The secrets to video marketing success

By Woven Agency, Tuesday November 13, 2018

We all know by now how important video marketing is as part of your armoury, and that you should be utilising it as regularly as possible. But creating engaging, shareable content is not as easy as it might seem. So, before you pick up your GoPro and start yelling ‘Lights, camera, action!’ at the studio dog, take a read of our tips on how best to go about getting the most of your video marketing.

 

Be analytical.

The first thing you’ve got to do is ask yourself why you want a video in the first place. What do you want it to do? Who do you want to target?

There are various video marketing options at your disposal, from overarching brand awareness videos to talking head interviews, and you need to know which will best fulfil your aims. So, work out what those aims are and pair them off against the types of video marketing available. Unsure what those types are? Click here and be unsure no more.

 

Be real.

By which we mean be true to your brand. Your video marketing is just like any other form of promotional material – it has to be rooted in your tone of voice and reflect your brand values. This will be seen in your video’s script, colour design, music and editing style.

So, if you’re Hello Kitty, don’t let your videographer, whose walls at home are plastered with Tarantino pictures, tell a grittily shot story of violence, vengeance and vitriol. Unless, of course, your Hello Kitty video is part of a very ambitious brand redesign…

For a great example of how a marketing video can encapsulate your brand in an engaging way, Panorama9’s animated video is hard to beat. It dials into classic IT nerd tropes, such as parallel scrolling gaming and 8-bit animation, to make IT network management interesting. Which is no mean feat…

 

Be a storyteller, not a salesman.

The internet is saturated with material promising x% sales growth or 1,000 ways to increase to your brand awareness. These days, this kind of content is just part of the online wall of noise that people have learnt to ignore. Instead, what intrigues viewers, and keeps them intrigued, is the story behind the sales.

A good story is about setting up intrigue or presenting a problem and then offering a resolution in an interesting, amusing or emotional way. Start with a hook – the intrigue, the problem – and then tell the story as to how you can help.

The below video from Slack is a brilliant example. Within the first few seconds, it sets up a problem with which we’re all familiar – the bewildering array of communication platforms available – and then explains how Slack can solve that issue.

 

 

Essentially, Slack is a messaging system. But their video positions them as a forward-thinking, empathetic problem-solver, and wraps all that up in a cleverly written and witty story.

Try not to spend long telling people what it is you do. Instead, focus on finding the way in which what you do solves people’s problems – and then tell that story.

 

Be quick off the mark.

Just as a novel needs a killer opening sentence or a newspaper article needs an attention-stealing headline, your video needs to grab the attention from the get-go. We do, after all, have the whole world at our fingertips, so if you don’t hook your viewer quickly then there are plenty other things they can be watching. A fifth of viewers will stop watching video after 10 seconds, whilst nearly two-thirds are gone by the 2-minute mark.

Disengagement is not a problem Android had when they released ‘Friends furever’, which maxes out the cuteness factor from the very beginning and doesn’t dial it down throughout its 60-second run time. Ducklings cuddled up to cats? A Labrador lolloping around with an elephant? A meerkat nestled on the back of lion cub? No wonder it was the most shared video of 2015.

 

Be educational. Be entertaining.

Nearly two-thirds of us are visual learners. That means most of us respond better to visual representations – pictures, graphs, diagrams – than to being spoken to.

That makes video the perfect medium by which to teach your audience what it is you do. This can be through interviews with your team members, webinars, a weekly vlog, product explainer videos and more.

But being educational doesn’t mean being boring. For example, you call tell us that we live an average of 25,915 days. Or, as Reebok did, you can show us how we need to make the most of every single day of the 25,915 that we live.

 

Be funny, if you can.

We’ll just leave this here.

Speak to a member of the Woven team today Click Here to get in touch