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With social media sites such as TikTok taking off and more than 1 billion hours of YouTube being watched each day, there’s never been a better time to use video in your marketing. Whether you choose to hire a video production company or to create videos yourself, there’s money to be made by harnessing the power of video. Here are four tips to help you incorporate video into your marketing.
- Focus on entertainment and not sales
The vast majority of video content consumed online is not sales-focused, but entertainment-focused, however, that doesn’t mean that it won’t help to boost your sales. If you want people to view your video and not to skip it, then it needs to provide them with value, and very few people find value in being overtly sold-to. The most successful marketing videos tend to focus on stories rather than sales, teaching their target audience about their company history, values or ethos, rather than pushing their products. By focusing on telling your brand story, you can improve your brand image and increase your visibility within your target market.
- It’s all about the first few seconds
We see so much content every day that our attention span is now less than 10 seconds. This means that you have very little time to grasp the attention of your target audience and so what you put in the first few seconds of your marketing videos is what really counts. To make sure that your audience sticks around for the rest of your video, create a captivating ‘hook’ and make use of informative and engaging thumbnails for your videos which entice people to click on them.
- Include captions
A lot of video content is consumed in environments where a person’s sound will be switched off, and so it’s important to include captions so that you can still educate your viewers. Approximately 85% of video content played on Facebook is played with the sound off, so it really is important to make your videos captivating with and without sound effects. The key to making captions captivating is to ensure that they are easily readable, and perhaps animated in some way to help keep the attention of your viewers.
- Tailor your videos depending on where you post them
Video content is consumed differently across different social media platforms. YouTube videos can generally be any length, but videos posted to social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter perform better at certain durations. For example, although you can post videos of up to 60 seconds on Instagram, 30-second videos tend to get more views and interactions. On Facebook, videos that are 60 seconds or less tend to get the most attention, and on Twitter, this drops to 45 seconds. By tailoring the length of your videos by the platforms you use, you can ensure to get the most out of your video content.
So there you have it – four simple tips to help you incorporate video into your marketing strategy. Have you tried video marketing before? Let me know how it worked for you in the comments.
