How You Can Start A Vlog & Why It Is Good For Your Business

Vlog is the short form of video blogs or logs. Vlogging is basically blogging with videos. You create video contents & share your views, ideas, experience etc. in these videos, instead of writing them up in a blog. Vlogging had become a famous phenomenon, during the 2000s, with the rise of video-sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. Nowadays social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are promoting more and more video content.

The recent fallout of vlogging can be credited to the easiness of the process & convenience of it. Anyone with a mobile can make videos & upload them on their social media account & share it with friends. You can put so much information in just a 2-minute video. Nowadays almost everyone in social media would prefer watching a video. It would make sense to go for media where you can get all the information you need within the smallest possible amount of time, plus you get to enjoy some visual & auditory presentation. For this reason, vlogging has become a lucrative form of media marketing. 

Hardwares you will need for vlogging

Vlogging is actually pretty easy. If you have a phone with a medium-range camera, you can easily do indoor vlogging. With better phone cameras, you can do outdoors & low lights as well. But if you plan on professional vlogging, you will need to get some good gear for your vlogging. Webcams can be used for vlogging in an indoor setting. But it’s best to opt for a high-end Vlogging camera if you are serious about vlogging. 

Vlogging Cameras offer a wide range of manoeuvrability- indoor, outdoor, low-light, high exposure, live-shot etc. You will also need to get a good microphone for better audio quality. If you are shooting outdoors you will need to have one with a specific noise-cancelling effect. For indoor shoots where you want to highlight a product or a person for marketing, you will need to have a light setup.

Platforms

As you can guess, the biggest vlogging platform for you is obviously YouTube. With 500 hours of video being uploaded every minute, this is definitely the largest video platform for any type of user. After YouTube, sites like DailyMotion & Vimeo are some of the largest video platforms.

Now let’s delve into the most modern mode of vlogging- social media. 

With Facebook launching its live video feature in 2016, digital marketing faced a revolution like no other. Now you can go live anywhere, anytime, share your views or promote a product. Twitter, allowing users to post videos no more than 2 minutes 20 seconds, made famous the concept of micro-vlogging. 

Instagram & Snapchat mainly allow micro-vlogging with caps on the length of the videos, while allowing various features like stickers, emojis etc. Social media platforms let you reach your audience like none other.

How it can help your business

Marketing is a major issue for any business. You can hire multiple marketing consultants, spend loads of money on conventional branding & somehow still not achieve the amount of outreach you would want. With the turning of time, you will have to adapt to new techniques & technologies. Vlogging can be one of those steps you take to promote your business. So how it can help your business?

Convenience

As we have discussed earlier, the biggest selling point for vlogging is its convenience. The amount of information you can give about your products & services in just one vlog, you will need to write several blogs about it. Customers prefer videos for the same reason. It gives them more information about your product in a short time. So it’s just convenient for both parties if the business use vlogs for promotion.

It’s low cost

With the litany of items, I mentioned in the hardware section, you are probably thinking how is it low cost? Well, I also mentioned you can do it using just your mobile phone. And most of the vloggers do use their mobile phone for vlogging. So if you are just starting your business, you can easily use your phone to promote what you are selling online.

For big companies, vlogging can be seen as diversification marketing & they can mostly afford the initial cost of buying high-end gears.

For the love of SEO!

SEO or search engine optimisation is a big deal if you are trying to promote your business online. It’s the only way you can stay relevant to search results. To improve your search ranking, you can do various stuff. One of the determinants can be the amount of quality video content on your website. Google & other search engines while crawling on your site look for video backlinks or presence of video contents. You will have better results adding the transcript of the video, with keywords, on the website. 

Personal Touch

You can always go to an ad agency and get a short ad, that’s better in terms of quality than your vlog. But one thing these agencies wouldn’t be able to show is how you feel about the product. On a personal vlog, you get to decide how you are going to show your own product. You can describe its benefits like none other. This personal touch could turn your vlog something that no amount of ads can ever achieve for you.

Social media and a broader audience

Social media has a vastly untapped potential of marketing. With billions of users around the world, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ are becoming like a global village. Now, not only could you reach domestic consumers, but you can also reach the foreign ones. One vlog can reach a million people’s news feed within seconds. This is creating a unique marketing opportunity for new businesses, that want faster outreach. 

You also get multiple audience groups by vlogging. Anyone, starting from a kid to an illiterate person, can understand a video. You wouldn’t have this vast customer base if you were using blogs or other mediums to promote your business. 

Promoting a business can be a costly venture if you follow the path of traditional marketing. Try diversifying, using social media & other platforms to spread the word. And what better medium to do that other than vlogs!