Must-Try Instagram Video Ideas for Small Businesses

Instagram Video Ideas to Post on Your Account

Now that you know about the importance of Instagram videos as well as the main video formats you can use on the platform, it’s time to take a look at the top eight video ideas for small businesses that work best.

1. Utilize the Power of Storytelling to Raise Brand Awareness

Practically every small business aims at acquiring new clients. The more clients you have, the better revenue you can achieve. However, it’s nearly impossible to find new potential clients when no one knows about your small business. 

Thus, it’s important to raise brand awareness, and creating videos that tell stories about your company, its values, principles, and products is a great way to engage your audience, spark customer interest in your small business, and drive organic growth.

Video storytelling has great power as it provides complex information and elicits emotions that create a bond between the company and its audience. Moreover, it keeps your viewers engaged, so they are more likely to watch your video.

Let’s take a look at an example from Pura Vida. The company speaks to its target audience by creating videos that tell stories about the target audience’s lifestyle that makes the right viewers feel closer to the company and therefore give their products a try.

If you want to understand whether storytelling videos work effectively for your small business, you can create a dynamic phone number and include it in your video to track what marketing channel generates leads for your business.

2. Educate Your Followers on How to Use Your Products or Services

To promote your business and acquire new clients, you need to prove to potential customers that your product can solve their pain points. The best way to do it is to create educational videos. Moreover, internet users find educational videos helpful and useful. 

67% of people believe that video content is an important educational tool, and 60% claim that online education fits their work-life balance.

To build your customer base, viewers need more than teaser videos. To spark interest in your small business, create Instagram videos that educate your followers on how to use your products or services. For example, if you run a personal training business, you can create workout video tutorials that show your expertise while helping potential clients achieve their goals, just like Tiwara did it in the example below:

Tiwara created a series of videos and uploaded them as a carousel post with the help of a video maker. He used Boosted by Lightricks (iOS & Android), which offers a wide array of templates and allows users to customize their videos with various fonts, color schemes, music, and filters that make the video content creation process easy for everyone. 

As you can see, every small business owner can create their own engaging social media videos that educate their potential customers and allow turning, interested users into paying clients.

Here’s another example of this strategy from Olivela. With an IGTV video, the company tells about the emerald trend and presents its new collection that can help fashion lovers stay trendy.

3. Take Your Followers Behind the Scenes to Increase Brand Trust

With a great number of options on the market, most consumers choose to buy from brands they trust. One of the best ways to increase brand trust is to provide your Instagram followers with authentic content that creates an emotional bond and humanizes your brand. How? Take your followers behind the scenes!

If you create overly-polished professional videos, that’s great. But if you take your phone to create behind-the-scenes videos that make your brand authentic, that’s even better. Of course, you can still show a sneak peek for a future product launch, but do not push too much on promotional video marketing.

For example, you can tell more about your founders’ lives and share personal news, just like in the example below where home decor makers tell their followers about Joanna’s pregnancy:

Obviously, there are many other ways to take your followers behind the scenes and therefore increase brand trust. 

Here are several ideas for behind-the-scenes video content:

• Upload a video interview with your CEO
• Film your typical workday
• Introduce your employees
• Show the product creation process
• Broadcast your offline event

4. Showcase Your Products in Action to Boost Sales

The more people know about your products, the more potential customers you can acquire. Moreover, social media users research and discover products in-app. 

There are over 3.2 billion social media users out there and 54% of them research products on platforms which means you can reach over a billion potential buyers if you showcase your product on Instagram.

The best way to spark interest in your products is to showcase their variety so that you can attract customers with different needs and wants. Dynamic videos allow you to showcase your products in action from various angles so that your followers can become customers without a doubt. The same applies for stop motion videos.

Here’s how Cluse uses Instagram Story videos to show its jewelry in detail!

5. Show Off Your Happy Clients to Provide Social Proof

Living in the era of paid ads and influencer endorsements, word-of-mouth marketing works best for businesses of all sizes and niches. Why? Modern customers crave social proof, so they pay close attention to peer recommendations and read customer reviews before making a purchase.

When you show your happy clients, not only can you increase customer loyalty, but you can also ease the worried minds of potential customers who are doubting whether they want to buy from you or not.

Check out an example of this strategy. The company added a product video and included a text customer review:

Want to know the best part? You can always find customer testimonial videos and record a video on a Mac to repurpose it for your Instagram account. It’s a great way to save time and effort when looking for videos with your happy customers. However, never forget to ask permission before posting this video on your profile.

6. Celebrate Your Milestones to Acquire More Clients

It’s psychologically proven that most people want to be a part of something important. This phenomenon is also known as the sense of belonging and it appears when you let your customers become a part of your business and its growth.

Another great Instagram video idea for your small business that should work is to create a video that celebrates your company’s milestones. Not only can it show your existing followers that your company is growing, but it can also help to acquire more clients as this content grabs the attention. In fact, you can also use user-generated content for such video posts, so you can be one step closer to your community.

Let’s take a look at Olipop. In honor of its milestone of 100k followers, the company made a simple animated video to congratulate its community and organized a giveaway to allow all followers to win a year’s supply of its drinks.

7. Organize an Instagram Live Stream to Engage Your Followers

Your video content should be engaging to bring great results. When it comes to making videos for your small business, running an Instagram live stream is a great way to grab your audience’s attention and engage your followers in real-time.

 The main reason is that live streaming is available for a short time and it gives your viewers an opportunity to interact with your company in real-time. Thus, small businesses can decide on the live stream topic and go live to engage Instagram followers. For example, you can show your offline event, answer customers’ questions, or tell followers how to make the most of using your products.

Before you go live, make sure that your followers know about your live stream in advance and therefore can join your broadcast. The best way to do it is to announce your Instagram live with the help of an informative Instagram post, just like in the example below:

It’s important to inform your followers about your live stream in advance, so it’s a good idea to post on Instagram with SocialBee. Not only does it allow you to add this post to your social media calendar, but it also helps to put your Instagram marketing on autopilot and therefore gives you time to get ready for your live stream. Win-win!

With SocialBee, you can have a calendar view of your social media strategy.

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8. Run Instagram Video Ad Campaigns to Reach a Wider Audience

In the last few years, Instagram has become an important marketing tool for various businesses which means the competition is getting high in-app. For small businesses, it can be daunting to cut through the noise unless you run Instagram ad campaigns. But if you want to create eye-catching ads and reach a wider audience, consider creating video ads.

Instagram advertising has a great number of features that allow small businesses to reach the right audience of potential customers with advanced targeting. Moreover, it also works as a supply-side platform (SSP) that allows you to sell to the maximum number of potential customers.

When Clif Bar decided to raise brand awareness on Instagram, the company made a series of short videos with branding for Instagram Stories. The right targeting allowed the company to reach the target audience. As a result, the campaign got a 28-point lift in ad recall, a 12-point lift in brand/product awareness, and a 6.8-point lift in purchase intent.

When running Instagram video ad campaigns, you can also include clickable links and redirect reached customers to the right website page where you can generate leads to work with hooked customers on other communication channels.

It’s Time to Develop Your Own Instagram Video Ideas!

The popularity of Instagram as a primary marketing tool for small businesses is growing. Since more and more small businesses hope for the attention of the same audience, it’s important to build an Instagram presence and create dynamic content that satisfies customers’ needs, while keeping your audience engaged. 

The solution is to create Instagram video clips that tell more about your business, market your products or services services, and turn engaged viewers into customers. Moreover, there are many Instagram video ideas for small businesses that work well if you’re afraid of wasting much time and effort on content that doesn’t bring results.

There is no time to waste: create videos and share them on Instagram with the help of tools such as SocialBee. You can also edit and schedule your post, monitor your analytics, and so much more. Start your 14-day free trial now!