Videos are fun to create and exciting to watch. It is a powerful storytelling medium that makes content marketing fun, intriguing, informative and compelling to watch. But, are videos appropriate for all content types? To answer this, let’s just get back to the basic once again– understanding video as a media type first.
The Video Format in Digital Marketing
In a simple sentence, video is a media format that simultaneously utilizes texts, moving images and sound to convey a message or an idea. It is a unique and independent communication medium that offers a lot of creative support and virtual strategic options.
According to the Diode Digital,
Some signs to identify an ill-suited content in a video promotion –
#1. Lack of narrative curve
A promotional video is built around a natural curve and includes both resolution and climax. If have a product or a service, then the video should have the narrative curve built around it.
#2. Complex Call-to-Actions
Videos should have simple and specific Call-to-Actions (pretty much like any good landing page design). If you have a content that is too complex, then it needs to be broken down into small pieces.
#3. Too Much Content
It’s not appetizing to squeeze in too much content in a single video. A graphic video analysis by Ben Ruedlinger shows how real video engagement look like –
- The lower the video length, the higher is the viewer retention capability.
- Videos that have less than one-minute duration length are seen to enjoy as much as 80 percent of viewer retention.
- This starts to diminish as the duration length increases. Videos that are two to three minute in length hold at least 60 percent of viewer retention while a five to ten minutes video will see over 50 percent viewer retention halfway through.
Hence, content length matters a lot in a video engagement. But are you sure the content used in your video production is not falling under any of the following categories of an ill-suited content? This naturally steers the discussion to another important aspect of video content creation that becomes hard to ignore.
Now that you know what makes video format content, let’s have a look into some versatile ways to make a video format investment more relevant, strategic, memorable and purposeful.
Things to Consider When Creating a Video Format Out of Content
Relevancy in Terms of Video and Audio
Video marketing does the art of doing more with less content superbly. However, proficient video marketing can only be possible when you understand how the nature of your content is affected by it. For instance, is the story of your content benefitting from both the visual and the sound? There is no point in repurposing content into a video format if you find the text version alone to suffice as a medium of engagement.
Therefore, it should not be identified with other content formats like blog posts or infographics.
Let’s take the example of a video promotional content produced by Do.com, a social productivity app for the management of projects and tasks.
The video puts a personal and humorous spin by portraying a child who is running a campaign for the election of the student body president.
It is the inclusion of narration, character dialogue, emotive music and a simple Call-to-Action that make the video creation funny and personal. Now imagine removing all these features in a video and replacing these with static images. You will agree that the scale of humor is impossible to achieve with static images.
Presence of Aesthetic and Conceptual Investment
For this, one needs to ask oneself as to whether a particular content requires auditory and visual element to make it engaging.
A content having the description of a complex process will feel very dry and difficult to understand. Hence, in such cases, a video content accompanied with visuals and sounds will help to draw the desired engagement from viewers.
The instruction video used in the Google Analytics Individual Qualification Test is certainly not a nice decision. That’s because the information imparted here is primarily conceptual and heavy. In such a case going for comprehensive content type and not any auditory or visual components appears to be a better option.
Keeping the End Goal in Mind
There are many who tend to equate a video’s success with the number of views and not the number of actions taken. Your video content should be able to guide viewers to take the desired Call-to-Action.
Integrate your video in a landing page to help viewers continue in their path to conversion easily. You may learn the art of driving more conversion with landing pages from a great article here.
Writing a Simple Script
Video contents must be made as simple as possible such that it is easy to produce and even easier to follow.
Refrain from using heavy jargon, complex ideas and putting in too many things all once. You will end up confusing both yourself and the viewer.
Write your script in short and concise sentences. Do not forget to emphasize the key points.
Before you even get down to production, read the script aloud once. This will help to give you some idea of the words and phrases where the speaker is likely to stumble upon and how long is a project likely to run.
Knowing Where to Host
Give your video content a proper home base before you share it on the social platforms. There are two options where you would like to post your content and each one of these has their individual limitations and strengths –
- Specific Video Hosting Sites – Posting your videos on specific video hosting sites will help to take your content to places where there is a larger target audience base. If you want to host DIY video content, then platforms like YouTube would be ideal to post your video. On the other hand, for academic instructional courses, you can choose Udemy after you read the reviews and compare it with other similar products. You will be able to take advantage of the basic video optimizing services that these platforms provide to their users. The best thing about video hosting sites is that these service tools are easier to configure than the ones used on self-hosted sites. This makes videos easier to share across other content channels and to embed them in other content mediums.
- Self-hosted sites – Posting your videos on self-hosted websites will help you to keep target audiences stick for a longer period of time. This opens the gate to driving more subscriptions and social shares. Besides, self-hosted websites have the advantage of flexible tools that allows users to customize the look and feel of a video content.
Setting the Right Social Stage
The success to social sharing of a video content depends a lot on the time and place. Will it be the right time to get a particular video uploaded and running? Is so, would it evoke the right audience reaction as anticipated?
Knowing your buyer personas and how they spend time on the social media platforms will tell you which channels to choose for sharing your video content.
Adding a Transcript
Search engines are not so much adept with indexing video content. A full transcript copy will save your video content from facing any kind of
Tagging Your Work
Do not forget to add a relevant title tag and description to your video content meta-data. This will help the search engine to index them for relevant keyword targeted searches.
Tracking the Attention Span
Observing the data related to the time engagement time will help you to understand the behavior and the preference of your audience.
You can use the knowledge to refine your existing video strategy.
Conclusion
Producing top notch video content calls for a lot of work. However, with the right strategy and plan, a video promotion can become a powerful medium for telling engaging stories and inspiring clients.
Images: ”Businessman pressing play button to start or initiate projects /Shutterstock.com“
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