Everybody loves videos.
In the most recent CMI research, 84% of marketers say they use videos — that’s an 11% jump over the previous year.
Yet executives, managers, and others still clamor for more videos. You’ve probably sat in a meeting where the CEO says the company needs more videos. Or received a forwarded TikTok link with a note from a sales manager saying, “We should be doing this.”
But making more videos because people in your organization want them isn’t a good enough reason. Well, a CEO request might be. But even then, you need a strategy behind your video decisions to get the most value out of them. In CMI’s video survey, 60% of marketers say a video strategy would help them deliver better results.
Bean Porter, manager of brand and content production at Grainger, and A. Lee Judge, co-founder of Content Monsta, recently joined CMI Live to share advice on how marketers should approach video at their brands and offer practical tips for creating quality videos.
Watch this video or read on for the highlights:
Build a video strategy for your customers
“Always think of the customer first,” Bean advises.
To do that, ask these two questions:
- What will attract an audience to watch a video?
- What does the brand want the audience to do after viewing a video?
By identifying the objective and the call to action at the start, you’re more likely to create an effective video for viewers and your brand.
To meet Grainger’s brand recognition objective, for example, Bean and her team created Everyday Heroes, a video series spotlighting various Grainger customers.
However, if the objective had been to motivate a viewer to buy a product, Bean says a five-second YouTube bumper promoting the product and driving viewers to a landing page would make more sense.
Combine customer considerations and brand objectives to guide decisions
An audience-first video strategy will naturally lead to a mix of video content, from subject matter to tone.
Video length will also vary. Short or long? The answer goes back to the audience.
For example, people won’t watch a two- to three-minute video about a product. “Make it short. Make it quick. Grab their attention right away, and you know what you want them to do — click to purchase,” Bean says.
Explore longer-form videos when you want to connect emotionally, which is often helpful for top-of-the-funnel objectives. Bean suggests 12- to 15-second clips featuring Q&As to help a middle-of-the-funnel audience get to know more about what your business does.
“There’s a creative way to use different types of videos with different lengths to continue to tell the story and take them down that funnel,” Bean says.
You also can use the same video content in several ways. For example, you could publish a two-minute video telling the story of your brand or of a customer to YouTube and embed it on a landing page.
Then, create shorter cuts from it to post on social and drive traffic to the landing page. You can lead the prospect further down the funnel by linking to videos for a specific product from that landing page.
“Tell the whole story to keep your customer engaged with your brand,” Bean says.
Use storytelling to strengthen your human-centered video content
While length, tone, and subject matter will vary, your videos should always resonate on a human level.
“Every brand has a story to tell, and every product can have that emotional element to it,” Bean says.
Say you sell hammers. It’s not a sexy product. People just pick it up and use it, right? How likely is it that a demo video of a hammer would grab an audience?
But if you focus on the person behind the hammer, people will respond, Bean says.
Do a video story about the customer who has the hammer. Did they buy it? Did they get it passed down to them? Who else used the hammer? What did they use it for? How does the current owner use it? How do they like it?
“You’re creating that human connection with it and emotional connection with the audience utilizing video as a platform,” Bean explains.
Among her other ideas for creating videos that connect with audiences:
- Record the sound of a product being created to appeal to ASMR-oriented audiences. (Autonomous sensory meridian response videos are popular because the sounds can trigger a tingling sensation in some listeners.)
- Go through the step-by-step process to make the product and give tips about its uses and features.
- Follow a day in the life of a product or an employee.
- Do a Q-and-A with a product specialist or customer who uses the product.
- Use a drone to fly over the building as employees enter for the day and repurpose it in multiple videos.
“There’s no shortage of stories,” Bean says.
Devise a distribution plan
With many platforms available to distribute your videos, the choice can seem overwhelming. But Bean says just go back to your original strategy — the audience.
“You want to meet your customers where they’re at, so they’re actually engaging with the brand and building that relationship over time,” she says. “You don’t want to be creating video for a platform that you’re not getting a return on.”
Conduct a test by publishing the videos to every platform where your audience views. Peel back the results to really understand which, if any, videos attract and engage your audience. See which ones are most likely to provoke responses to your calls to action.
With that data, you can stop publishing on platforms that don’t deliver results and focus on those that do.
Tips for producing better video
With your strategy documented, you and the team can begin production. Bean says Grainger shoots horizontally so the full-length content can live on YouTube. Then, they edit the content to better fit the audience on vertical platforms.
Content Monsta’s Lee Judge offers these additional tips to produce better quality videos that work for your brand and audience:
- Adopt a listening tempo: When you speak to communicate, you need to slow your pace even though it won’t seem slow to you. Take the time to enunciate and get your point across so the listener can process what you’re saying, Lee says.
- Give on-camera energy: Watching his early videos, Lee realized that when he read a script, his eyebrows never moved. “That’s not normal. In a conversation, you get excited, your eyebrows move, and things happen. It was a telltale sign I was reading, and I didn’t have the correct emotion.”
Turn up your emotions a little so you appear more natural. When you’re engaged, not only will your eyebrows move, but so will your hands and even your smile.
- Try throwaway takes: When you encounter subjects who aren’t comfortable in front of the camera, plan for an extra take. Lee says his colleague Marc Raco at Content Monsta lets the person know it went well, but he asks them to do one more. “Forget all the rules. Just be yourself, and let’s give it one more take,” he tells them. That second take is almost always the one they use. “At that point, he’s already trained them. He’s already told them how to do certain things, and they’ve become more relaxed.”
Take time to craft your video plan
If you want to create videos — and you probably should — be thoughtful about it. Map out a strategy for how you’ll use video throughout the customer journey.
“You want to make content that’s relevant and a great representation of your business,” Bean says.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute