In 2017, the world will watch almost five billion YouTube videos every day. On Facebook, users will get through an astonishing 100 million hours of video footage daily - a figure that has made Facebook video a major priority for 30% of marketers in 2017.
As a social media marketer, adding video to your campaigns and engagement efforts is one of the most powerful and effective ways to generate more attention and reach your audience.
Just like copy, video needs to be engaging, interesting and unique to be effective. Make your video without a clear focus and viewers are likely to tune out. Make it with a clear goal and you’re far more likely to achieve your objectives.
Below, we’ve shared six ways that you can use video in your social media marketing, from short videos that build anticipation to longer, more informative videos that let you dig into the details of your product and attract a more discerning, quality-focused target audience.
Create short, simple instructional videos for your audience
One great way to promote your brand using social video is to create short, instructional videos that demonstrate how your product can be used to solve a problem for the viewer.
For many corporate and personal brands, video is more important than ever before. With 78% of people online watching videos weekly–and 55% watching daily–it’s a great time to gather video marketing tips for your strategy. A staggering number of viewers watch video content online. Is your website not interesting enough? Besides nice design, you can upload videos to your site. According to researchers, today, 33% of all online activity is watching videos.Videos will be the element to drive 80% of the world’s internet traffic by 2019. So, start looking into this aspect now. Here, we have few tips in coming up with good. According to a case study conducted by Web Marketing Video Council, a staggering 60% of brands are actively using social media video today. So there is every chance that your competitors are already leveraging social media video to promote their products, grow their brand, and drive traffic to their business site. Video Marketing Tips #5. Spread your videos around. It is what social media is made for. Most people just upload a video to one platform, maybe YouTube or FaceBook but share it to what ever platforms you have access to. Embed your videos into your websites and blogs and any other places you can.
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Ice cream brand Ben and Jerry’s has mastered this strategy on their Instagram account over the past year by posting short, simple recipe videos that incorporate their products.
Each video is reduced to the most basic steps of the process and sped up in post production so it only lasts for 30 seconds. The beauty of these little social video snippets is that they quickly solve a pain point for users. Vegan but want to enjoy a smoothie? Check out how to create vegan cherry garcia acai smoothies or what about some non-dairy caramel almond brittle tarts for the lactose intolerant in the audience?
The end result is a short, simple and tightly produced instructional video to keep viewers engaged, while naturally placing Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in front of the company’s social media following. Having experienced a 6-point lift in brand awareness using Instagram Stories, it’s likely that this encouraged Ben and Jerry’s to delve further into shorter social video content.
There is a noticeable difference in viewership between their instructional content and other post formats, with these recipe based videos garnering between 100,000 and 200,000 Instagram views each, statistics that highlight the importance of content that provides real value in a quick, accessible format.
Got a complex product? Go for long-format!
At a 2013 YouTube partner event, reps from the video giant shared that upwards of a third of all YouTube viewing time can be attributed to videos greater than 20 minutes in length.
Despite the commonly held belief that short video content is best for attracting attention, a huge percentage of YouTube audiences watch online video like they do TV - in long, in-depth viewing sessions.
If you have a complicated, interesting product that you can talk about in detail, long-form video is a great way to attract attention and engage your audience on a deeper level.
Marketers and content creators, it seems, are taking notice. A Q2 2016 report from FreeWheel shows that long-form video content grew in popularity by 37% over the previous year, outpacing live ad views for the first time in the report’s history.
Examples of long-form content done right include Wine Library TV, which amassed such a huge audience over its 10-year lifespan that it earned 60,000 views on a 22-minute video posted after a five-year hiatus of new content.
Or Nintendo’s Direct series, which attracts millions of viewers for long, detailed product videos that occasionally run for hours.
As Mad Marketer notes, long-form video is a great tool for attracting audiences that will reject short-form, traditional video marketing: “Where many millennials will do everything in their power to avoid a 30 second ad, most of them will allow themselves to be drawn in by a longer movie if it is compelling enough to grab their attention.”
Create unusual, quirky videos that people can’t help but watch
In 2006, before most major brands had started to take social media seriously, Utah-based home and commercial blender company Blendtec launched their first video in a YouTube series called Will It Blend?
The videos involved Blendtec founder Tom Dickson blending popular consumer goods and well-known household objects ranging from iPhones and iPads in the company’s blenders. At one to two minutes in length, the videos are short, easy to watch and packed with fun inside jokes.
Central to each video are Blendtec blenders -- in fact, the entire series exists as a quirky online ad campaign for the company’s products. But because the focus was more on the zaniness of the concept than the product itself, viewers weren’t put off by the overt product demonstration.
Will It Blend? is widely regarded as one of the most successful social media video campaigns in marketing history, earning well over 280 million brand impressions for Blendtec and generating an immediate increase in sales for Blendtec.
The success of Will It Blend? shows that video content doesn’t need to be refined or expensive in order to be successful. Blendtec’s videos are nicely shot and polished, but all take place in a bland “test lab” and don’t contain much in the way of visual appeal.
Instead, they’re packed with fun, making them a hit with audiences and a huge driver of media coverage for a company that, prior to the campaign, was barely known outside of a small niche market for high-end home and commercial blenders.
If you want to attract attention with your video, try being quirky and unusual. Very few people will tune in for a two-minute product demo, but you could win over hundreds of millions by taking an interesting and unique approach to showing off your product’s functionality.
Create low-cost, rough and ready content to stand out
Effective social media video doesn’t need to be costly. In fact, sometimes “rough” content is more effective than polished studio footage for standing out and attracting viewers on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.
Financial services company PwC proved this with its #BallotBriefcase campaign, which involved a series of short, on-the-street videos of a leather briefcase housing the Academy Award results as it made its way across the USA to promote PwC’s 82-year involvement in the awards.
The campaign increased PwC’s impressions 136x compared to content that didn’t feature the briefcase, all while generating 12.3 million impressions on Twitter. It went on to win the Shorty Award for best use of social media in a B2B marketing strategy and campaign.
When done right, inexpensive and simple content works. In some cases, the fact that it’s raw and simple isn’t a weakness for viewers -- instead, it sets the content apart from slickly filmed, overproduced commercial video, humanizing a brand and making it more accessible to the user.
Need help creating great content on a modest budget? Our Beginner’s Guide to Snapchat for Business is a great resource for mastering the basics of Snapchat and reaching your audience with short, simple videos.
Use pre-roll ads to reach your target audience on Twitter
Most marketers are familiar with YouTube’s pre-roll advertising options, but far fewer are aware that pre-roll ads are also available on Twitter. Twitter rolled out pre-roll ads in late 2015, and has since expanded them to cover live Periscope video content.
One huge benefit of Twitter’s pre-roll video advertising is its targeting options. As an advertiser, you can select your audience using IAB content categories, then narrow it down by filtering via Twitter’s location, gender, language, device, platform and carrier options.
Twitter also includes the option to exclude specific publishers, letting you avoid advertising on content that’s are a bad match for your brand.
Since Twitter pre-roll ads are relatively new, they’re also comparatively cheap. Volvo achieved an impressive $0.03 average cost per view and a 36% view rate (33% higher than average for the automotive industry) for its pre-roll video campaign advertising a Summer Sales Event.
Use social media video as a customer service channel
Finally, one of the most effective ways to use social media video to connect with your existing and prospective customers is to create video content that’s equal parts advertising and customer service.
Warby Parker does this brilliantly through its WarbyParkerHelp YouTube channel, which has a mix of promotional videos showcasing the company’s eyeglasses and useful customer service content that’s aimed both at Warby Parker customers and people searching for glasses.
Because the videos directly answer common eyeglass-related questions, they feature in the YouTube search results for keywords related to eyeglass maintenance and care, producing a steady stream of organic traffic while answering customers’ questions.
And since the videos aren’t directly commercial (Warby Parker sunglasses are, for the most part, only mentioned in passing) they can capitalise on the traffic that comes from users searching for unbiased, helpful information about different eyewear to win new customers.
Even if you’re new to video, Warby Parker’s customer service approach to video isn’t too hard to imitate. SproutSocial’s guide to using YouTube for customer service covers four simple ways that you can use video for customer service and marketing.
Master the art of video marketing
Feeling inspired? Video can be an amazingly powerful marketing channel, especially for B2C businesses with exciting products. It’s also a surprisingly inexpensive marketing option - one that, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t require a Fortune 500-scale budget.
Our post on How to Create Outstanding Video Content on a Budget is an excellent resource for creating your first videos, while our 5 Steps to Develop a Video Marketing Strategy on a Startup Budget contains addition tips to get the most from your first videos.
Before you launch your campaign, make sure you use our 5 Secrets of Super-Successful Video Marketing to master your story, video introduction and tone to get the best possible response from your target audience.
Source: LemonlightOne of the biggest award shows in the world, the Academy Awards, have come and gone. Whether or not you tuned in to watch, you likely had predictions about who would win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, or Best Director. But there’s probably one category you didn’t think much about: Best Screenplay. Overlooked by the average moviegoer, the screenplay is actually one of the most vital parts of any movie. After all, without a script, there would be no movie to begin with! And if the screenplay is bad, it’s really hard to make a good movie out of it.
Just like with big Hollywood blockbusters, overlooking the script is a practice repeated over and over again by businesses looking to get into video marketing. When setting out to make a video for their company, very little consideration goes into the video script itself — if there’s even a script, at all. And having a bad video script can easily ruin a company’s video marketing efforts, leaving CEOs and marketing executives scratching their heads, wondering why their fancy video isn’t working the way it should.
The perfect script can make a dramatic difference in the overall quality, reach, and effectiveness of your video marketing efforts, helping you better nurture your prospective leads and turn them into paying customers.
Stage One: The Format
When it comes to writing screenplays for movies at any level, rule number one is always format correctly. All movie screenplays follow the same formatting, and while the rules are rudimentary, they can be rigid. Breaking them is one of the easiest ways to get a reader to throw your script in the trash. Luckily for video marketing, there are no hard-and-fast rules on formatting, with one exception — the length.
The typical rule of thumb for your video script length depends entirely on how long you want your video to be, but it breaks down to about two words per second. Here at Lemonlight, we find the best marketing videos usually fall within the 30-second, 1-minute, and 2-minute range. This is how it breaks down:
- Video Length: 30 seconds = 60-word script
- Video Length: 1 minute = 120-word script
- Video Length: 2 minutes = 240-word script
It’s important to keep as close to this rule as possible, so you don’t write more content than you can fit into your video. This rule is based on the average reading speed. Your reader could be your CEO, a hired spokesman, or a hired actor, and can be shot in either a talking head interview style or recorded as a voice-over, which is recorded separately and played over other footage.
Whichever route you choose, the idea is to film accompanying footage to go along with the interview or voice-over that will keep your video dynamic, visually interesting, and representative of the goal you’re trying to achieve. Which brings us to our next stage: the outline.
Stage Two: The Outline
With formatting down, now it’s time to plan out your video script outline, or the structure of your story. We’ve found that every good marketing video script is made up of the same six components. They are:
- The Opening
- The Problem
- The Solution
- The Secret Sauce
- The Team
- The Call To Action
Whether your video script is 60 words or 240, all good marketing video scripts should include these same six components, so the goal is to be as economical as possible and say a lot with a little.
“Maximum impact; minimum word count.”
Here’s what you should include with each section.
The Opening
Your opening should be immediate and attention-grabbing. While it doesn’t have to be in your audience’s face, it needs to instantly attract their focus, or they won’t stick around past the first five seconds (sometimes even less).
A good opening could include: an emotional hook, like an appeal to animal lovers regarding the number of pet dogs neglected every year; a surprising fact, like a little-known statistic with a big impact about the levels of trash in the pacific ocean; or a relatable story, like the personal anecdote that led you to start your instant laundry delivery service, so no one will ever have to face the same embarrassing pizza stain debacle you went through again.
The Problem
Once you’ve hooked their attention, your main objective is to grab the bull by the horns and confront your viewer’s most dire question: Why should I care? With so much content vying for your audience’s attention, and time, and money, everywhere, all the time, your job is to very bluntly tell them exactly how they’re affected by what you’re about to tell them.
Your product or service has a specific purpose, and that purpose is to solve a problem. Why is this problem so important to solve? How does it negatively affect your audience on a day-to-day basis? Why should they care?
You need to answer this in your video script, because if you don’t, this next stage will fall flat, and so will your entire video marketing efforts. (Fun fact: the same is true for screenwriting in movies!)
The Solution
By now, your audience should be feeling pretty passionately about the problem you’re aiming to solve. At the very least, they know why they should care. Even if it doesn’t impact them on a daily basis, you’ve sold them on the negative effects and issues this problem is causing. Now, it’s time to hit them with the solution.
Put simply, when you present the solution in your video script, you’re presenting the benefits of your product or service. Your product is not just a solution, but the best solution, because of “these specific features,” which you’ll list out in a clear, direct, easy-to-understand way. Be brief and stick to the most compelling facts. No need to list all 10 different antibodies each microfiber combats on a molecular level to fight germs. Keep it high level, efficient, and effective. And once you’ve laid all that out, it’s time for the secret sauce.
The Secret Sauce
The secret sauce is meant to answer the most important part of your video script: Why you? Your product or service has a unique and specific selling point that separates you from the competition — your secret sauce. It’s the critical feature or core component of your product that’s better, cheaper, easier, or more unique, and proves once and for all you’re the right company for the job. Other products or services might be able to do everything else you can do, except for this.
5 Video Marketing Tips For Your Website Page
If you’ve done your job right and effectively hit the last three video script components, then the secret sauce should act as the tipping point, convincing the user to give your company a chance. But it’s not all about the secret sauce. You also need to give them a little more information before they’re fully willing to trust you. That’s where the team component comes in.
The Team
By now, your video script should have sold the user on their problem, the solution, and your product or service. Now you have a little room to warm them up to your company and build enough credibility to continue nurturing them. There are no requirements about what to say here, just be genuine, authentic, and unique enough to differentiate you from your competition.
The goal here is not to oversell yourself in your video script or come off like you’re trying too hard. You still want to play it cool, so to speak. Give your viewers just a taste of what makes your company culture special and convince them to take a closer look. The goal of this video is to nurture your leads, not sell them. Keep the focus on their needs, opening them up just enough to see what you have to offer.
The Call to Action
The last and final piece of a great video script outline is the call to action, or rallying cry. So many companies starting out in video marketing struggle with defining what exactly they want their video to accomplish, and wind up unhappy with the results because they weren’t specific enough in their messaging. Your ultimate goal in writing a video script is to convince the viewer to act — and the call to action is where you ask them to do just that.
In your call to action, tell the viewer exactly what you want them to do and how doing it will benefit them. If you want them to schedule an intro call, provide a phone number and ask them to book their call now for a free appointment. If you want them to visit your website to learn more, provide the link and try giving them a limited time discount offer. Stay focused on their needs, while enabling one single, specific action. Don’t try getting them to like, follow, share, subscribe, and pre-order all at once. Try asking for just one of those things and see how much more successful you’ll be.
Stage Three: The Content
You know how to format your video script and how to outline it. Now, what do you write? While we can’t give you the exact words ourselves (unless you buy a video package from us!) we do have a list of questions you can ask yourself to create meaningful content focused on the “why.” This is a theory made popular by Simon Sinek’s latest book Start With Why that emphasizes focusing all your marketing materials on the core purpose of your company — or your company’s “why.”
Consider the following questions to start crafting the content of your script.
- What is your company’s description or mission?
- What problem are you solving?
- How are you solving it?
- How do your solutions enhance your customer’s lives?
- Other companies exist that are similar to yours. Why is your solution unique?
- What’s the overall message you want to get across?
- What are the three most important things you need your audience to know?
- What feeling do you want your audience to have?
- What are your brand guidelines?
- Who is your core customer/target demographic?
- Describe your ideal cast: Who is the team behind the video? Why is that relevant?
After answering these questions, you’re one step closer to drafting your script. Here’s how our team recommends getting started.
First, write out your answers to all the questions. Then, bold the phrases and words that are important to your brand and use these phrases to craft your script. Remember: be deliberate and focused. Your time is limited, sometimes as limited as 30 seconds, and 60 words can fly off your fingers in a flash.
Stage Four: Production!
Once you’ve drafted your very own video script, the next stage is to put it into production! Production comes with its own set of stages, including pre-production, production, and post-production, and can be quite complicated if you’ve never done it before or aren’t equipped for the challenge. And that’s okay! Nobody said you had to invest in your own video equipment in order to get into video marketing. All you need is an idea and a video marketing partner to help bring that idea to life. By bringing your own video script to the table, you’re one step closer to seeing your specific vision brought to life.
If reading this inspires you to draft your own video script, we’d be happy to meet with you and discuss how we can help you turn your video script into movie magic. Or, if you want more guidance before jumping into writing a script and want to talk through your ideas, we’d be happy to hop on the phone and review some concepts with you.
Schedule a call with one of our creative producers today to get a taste of our video marketing expertise as we provide you with tangible value that can take your video marketing to the next level. Book your call today!
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