Small Business Has Advantage Over Larger Companies with Live Video Leverage

One of the biggest challenges for small business in the past has been to get their message to the marketplace. Live video and social media now make it so much easier to deliver this message. I think a small business now has such an advantage over larger companies for a couple of reasons.

Read on for the full transcript:

Ryan Steinolfson here. I hope you're doing well. I'm coming to you live from Ubud. Let me just give you my backdrop here, from Ubud, Bali. In the rice fields here, I'm consulting with a client. There you go, there's my backdrop.

I help brands leverage live video, in order to get their message to the market and that's actually what I wanted to talk about, just briefly today because one of the biggest challenges my agency has come up against, for years with small businesses, with local business, is their challenge to get their message to the marketplace.

They don't have the budgets that large brands have and so, a lot of times what happens is, they have to bootstrap and what this means is that, they just don't have the reach. They can't reach as many people or haven't been able to reach as many people in the past. They haven't been able to, get their message to the marketplace. Reach the right types of people and that really has changed with social media, and I just wanted to give you some examples.

I like to leverage live video, in everything that I do. One of the things that I like to use live video for, is to do exactly what I was just stating with you. Is to help businesses get their message to their market and that really is what has shifted. The ability for businesses, large and small to use it. But I would submit to you that large businesses are not able to leverage live video, at least not from my experience. They have not been able to really leverage live video to the extent that small businesses can because they have more red tape.

They have more people that they have to get approval from and I've seen this in my agency. We've worked with many large businesses and we've tried to get them to do live video and if it's the marketing department, they have to get approval from the VP of marketing and everything has to be approved. They have real concerns. I mean, you know this has been going on for a long time.

These are all things that we've been talking about for a while. Which is, things like copyright. Well, what if there's music playing in the background? Or you see somebody else that's in the background and their face is showing. Well, we might be held liable as a large company and so, large companies are very reluctant to start doing live video and if they do it's very controlled.

The reason why that actually does favor the small business is because when, from my experience, I've done video that has been a little bit out there. Where I, for example, strap my phone to my forehead when I went kite surfing. Those were the most engaging videos because they were different and when you have as a marketing person, for a larger company, the challenge of not being able to do things like that, it's significantly limits your ability to reach your audience and to create engaging content.

So, the benefit as a small company is that you can get away with a lot more. You can do more things 'cause you don't have to go and get approval from upper-level management. You know, you can go live and do different things, like one of the things that we're gonna do in the next few days here, is we're gonna go on a road trip. And one of the guys that I'm working with here, they really wanna build their brand and what better place to do it than here in Bali and to highlight that by going live, from our motorcycles when we're road tripping it around the island of Bali, along the coast.

You know, then to create engaging content like that without having to worry about all the other stuff that's going on ... Not to say that we're not gonna consider that, obviously we are but there's just fewer obstacles in the way and there's more opportunity from my experience, in working with both small businesses than larger businesses. That you can't even really compare, I mean there's such a vast difference because of the two reasons that I just mentioned.

Number one again because of the red tape, because of the approval you have to get. Number two because of the concern of offending somebody or copyright issues, or getting somebody on camera that didn't wanna be on camera and the liability that might be there. Not to say that you don't want to consider that. It's just that it's much more acceptable for a small company to leverage this type of a medium and not only this, like live video but any time of medium.

Go ahead and message me on my Facebook Messenger, my Chatbot, go to M.me/goliveRyan. Let me know any questions you have. Thanks!