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Video has become an integral part of the customer journey, especially over the past two years. The pandemic has dramatically increased the amount of video that people watch online and this increase has continued to drive marketers to implement video into their marketing strategy.
According to Hubspot, “marketers feel more positive about the return on investment offered by video than ever, as it continues to strongly influence traffic, leads, sales, and audience understanding.”
However, just creating video content isn’t enough. It must be engaging to drive your audience to action. Before you reach for your camera, consider the following best practices for creating an engaging video.
Analyze Your Market
The first step in creating an engaging video is to analyze your target market to understand how to best craft your message. Once you understand what your audience wants and needs, you can begin developing content that speaks to them directly. This information will help inform your decisions moving forward, including where you host the video, how long it should be, and the best way to present your message.
Identify Pain Points and Provide Value
This leads to our next step–identifying your audience’s pain points. What problems are you able to solve through your product or service? Now is the time to educate your audience on how you can help them while building brand awareness and trust for your company. Now that you know their pain points and how you can help, you’ll want to identify the key content that will add value to their lives. You want to create content that provides topics or information that your audience needs to know and understand during their Buyer’s Journey to solve their problems.
Focus on Quality
It’s important to remember that your video is a direct representation of your brand. People are often so focused on the technical aspects of filming a video (choosing a camera, selecting a resolution, etc.) that they forget about the essentials. Understanding how to craft high-quality video content that not only looks good but sounds good will ensure that your audience sticks around to watch.
Audio
People don’t often realize it before they hit record, but capturing great audio is often much more important than capturing great video. Viewers will typically sit through a poorly shot video, but they will click away immediately if the audio quality is bad. That’s why it’s extremely important to capture it properly, so invest in a high-quality microphone and record in a quiet, controlled location.
Composition
Composition refers to how the elements on the screen (actors, scenery, props, etc.) appear with respect to each other and within the frame itself. The composition of your shot tells a lot about your intent and is often communicated to your audience subconsciously. When done properly, it can be used to communicate to the viewer that something is important or elicit a certain emotion. When done improperly, it can cause your viewer to feel confused or anxious and they may not even know why.
Lighting
Lighting is often overlooked, but it’s actually the most important aspect of capturing great-looking video. Lighting comes in many forms and can drastically affect the look and feel of your video.
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Keep It Short
In today’s fast-paced, content-saturated world, consumers’ attention spans are at an all-time low and should be considered a precious commodity. You want to gain their attention quickly, and to do so, you must carefully consider how long you make your videos. Depending on your style of video, your viewers will be willing to spend more or less time engaging with your message. Videos must be only as long as they need to be to get your point across. But it’s not just the length of a video that matters. You want to analyze video engagement along with length. Videos under two minutes long tend to get the most engagement. (Wistia) 33% of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds, 45% by one minute, and 60% by two minutes. (AdAge)
Tell A Story
Your message should be simple–a short statement starting with what you want to tell your audience and ending with what you want your audience to do. From there you build a script and creative concept.
Five key components aid in creating a successful message:
Introduction
As a society, we have ever-decreasing attention spans. It’s important when crafting your message to grab your viewer’s attention within the first few seconds of your video. Overall, you want your introduction to tell your audience what to expect and entice them to continue watching.
Set the story
Setting the story involves letting your audience know that you understand their problem or pain point and that you are here to provide relief.
Value proposition
Next, you want to explain how you are going to impact their lives with the solution you are offering for their pain point.
Hook
Now’s your chance to not only explain what is special about your offer but to set your solution apart from the competition.
Catering to Your Audience
And finally, you’ll want to introduce your Call To Action (CTA)–or what action you’d like the viewer to take next. This could be an invitation to call or visit your website or introducing a link so viewers can order your product or service today.
Whether you do it yourself or hire a professional video production company, it’s important to focus on creating an engaging video that speaks directly to your audience. Following these best practices will ensure that your audience sticks around until the end so that you can drive them to profitable action.