4 Hidden Video Marketing Approaches To Steal From Your Competitors

At the end of 2021, online videos were consumed by a huge 91.4% of internet users worldwide; making video marketing more important than ever across every channel to reach and engage with a wider audience. Brands need a video marketing strategy to keep up with the trends and stay relevant.

We’ve put together a list of video marketing tools your brand should use to help create valuable video content.

1. Maximise Value From Your Advertising Workflow

There are many different ways to maximise the value from your advertising workflow across all different channels. Firstly; know your target audience. Using analytics or speaking to the sales team is a great way of getting to know who your audience is. Once you have established an accurate customer persona, you can start thinking about what content would appeal to these people, if they would have any questions, or what it is they would like to know.

Once you have some ideas down it's important to polish and shape them into well-thought-out and strong messages so they create a bigger impact on your audience. Once you have your key messages down, start to brainstorm and storyboard creative video ideas to portray these messages. When you’ve got a plan and have a script ready, it's time to get down to filming. We put together a blog all about branded video content including different types of video and tips on how to make video for your business, take a read here.

Moving onto channels to post your video content to, there are so many to choose from. But across all platforms, if you're looking to post your content as adverts you want it to be viewed by your target audience. Using the respective ads manager on each channel will allow you to nail down your audience by a variety of demographics and also where your content will be seen. For example, YouTube’s in-feed video ads allow you to place your brand, product or service alongside YouTube content that is likely to be viewed by your target audience. In-feed video ads appear in YouTube search results, YouTube watch next, and the YouTube app Home feed. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn all use in-feed video ads too, this means your ad will show up in your chosen audience's news feeds as they scroll through. Instagram also allows these to be placed in the Reels section now as well, which is great as this section has seen a rapid acceleration in recent months and proves to show a better engagement rate than normal Instagram posts.

2. Captions For The Win

One of our main findings is that most digital media is consumed on mobile devices. This means that when in public spaces, people will often watch videos without sound on. If you’re totally reliant on a voiceover, you’re risking most of your audience being unengaged by the video. So, how do you keep your audience tuned in?

We suggest subtitles and there are a couple of options on how to do that here:

• Hard Embedded Captions

These are edited into the video so that they are always present within the file itself. This option is perfect for offline use at events where auto-generated captions might not be an option. It may also be perfect if you’re advertising on social media where people might be travelling & have intermittent signals.

• Closed Captions

When your video is uploaded to a major online video platform (i.e. YouTube or Wistia) then you can also upload what is called a .srt file. This will then give the viewer the option to turn captions on/off whilst watching the video. This is a great option if you want to provide different language options as multiple .srt files can be uploaded for one video so you can give the viewer the option of choosing subtitles in various languages.

Captions are great to increase engagement and allow you to be inclusive of many different audiences. Also, another reason is indexing for SEO. Search engines can’t crawl video but they can crawl text, so adding captions to your videos allows them to contribute to your rank on search results.

3. Turn One Video Into Multiple Videos

If you have created a great video but it is too long for social media then we would recommend chopping the video up into a series of short videos to maximise the value the video content brings your brand.

We find ourselves recommending this all the time to prospective clients as each video we produce can be ‘chopped’ into multiple shorter videos to have a single key message. These shorter videos can be used as an organic post or as part of your paid media funnel/s.

Wistia conducted a study into optimal video lengths and found that attention spans for video online are up to 60 seconds.

Wistia experimented by taking two versions of a video; one at 60 seconds, with one 10 seconds shorter. The average viewer watched 72% of the shorter video compared to 50% of the longer video. Audiences seem to get distracted, bored or realise the video isn’t for them and this is shown by a fairly linear increase in audience engagement which is normal. However, the longer video showed an abnormal sharp decrease after around 20 seconds.

With this in mind make sure to focus on how you can make your video’s message short, sweet and to the point. You want to have got your main point across before your audience loses interest or gets distracted.

If you are looking for ideas and inspiration on what type of videos you could make for your brand or if you’re wondering how video can help your brand take a look at our previous work. Alternatively request a call back with us today and we can arrange to talk about how video could suit your needs.

4. Stop Being So Boring!

Keeping your audience engaged can be difficult, especially with the volume of content reaching our screens every day. On average, a person sees around 10,000 adverts per day; with this number doubling since 2007.

One tip is to make your videos personal, introducing yourself & your brand/culture before you try to sell your product or service will keep your audience interested for longer as the message feels more authentic.

Wherever possible, we’re seeing great numbers when clients can show their sense of humour. Now more than ever, audiences want to laugh and feel enlightened - a light story or alternative angle on sales can genuinely brighten someone’s day.

It can be hard to break the barrier of worrying about the appropriateness of humour in the corporate world, but we’re here to help guide you on this. Breaking the ‘boring’ cycle may just be what your brand needs to be engaging and memorable!

We used to see it all the time - the worst thing you can do is come on camera with a stiff tone and boring script full of stale facts and figures. Wherever possible, bring the video to life and show your company’s personality!

The takeaway

Video can be an amazing marketing tool but given its cost, it’s vital you hit the nail on the head. The constant battle of fighting for top stops on social media is becoming harder by the day. Make sure to always have a clear straight-to-the-point message you want to get across and ensure all the background boxes are ticked. This alongside a new creative video will help push your video to the top of people’s feeds and help them stay engaged with your content.

If you have a video project you need help with or just want to see how video can help accelerate your brand, get in touch with us today and we will get back to you within 2 working hours.