5 Tips to Make Your Marketing Video More Persuasive

The key to any good marketing content is to persuade people to do something concrete and positive. For a landing page that could mean getting customers to move through the sales funnel and purchase a product from something they see on social media.

If you are creating a marketing video, of course you want it to have to have an impact. You want to influence, to move your customer in a certain direction or prompt a direct response such as picking up the phone and giving your business a call. (more…)

How to Make a Great Film to Attract Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a powerful tool that can be used to raise money for any project or business venture. The internet is full of success stories of start-ups around the world that began by attracting this kind of investment from the general public.

As you might expect, how you pitch your idea will often determine the amount of crowdfunding you end up getting. There’s no doubt that producing a great video to explain your project and get people motivated can make a big difference in the level of funding you are able to raise.

But how do you make a great crowdfunding film? Here are our top tips: (more…)

Basic Tips for Your Video Marketing Strategy

Most marketers will admit that video is an important part of a marketing strategy, most of them don’t really have a clear plan on how to use it.  Making those videos is on the to-do list but there’s other stuff to handle first.

So, this means if you have a marketing strategy for video, you are likely ahead of your competition.

Video stats back up how important this is.  In 2018, over 80 percent of businesses were using video in their marketing plans, an increase from 63% in 2017.  And people spend a third of their time watching online video content, which also increases ad spending.  In fact, over 80% of people have decided to buy something just based on a video. So how do you create a strategy?

Audience awareness and campaign goals

The fundamentals of a video marketing strategy are two – awareness of what your audience would want from you and goals for the campaign.  Audience research is paramount – what kind of video content does your audience want?  Where do they watch it?  How long should it be?  Getting these basics in place is very important or you risk making the wrong content.

As far as campaign goals, think about who you want to reach and what you want them to do.  Should the aim be to get clicks from social media to a website?  Do you want to make money from ads on the video?  Or is it about raising brand awareness?  Setting goals at the outset help guide what you do.

Ensure videos are branded and consistent

Next is the planning stage and there are two things here to remember.  All of your videos should be branded so that people start to recognise them.  If you use a shot of yourself or a staff member in a certain place, that can be a useful element of branding.  But even visuals, music and having a logo can be important.

Consistent video content has a 20% higher success rate than random, varied content.  An example of consistency is that all videos have a link to your website or a landing page and have on-brand creative and messaging that is united across all social media.

Optimise content for all platforms

There’s no reason one piece of video can’t go across multiple channels, but you need to make sure they are optimised for each to get the best results.  So, for Facebook, keep the video shorter, add it directly to the site and add captions.  YouTube videos can be longer while Twitter has a limit on length.  Plus, you can look at things such as Instagram Stories and even adding video content from YouTube to Pinterest.

Study analytics

Finally, keep studying those analytics and use the data you generate to make decisions about your future video strategy.  Some key metrics to study include:

  • Engagement rate
  • View count
  • Play rate
  • Social sharing
  • Comments or feedback

By studying these, you can get a clear picture of what works, what your audience reacts best to and therefore fine-tune your strategy going forward.  This ensures that any video content you create is going to the right people on the right platform and gives the best return.

Size and length do matter

I understand large corporations may have multiple complex messages to convey to staff and stakeholders, or your business is so good, you need to say everything about it. I feel the challenge for many communicators and marketers is distilling these messages simply and concisely. Video can illustrate complex ideas, through the use of motion graphics for example, but video is not good on conveying huge amounts of detail, as these generally have to be long and complex.

Attention spans these days is getting shorter and shorter and (I include myself in this.) I often find myself on YouTube about to watch something, but notice that it’s over five minutes long, and think, “I don’t have time to watch this now, I’ll come back to it later”, and never do. Or I start to watch a video and before it has even reached 2 minutes I stop watching because I’m bored.  The days of when a corporate video being 15 to 20 minutes have long gone, but I still see clients today who feel the need for a lengthy video, as they have so many messages to convey and assume it can be done in under two minutes!

Video is not a magic bullet. Video is great a conveying messages quickly- a picture is a thousand words and all that – but it can’t bend time, you can’t have 20 messages and expect it to be short, well, you could try, but I don’t think it would be an engaging video and one that I would want to watch it.

KISS – Keep it short & simple
There are lots of acronyms for KISS, but I like this version as it’s really relevant to video.  Keep your messages short, succinct, and use everyday language in your scripts, interviews and when talking to camera. Using words that make your communication simple and uncomplicated ensures that you’re understood by everyone you’re speaking to. After all, if your viewer doesn’t understand what you’re saying, there is no point saying it in the first place. Don’t assume that people understand your technical jargon and don’t assume you appear smarter by using it. Knowing your audience and adjusting your message and words accordingly is far smarter. The key to effective communication is to use simple, easy-to-understand language.

Why shorter is better:

  • Shorter videos are more engaging than longer ones
  • People want to consume information quickly
  • 50% of people will watch a one minute rather than two-minute video
  • The longer the video the more likely viewers will not watch till the end
  • Critical that the most important information in your video comes sooner than later
  • Viewers are used to choice and will watch multiple videos that are relevant to them

You must understand what’s really important to the viewer.

Extract from “How to Get Video Right’ book by Simon Banks. The essential guide to video strategy in the rapidly changing digital age.

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