Sixteen hours per week. That’s the amount of time the average person spends watching video online, a 52% increase over the last two years.
No one can deny that video marketing is on the rise – and for a good reason. Video is terrific for increasing engagement across almost all audience demographics, industry niches and media channels.
Getting the most value possible from your video marketing is crucial for any entrepreneur. But before you can do that, you’ll need to know how to create, edit and promote compelling video content that provides exactly what your audience is looking for – and prompts them to further engage with your brand.
If all of that sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t worry. In this article, we’ll share some actionable tips on exactly how to see more value from your business’s video marketing efforts in 2022.
1. Use Video with and without Sound
Interestingly, as many as 80% of people who use captions to engage with video aren’t deaf or hard of hearing – people just prefer it. What’s more, Facebook videos autoplay without sound, and captions are auto-generated. So if your target audience is Facebook users, consider keeping your videos engaging and easy to understand without audio.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you don’t have to use sound; just make sure people can understand and enjoy it without. How you go about achieving this largely depends on the type of video you’re creating (e.g., promo, informational, demonstration, company culture video, etc.). However, you could focus on making a video that uses music with captions or use a mix of music and dialogue to keep it interesting.
Whatever you do, ensure the storytelling is primarily visual, not verbal. Incorporate enticing visuals. Think bold colors, animations, text-heavy descriptions. These are more likely to retain interest. Of course, a professional video ads company might be able to gauge what to do best in this scenario.
As you can see in the example above, the visuals are bold and colorful with minimal wording, but the point is punchy. It’s made for sound on and off – no dialogue or voiceover but a nice, upbeat jingle in the background.
It’s also worth playing around with your CTA and type to see what works. In one experiment, marketers found that audiences didn’t engage with “sign up” or “learn more” buttons, possibly because this microcopy suggests more reading or handing over personal info. What CTA is the best fit for your promoted video posts on Facebook?
2. Publish Teaser Videos to Entice Customers
A teaser video is a short clip that aims to interest and excite viewers about what’s to come next. Usually, it’s some new facet of your product or service. Teasers are generally flashy and punchy.
So instead of providing a detailed overview, focus on short excerpts that provide a solid hook to entice viewers. Of course, this will depend on your business and what you’re promoting. It could showcase your product’s main features or exciting clips of a live event. Then, having watched the video, viewers should know what to expect from the main product and eagerly anticipate its arrival or release. Remember that viewers want to see that you know your stuff and that your product or event appeals to their needs, so teasers can be highly effective as “gateway” content.
Just make sure to edit these clips for dramatic effect. For instance, you could make your video somewhat cryptic, by using snippets of footage that pique interest with little or no commentary.
A musically driven video-editing iOS app, Beatleap by Lightricks is cost-effective and amazingly user-friendly, making it an excellent option for marketers just getting to grips with video editing.
This handy app automatically creates montages of footage you select and matches the visuals to the audio of your choice. Beatleap uses machine learning to determine exactly when a video should slow down or speed up to complement the rhythm and dramatic drops of the music.
Powered by AI, Lightricks transforms the editing process into a simple, enjoyable experience packed with possibilities. You can apply filters, overlays and access an expansive music library. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s the first app of its kind and has the potential to become the go-to editing app for marketers. Beatleap is great for teaser videos, because it’s fast, easy and caters to shorter content creation.
3. Optimize Your Video for Search
Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second. With so much content on the internet, failing to optimize your videos means you likely won’t appear anywhere near high enough in the search results to be found, so you’ll miss out on that all-important engagement.
You can optimize your videos to improve your visibility by:
- Using keywords in the title
- Keeping your title under 66 words
- Transcribing your video
- Publishing an enticing thumbnail
Keyword Tool is great for finding valuable keywords from YouTube’s autocomplete database. You’ll soon uncover phrases your target audience is searching for. With this info to hand, optimizing videos to extend your reach is much easier.
The paid version offers additional information to help further finetune your SEO strategy: search volumes, trends, competition data, and CPC.
4. Focus on the Emotive, and tell a Story
Videos need to provide value. If your video’s focused purely on sales, it won’t resonate. Viewers want to know your brand is impactful and honest.
Take this Land Rover ad as an example:
This video boasts excellent aerial cinematography; it’s meaningful, authentic, and emotive – all the while demonstrating the product’s capabilities, but without being pushy.
By successfully focussing on the emotive, your business will stand out so that it’s unforgettable in the minds of your target demographic. You’ll evoke an emotional response that makes audiences feel connected to the service or product on offer, as well as your brand, which is way more likely to result in sales than traditional sales pitches.
This is hardly surprising when you consider that stories engage our brains, triggering our imaginations, releasing dopamine into the bloodstream. As such, we become participants in the narrative and entangled with the story, which, when done well, yields excellent results. Producing high-quality and compelling video content involves a lot more than just editing, without creativity and engaging storylines viewers’ can lose interest in the content. If your in-house marketing team has a lot on their plate running campaigns, you can also consider outsourcing video production services from companies who are experts in SaaS video production for startups, they can help you support your brand mission and help you with the workload, and ideate compelling storylines for your product and service videos.
5. Incorporate Video and Email Marketing
In 2020, there were around 4 billion global email users – if you’re not marketing to them, it’s a vast, untapped database of potential.
When you incorporate videos into your email marketing campaigns, you’re delivering your message directly to customers and building a relationship with them. There’s no need to optimize to drive organic traffic because it’s guaranteed to reach the right target audience. Imagine the kind of connection you could establish with subscribers when your pair email with an emotive video.
This strategy is even more effective if you personalize emails, such as adding the customer’s name in the email’s opening or subject line.
Just as video enhances email engagement, views on your hosted landing pages can also help feed your email list. Using Wistia’s integration with HubSpot, for example, you can seamlessly capture leads using videos and conveniently peruse viewing data inside of Hubspot’s CRM. From here, you can assign leads rules based on video triggers to ensure each view brings you a step closer to your brand’s overarching business goals.
Are You Ready to Start Mastering Video Marketing?
By now, you should have a better idea of using video marketing to the fullest in the year ahead. By ensuring videos are engaging with and without sound, optimized, and tell a compelling story, you’ll be in great shape.