Your business has a great service or product. You know that, I know that, and your customer will know that – as soon as they discover you.

But as a small business owner, you are familiar with one of the biggest challenges you face: marketing. Doing it well can be expensive, slow and confusing. There are thousands of articles that tell you to just ‘get on TikTok’ or ‘post to Facebook’ without giving you the context you need to actually do those things in a way that doesn’t waste your time or energy.

You’re facing a limited budget, gaps in brand awareness, big competitors, and difficulty with even measuring what works and what doesn’t. You don’t have the luxury of just posting until something magically works.

One of the best ways to reach your audience cheaply and quickly is through video marketing. Research shows there’s a strong correlation between video marketing and customer purchase intent. What’s more, short-form videos are the most engaging types of social media posts, according to audience preferences.

Committing to creating a steady stream of videos, however, can feel like a lot, especially if you’re already stretched thin. Luckily, there are plenty of video creation tools to help make your job easier, faster and more enjoyable.

1. Trend-fuelled ideation with RightRelevance

Not sure where to start with video marketing? The worst thing you can do is post video content based on your gut feel, without validating your ideas using data. That’s a recipe for wasting time and energy. Especially as a small business, you can’t afford that.

Instead, take a more analytical approach with a resource called RightRelevance. Say you’re a small business that sells speciality board games. RightRelevance shows you trending topics, videos and similar content related to board games.

You can see who shared these videos and even filter by geo-location.

This helps you come up with video topics that are likely to appeal to your target audience, based on video content that’s already successful. RightRelevance is free to use as a research tool.

2. Brand consistency with Visme

What’s one thing that almost every multi-channel marketing expert will tell you to do? Be consistent.

That obviously breaks down into a lot of facets, such as consistent brand colours, consistent posting schedules and consistent topics. But one of the easiest to get right is a consistent video intro.

If you’re working on a budget (and let’s be real, what small business marketer isn’t?) creating branded, reusable video intros using a tool like Visme is one of the best ways to save money and time, while making your content look more professional.

It’s an easy tool to use and there’s a free tier if you want to take it for a spin.

3. Visual pop with Videoleap

You have some content ideas and you’ve got your branded intro. What’s next? The video itself, of course. All small businesses face major time constraints, as there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done.

Videoleap can make your time go further by helping you easily create and then reuse your video content time and time again.

You can use the platform’s community-shared video templates to quickly throw together some content that has high production value. Videoleap supports some really nifty special video effects that you can use to make your video stand out and by using templates, you can benefit from the soundtrack syncing, fancy cuts and visual effect setups that others have worked hard on.

Create your video using Videoleap, and then repost it onto TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or even your own blog. It comes with a free trial.

4. Repurposing audio with Headliner

To help make sure your content investments pay off, you need to reuse it in new formats across channels. A great way to do that is to turn audio content into video. This lets you post in more places where your audience might be hanging out, without very much work. For example, you might record a podcast, then upload your podcast as a video to Twitter and YouTube.

A tool like Headliner gives you a few options to do that. You can upload the audio and just add some video to make it more engaging for a listener. You also have the option of adding text to make your video content more accessible.

The very best thing about Headliner is how convenient it is. You can automatically hook up your podcast to YouTube, for example, and import your entire back catalogue with just a click. Headliner will keep automatically importing and publishing your podcast onto YouTube with some jazzy visuals as long as you want it to. Save time, reuse content and rely on tools that help you automate workflows.

Headliner has some great pricing options, and you can even go for free forever, though it caps you at five monthly unwatermarked videos and ten minutes of transcription.

5. Easy editing with TikTok

You may think of TikTok as merely a time-wasting app. Without careful vigilance, it can become that. But it can also be a great free tool for your small business marketing team. This platform has revolutionised video marketing forever by making it free, easy, and even fun to create short videos.

You’ll notice that this list doesn’t contain Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere or any of the other ‘professional’ video-making tools that cost a fortune and are hard to learn. TikTok’s user interface is intuitive and simple. It has a short learning curve, so you’ll quickly be posting with the best of them.

Not sure where to get started? Go back to RightRelevance, find the right topic in your niche and get inspired with the popular content.

Video creation doesn’t have to be an expensive hassle

We all know that especially in times of economic downturn, marketing budgets are one of the first things to get cut. Your shoestring budget has been whittled down to a thread. You’re wearing so many hats, you may as well be a milliner. This list of tools aims to help you streamline, automate and expedite your video creation as much as possible.

These tools can help stretch your budget, give you back some of your time and make major parts of your job fun and enjoyable again.

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How small businesses should structure a video marketing campaign