In a world filled up with words, capturing the attention of your audience is getting harder and harder. But fear not, video content has come to the rescue. This hot trend is here to stay and it’s crucial for brands to embrace it.
Customers are impatient – there is no doubt about it – they know exactly what they want, when and where. Their attention span is getting lower inversely to the amount of content they consume. Because of this, audiences don’t bother reading content beyond the headlines. In fact, according to Hubspot, 80% would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog post.
With this in mind, video is here to stay, embrace it! It can help you improve your performance: increase leads, bring in more clicks, increase your online reach and help customers better understand your brand and your message. Visual communication enables storytelling in a much more interactive and compelling way, that ultimately creates bigger impact on your audience.
Video is relevance
Not convinced yet?
Take the example of the big ones: Facebook and Instagram have found creative ways to respond to this trend through live video and by providing ways for businesses to monetize their live streams. Many known brands like GoPro or LEGO have already jumped on this bandwagon. GoPro often shares visual content of great quality from brand ambassadors and consumers who use their cameras while travelling, camping or doing radical sports and also hosts user-generated videos contests. LEGO produces visually stunning short animations featuring their bricks, showing their latest novelties. They also partner up with big brands like Star Wars, Disney or Marvel to promote their products.
8 out of 10 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube
Without video content you’re missing out on a big opportunity on the second largest search platform after Google: YouTube. It is the third most visited website in the world and people watch over 5 billion videos here per day (Yes, per day!).
Share your content online with the world – it’s free to upload your videos and get access to a massive audience already using the platform. There are many examples of successful campaigns on YouTube (take Dove and their mission to show women that beauty comes from confidence) by making compelling video content that caught the masses eye. If they did it, why can’t you?
6 tips for effective video content
You’re not going to make it by producing a few random videos without strict planning and purpose. Here are some tips for producing video content for digital:
- Don’t make your videos too long. Research suggests that viewer engagement drops off at 2, 6 and 12 minutes. Many companies stick with one-minute videos, although there are some exceptions. But you can always make some A/B tests and see if your audience responds better to longer or shorter versions of the videos.
- Get to the point. Don’t share content for the sake of sharing content. Customers are smart and informed, and they’ll lose interest in what you’re offering them. Try to share useful, pertinent and shareable content for your target market and avoid the fluff, there’s no time for that.
- Don’t stop producing. Consistency is key. It isn’t enough to produce 3 or 4 videos and then stop. You need to give your audience enough content to engage and convert them to what you’re selling (even if that’s yourself). If you’re not consistently adding fresh content, they’ll look elsewhere.
- Don’t try to be viral. Many marketers make this mistake. You shouldn’t produce content based on what is viral already. Instead, you should produce high-quality content that matters to your audience so that they become loyal customers. If your content turns out to become viral, great. If not, doesn’t matter as long as you keep your audience satisfied.
- Produce mobile-optimized video. With the development of technologies, faster connection speeds and smartphones screens build for multimedia, mobile video consumption has increased. In fact, 92% of people who consume mobile videos share them with other people and that’s why your content should have a responsive design.
- Make your brand’s style and format recognizable. With such amount of information up there, it’s easy to mix them all up. You should keep your colors, fonts and voice the same in your video as they are in your blogs, articles or site. Consumers must be able to identify your content by esthetic.
How marketers can benefit from video content
Producing video content has never been so easy and affordable. New technology and programs allow anyone to easily create short videos with great quality and pair them with SEO targeting features (learn how to write effective articles for seo). Your biggest investment in video producing isn’t the equipment but the time to make yourself comfortable with the tech available. Great video content will generate leads and sales while helping and affecting your customers’ final buying decisions and increasing your ROI.
There’s so much you can do to make your video content entertaining yet still relevant. You can create long-form videos, short-form videos, live streaming, video advertising, interviews or tutorials, the point is: be creative with your content and your audience will respond to that.
Creativity is becoming more and more relevant, not only for B2C marketers but for B2B as well. In fact, according to a study by LinkedIn, the great majority of B2B marketers believe that video content is the most important form of content right now and that every brand should invest in this.
Another important aspect of video content for marketers is its optimization opportunities. With video, you can measure click-through rate, drop-off points or the number of times watched, which helps seeing what’s working or what’s not.
Video is king
If you’re still doubting the importance of video, take a look at this:
Forrester estimates that a 60-second video has the same value as 1.8 million words.
So, if you believe that producing video is too difficult and time-consuming, think again. 1.8 million words are the equivalent of 3600 pages of text and quite a few books. This shows that video allows you to convey a great deal of information in a short time and in a more interactive, effective and memorable way. Let’s put the tons of words aside for a while and focus on video.
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