Video - Jonathan Potton and Gabriel Lunte, Chillbox Creative

From left to right: Gabriel Lunte, Jonathan Potton and Milon Tesiram of Chillbox Creative.

This week, Small Business editor Caitlin Sykes talks to business owners about video.

Jonathan Potton is managing director and Gabriel Lunte is a content creator at Chillbox Creative, a small Auckland-based business that offers video production services.

What are you seeing small businesses using video for?

Gabriel: There are a lot of different uses, but if you take it back to basics it's a way of communicating messages to interested parties - whether that's a customer base, employees or for recruitment purposes. For smaller businesses we're generally seeing them produce video content that's customer facing. So, for example, that might be a website video that explains what the company does, or as content for their Facebook page.

Jonathan: We are seeing businesses opting more and more to produce video content over written material, because people seem to be engaging with it more - particularly younger people. It's also a way that business owners are getting in front of their audiences, because when people see and hear someone from a business I think it gives the viewer a greater sense of what the business is and stands for. It helps build trust and rapport with an audience.

What should small business owners be thinking about if they want to create engaging video content?

Gabriel: For most purposes we find it's best to keep the message short and simple. There's no story too complex to be simplified, and if you're having a hard time keeping your message simple you probably haven't quite nailed what your message is and need to put more thought into it. Ultimately you want your message to come through before people have had the time to think about clicking away. Particularly if you're looking at posting your video on Facebook, the first three seconds are really important because that's really the window you have to grab someone's attention with Facebook's video autoplay function before they've scrolled away.

Jonathan: You also need to be respectful of your audience. Particularly among younger people engaging with content online, the idea of a captive audience doesn't really exist anymore. They're really careful and selective about the content they engage with, so anything you're putting out there first and foremost has to have value to the viewer. If there's nothing there that's entertaining, informative or useful to the viewer they're going to choose to go elsewhere. People want to leave with more than they had going in.

How about engaging people with video content once it's produced? How do you get people to watch it?

Jonathan: You have to go where your audience is, and that's why it's so important to marry up your content with the distribution platform you're targeting. Often we see people saying 'let's do a video' and once they've produced it they'll ask 'now what do we do with it?', but you have to have that strategy from the outset. There is such a variety of ways you can distribute content online now, so you really want to figure out which ones you can take best advantage of so you get the best return on your investment.

We are seeing some people click on to that idea now, and instead of making one piece of collateral to serve a number of purposes they're creating separate pieces of collateral to serve specific purposes. So, for example, if someone is looking at video for recruiting purposes, instead of making one overall video explaining why their company is so good to work for, they're making separate videos that are tailored to specific areas of the recruitment market.

Gabriel: I also think the long tail adds up. People often say 'let's get this video going viral', and if you can do that of course it's great, but there's no proven formula to do that time and again. However, if you're targeting niche markets and you're able to narrow in on who you're targeting, then a lot of little audiences add up over time. Every view matters, so I think the real value is going to be in recurring content and keeping that presence up.