We totally understand the desire video service teams feel to bring their video campaigns to the next level. After all, video is such an incredible tool with which to engage viewers – it’s both visually and aurally captivating, and it has the ability to tap into emotional motivators unlike any other medium. What’s more, it’s popular. People like engaging with video — over 100 million hours of video content are watched daily on Facebook alone.
So when you recognize what a powerful tool video is, especially when used as part of a creative marketing campaign, it makes sense that video service providers want to constantly seek to maximize and innovate their approach.
With that in mind, we’ve turned to a trusted expert in the field and organized some great video marketing tips.
1. Don’t Lose Sight of Good Storytelling
Whether you’re creating a video campaign for an innovative, outside-the-box start-up or the most straight-laced financial institution, one truth stands steady. Good storytelling is always necessary in order to maximize viewer engagement.
Says Tony Jones, Digital Content Director at Signal TV, “The rules still apply – just because the narrative is corporate, doesn’t mean the format needs to be boring. Adding a human touch, a sense of comedy or a novel graphics technique can make the films more engaging.”
Enjoyment of video ads increases brand recognition by 139% and it opens the door for emotional engagement. What’s so important about emotional engagement, you ask?
According to a study conducted by Psychology Today, “the emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content – by a factor of 3-to-1 for television commercials and 2-to-1 for print ads.”
The role of emotion as a purchase motivator also applies to video campaigns where the goal is to convert in ways other than a new sale. Emotion can be used to simply drive action, whether it’s the download of an app, the enrollment into online services, engagement with a special offer and so on.
2. Be Aware of the World Beyond the Campaign
When you’re deciding what story you want your campaign to tell, it’s not uncommon to pull inspiration from real life – the state of the economy, pop culture trends, headline events and so on. A video campaign that contributes to a larger social conversation is a great thing and can do wonders for engagement. But that said, be extremely mindful that your campaign is contributing in exactly the way you mean for it to.
This is where suggests asking this critical question during the creative brainstorming phase, “Where did that come from? Consider cultural hot topics like Brexit, Trump, etc. There may be news events that affect the context of the production and the last minute changes to the script. Keep an eye on the news as your client will.”
Take for example when Pepsi launched its Black Lives Matter-inspired campaign featuring Kendall Jenner. In a PepsiCo boardroom brainstorm, the concept may (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt) have sounded great. The focus of the campaign was timely, impactful and certainly emotionally-driven. But the final result played to viewers as a privileged white woman trivializing an incredibly important social movement – Kylie Jenner putting a stop to police brutality with one simple can of Pepsi.
Needless to say there was momentous and incredibly negative uproar from consumers, and the campaign was pulled shortly after its debut.
The point here is not to tip-toe around difficult topics or to keep things vanilla, but rather to do your homework. Understand the conversation or event your campaign comments on, and keep an eye on important developments as you go to launch.
3. Look to Exciting and Emerging Creative Technologies
When it comes to personalization, the future is now. “The client may not have considered this, but using Personalized Video can make the video much more engaging, useful and relevant to each recipient,” says Jones.
Jones and his team at Signal Productions worked on a Personalized Video campaign for Tesco Clubcard with the goal of showing loyalty members how many club points they’d earned, and also sharing exciting ways the points could be redeemed.
The campaign featured dynamic elements that changed based on customer data. In addition to featuring a viewer’s name, additional areas of personalization included the tabletop objects, the article in the magazine, the contents on the laptop screen and the Clubcard deals offered at the end of the campaign.
The cinematic-quality Native Personalized Video campaign was a clever way of engaging customers in a true wow moment that leveraged innovative technology hyper-relevant communication.
Want more?
Download our Standing Out in the Creative Industry: How Video Increases Consumer Engagement, Tells Richer Brand Stories and Delivers Wow Moments eBook:
