The core tenants of Inbound Marketing are to Attract, Convert, Close and Delight, but a lot of the time, we focus so much on lead generation and numbers and data (all important!) that we lose a little bit of the human element in our messaging. It’s easy to focus way too much on the first three, that we forget to Delight!
As an agency and consultancy, one of our pillars is to make marketing more human, and video is one of the most powerful ways to do that.
A good story centers on a protagonist (not the company!), tells a story that draws the viewer in, creates an emotional connection with the viewer, and, if you’re really good, provides a call to action that doesn’t even feel like a call to action.
Charity:Water is one of my favorite organizations. Their messaging is always on point, their mission makes a ton of sense, and they have been able to mobilize thousands of people to join their cause. Their latest video is a powerful example of telling a great story:
Tell A [Short] Story
Generally, you can count on people to watch the first 10 or so seconds of your video, so you’ll need to make sure that you take the time to get the opening scenes right, make them powerful enough that people want to finish watching, and make it memorable enough that viewers remember it and, if you’re lucky, share it with friends.
This can be challenging, but there are a few examples where filmmakers have just nailed it.
One of my favorite recent trends started when Youtube began offering an ad type that is 6 seconds long that viewers are unable to skip.
The time constraint has made people start to really think creatively and strategically about how to tell a full story in those six seconds.
Here are a few of my favorite examples:
Make it Emotional
People don’t want the boring details in your videos. They want to feel an emotion, so make them laugh or cry. Outrage them or inspire them. If your brand allows it, push the envelope.
The point here is to allow viewers to have an experience with you. These are a few of my favorite examples.
Be Educational
Do you need to teach your viewers something? Perhaps you’re a hospital and you want to run a campaign on healthy eating, or maybe you’re a lawn care service and you’re wanting to teach your customers how to care for their bushes. A video can be a great way to disseminate information. People learn all different ways, and a good chunk of the population are visual and auditory learners. So perhaps see where you can take the information that you have up in your head or written down on your website and make a video out of it.
Moz is great about this. Every Friday, they run their SEO Whiteboard Friday, and they cover all their bases. They give viewers the option of watching a video, listening to an audio recording of the video, or reading the transcript.
For the full experience, head on over to their site to check out the latest episode, The Rules of Link Building.
Get Found
Youtube is the second largest search engine, so make sure that you don’t forget all of your SEO strategy in your excitement to upload your video. Do you keyword research and determine how people might be searching for this topic, and make sure to tag appropriately.
I hope this has been helpful. Let us know some of your favorite marketing videos in the comments below!
