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Remember when infographics were the new and hyped thing?
Content marketers reckoned the shareability code was ultimately cracked! All you had to do was turn a pail of “boring data” into an attractive image with flat icons and digestible stats, and people will share it out to viral status.
But people tend to do silly things with brand-new and hyped things.
We get hit with an overwhelming feel of FOMO( “fear of missing out”) and blindly rushed towards what’s hot and shiny. The ensue? Marketers have built silly infographics out of just about everything with not a lot of thought towards whether it built appreciation, whether the return was worth the investment, and whether it was of any real value to their audience.
Enter the exciting brand-new medium of video
Video marketing is getting more and more attention every year. Globally, the amount of video in Facebook’s News Feed has increased 3.6 x year-over-year with a whopping 76% of B2B marketers employing video content marketing as a core part in their strategy.
I can feel the mad rush: “We need video marketing, and we need it now.”
In order for us to escape stimulating the same rookie mistakes as last-place time, here’s a listing of tried-and-true lessons from good ol’ content marketing that is likely to be- and should be- applied to video marketing.
1. The median attention span of a human is now shorter than that of a goldfish
Putting aside what that shocking stat could mean for the future of mankind, one thing is obvious: Time is the most precious currency for today’s Internet customers. If they don’t find what they’re go looking for in the first 50 words, they’ll go back to their search results and try another source.
For video, this is the first 10 seconds. According to a study by Visible Measures, 20% of observers will click out of a video in 10 seconds or less. YouTube dedicates sponsored advertisers simply 5 seconds to hook their audience during auto-play.
Lesson# 1: Hop-skip over the intro. Identify the very best narrative or the most compelling welfare of your product or service and use it as a hook from the start. Build the rest of your script by delivering bite-sized info in 8-second segments( around 20 terms) in order to maintain the viewer’s attention.
2. “Going viral” isn’t a KPI
Let’s be honest: We all said he hoped that our next part of the information contained is The One that goes viral. But no matter what people claim, virality can’t be distilled down to a simple science. Most of it is based on luck which is neither replicable or scalable.
“But it worked for Dollar Shave Club. Why not us? ”
If you have this mindset from the beginning, your brainstorming session will circle around things like humor, startle importance, and somehow figuring out a direction to tap into the zeitgeist of our digital day. What do they all have in common? They don’t touch on the utility of the content.
Regular content marketing has taught us that a prized post is one that speaks to a common pain degree of our target audience. The more helpful “you think youre”, the most credible you are.
This doesn’t means that a helpful video can’t achieve massive reach and shares. According to a New York Times study called The Psychology of Sharing, 94% of participants carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to the recipient.
Lesson# 2: Instead of trying to write a script that are able to “go viral”, build on a known difficulty that your qualified audience faces. Treat it like an inside joke and appeal to their motivation to connect with others that will “get it”. An lesson of a label that has successfully( and delightfully) done this is Slack, who plays up the common complication of inter-office communication in their intro video.
3. Create( or re-create) with ROI in mind
With regular content, we all know that there’s a wide range of the information contained forms we can create. But some( like ebooks, how-to guides, and even infographics) require a bigger commitment in time, resource, and coordination than others.
This gradient of investment is present in video types as well. For instance, generate a video interview expects far less scripting and post-production employment than an animated product walk-through. Or posting a recording of your webinar or demo is an easier route to take advantage of video than creating a separate how-to series.
Sorting your index of options by ROI is especially important for new content marketing crews that are pressed for quick results or working with a strained budget. Do an audit of your existing content to recognize which topics can get repurposed for video apply. Not only will this cut down on the amount of research you’ll have to do, but it’ll give you an indicator of what topics will work well with your audience.
Lesson# 3: Being able to show positive returns is equally important as making those results. To secure continued buy-in, first try to knock cold the types of videos that have the highest ROI compared to the investment. This includes user-generated videos for B2C companies and even curated third-party videos that may be relevant to your audience.
4. Bolster up the soft spot in your sales funnel
Content Marketing 101 has taught us that one of the most efficient ways to create content is to map it to your buyer’s tour: infographics and vertical-centric blog posts are top-of-the-funnel while comparative reports and testimonies hit further down, at the evaluation stage. These assets are then scattered throughout the website so that the most relevant information is delivered to the right people at the right time.
With more than 70% of marketing professionals reporting that video converts better than any other medium, we can strategically create and home video content at the weakest levels of conversion.
To identify these soft spots, dive into Google Analytics and analyze your User Flow and Bounced Sessions. Determine the biggest degree of drop-off and develop custom videos that give extremely focused information that’s relating to that page.
For example, if a significant portion of your traffic is ricochetting on the pricing page, strengthening it with a video that explains your pricing dislocation or one that highlights the cost-saving the specific characteristics of your service or product. If people are leaving right before the phase of marketing, region short testimonial videos before checkout to encourage them forward.
Lesson# 4: In the same way that content is strategically used to encourage leadings along a sales direction, take advantage of video’s converting ability by creating answer-packed clips for the weakest points of your website. Re-purpose these videos for your emails and nurture campaigns!
5. Don’t build your label on rented land
When social networks like Facebook and Twitter became too big to ignore, many induced the mistake of building their labels on belongings that were not their own. They pushed their contents on stream-based networks and nurtured communities that were off-site.
It’s only recently that content marketers are seeing their own problems with this approach: there’s a lack of control and reliability, engagement doesn’t leash back to your dwelling land, and you miss out on deeper customer insight opportunities.
The same thing applies to video. While great for distribution and attracting brand-new audiences, gigantic platforms like YouTube and Vimeo shouldn’t be the sole region whatever it is you host your videos. Not only do they lack the tools to extract deeper data based on individual opinions, there’s actually no reason for your viewers to come back to your website for more.
Lesson# 5: Instead of going to where the people are, focus on building a brand on your own realm. Memorialize your video content instead of pushing them out on streams, and integrate video analytics with your CRM to maximize your studies and returns.
6. Storytelling( still) wins
This is a no-brainer but a lesson that I securely belief applies to every type of marketing: Storytelling runs. And it doesn’t do it by tricking you, or by utilizing buzzwords and cliche. It’s simply how we appeal to our natural instinct for empathy and become better communicators.
From explaining your importance prop to showcasing your happiest patron, take every opportunity to tell tales that get recollected. Tell it how you want to be remembered: merriment, helpful, skilled, sentimental, honest, or whichever characters fit your label. Be person that people want to talk to. Stir them want to take their shoes off and stay awhile.
Lesson# 6: With such a dynamic medium as video, storytelling becomes even more important and powerful. Don’t merely make a video for the purposes of the making a video. Take every second to identify with your audience and develop a loyal community around your brand.
What are some of your tried-and-true video marketing lessons?
The post 6 Lessons Video Marketing Can Take From Regular Ol’ Content appeared first on Vidyard.
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