Video Marketing – Best Practices
Video Marketing – Best Practices
Video marketing is the process of getting the video reach its correct market. The steps can be varied and diverse, but the base on which video marketing thrives is this. Even while hitting the record button, you need to have the intention and thought of the audience for the video. This will help create the correct content properly because you will be making as per the right medium, right target audience, and right channel.
Video marketing is one of the top requirements in today’s time. Videos have been made from a long time, but the channels to showcase them were limited earlier. Today, with all the coverage, it is much easier yet complex to reach out to the audience. It is easier because the audience is everywhere, and you can gauge the audience and help the video reach the correct audience easily. It is complex because the marketer needs to understand the different channels, mediums, and audience before plunging into the marketing. Some of the best practices for video marketing are:
Segregate Content
If you are serious about reaching the audience, you can’t keep the same content for all the channels. Each channel has a different purpose. While YouTube is solely concerned about videos, and people go to the website to watch videos only and search particular videos, it is the medium for which proper videos are made. Be it storytelling videos, advertisements, etc, people will generally watch the videos with sound, and would have reached the video by their own requirement.
Facebook videos are shorter, crisper, and should be able to work without sound. A study recently suggested that 85% of Facebook videos are played without sound. This means that the visuals become extremely important, and should be able to drive the potential customer or client to watch full and reach the conclusion. Even if the person is scrolling down on phone or system when the video appears, that 1-3 second moment should be strong enough to hold the audience.
Instagram and Snapchat work on shorter videos, and are more personal in nature. Also, targeted towards much younger generation, these channels help in creating the connect with the younger potential customers and clients, and also create the awareness of the brand towards them, which in turn can increase the life of the brand.
Understand the Aspect Ratio
While it may appear odd, it isn’t the horizontal aspect ratio that works anymore on all platforms. For YouTube, it is the best. However, for Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, horizontal doesn’t work now. Facebook makes the case for vertical videos, because people usually use the phone in vertical position. Therefore, when a horizontal video is posted, it appears very tiny, and in that fleeting glance when the viewer scrolls down, the size will be way too small to make any impact. Square videos work better when targeting both mobile and computer users.
Instagram is usually about the square format, and the square videos are the best for the platform. They allow horizontal videos, but it isn’t a match for square videos. Same is the case with Snapchat, and square videos are not a trend.
The 3-second Rule
On any given social media channel, you have three seconds or lesser to make an impact. The video needs to start in such a way that those first 2-3 seconds are enough to hold the audience. This could be done via some text or animation that shows what will be shown in the video. This is also possible via following the age-old shock and awe formula. Crisp editing and high quality video at the beginning, and you can get the viewer hooked on for the rest of the video. If the three seconds don’t work, there’s a chance nothing else will.
YouTube is slightly different from this 3-second rule. However, even in YouTube, or any other video, it is best to have a strong beginning that ignites an interest in the mind of the viewer to watch the full video. It is usually the first 5-10% of the video that is traditionally called as the beginning. The beginning is required to be engaging, and the audience will pass through the middle without much hiccups.
Content is the King – Entertain or Make them Emotional
Content is and will always remain the king. The content that works easily for social media is the one that either makes one laugh, or makes them emotional. This can be done simply by incorporating product or service within videos, or simply by having a video story which incorporates brand values. These form of videos have larger chance of working on social media than direct advertisements, which work well on traditional media. Therefore, quality content that not only makes us emotional or laugh, but also incorporates brand values, stories, or product or service, is the requirement for today’s video marketing.
Call to Action – Because it is all about Engagement
Video marketing must have videos involving call to action in them. It is a basic principle for any video to have a call to action, and more so when you have spent time, effort, and money to make an audience reach your video, and worked on the video so that you can engage the audience. If you leave out call to action, you are not really making do with anything on the part of an engaged audience that is interested in your video and reaches the end of the video.
There are several parts of successful video marketing in today’s age. Understanding different medium and segregating content based on that is the first important step. Creating engaging content with strong first 3 seconds, along with compiling the video with a strong call to action are some of the ways of being successful as a video marketer in today’s times.
