment that I have planned to spend is roughly $6,000, give or take $1,000. As mentioned previously, the total value of equipment I will use is $15,000, but since I already have or have access to the additional equipment, I have that advantage of not having to shell out the additional $9,000.
This means that in 6 months, I would have to take in $12,000, which is 12 videos. In other words, 2 videos worth $2,000 a month. Not a crazy target.
How does this make sense in contrast to what I’m already doing with my subcontracted work?
I make $50 an hour when doing subcontract work for other people. I anticipate the small business production will take me 10 hours of work. So, as a subcontractor I would make $500, as a producer I make $1,000. I double the rate I make. However, I also increase the costs, as noted in the additional equipment investment, I have to spend time and money on marketing, and have to spend time organizing the shoots. I’ve purposely made the shoots a simple half-day shoot affair, so that this will be minimal.
In the end, the first 6 months I’m no better off than if I had done the work as a subcontractor. After that, the extra money is gravy, as long as I get the business :)
Conclusion of the Local Small Business Video Plan
This is somethings that I’ve jumped into and decided to pursue. The pressure will really be on to get a website up and running and get those initial contracts. I will have to spend a lot of time at the start to get this setup, and then continue to spend time on this to maintain it. I will need an action plan for all the steps I’ll need to take, which will be in a upcoming post.
Hi, i'd love to know how it's going! I am in 100 Mile House BC and starting to help small local biz with their marketing efforts. I plan to help make videos for them too, although much less high tech (Kodak Zi8) but haven't done any yet. As I progress through developing my biz plan i realize i am going into marketing, not just internet marketing. Any thoughts?
Hi Bill,What are you specifically looking to know? There are a lot of topics for discussion, from starting your business, to marketing (and more specifically Internet marketing), and what you alluded to, which was producing videos.The video gear that I have literally costs 100 times what the Kodak Zi8, so what I do in terms of video would be a lot different than what you could do. That being said, people have used inexpensive cameras like that to post videos online and have had great success, as it was the content that mattered, not the video quality.
[...] I set to answer in July. After a year in business working primarily as a sub-contractor for others, I’ve decided to make the leap and start taking on more work of my own. This doesn’t mean that I’ll stop doing sub-contracting work, but it does mean [...]