Summary: By getting to know your audience, keeping things short, and being transparent about your content, you, too, can use video marketing to reach your overloaded, short-on-time audience!
The year is 2022, and there are an endless number of things vying for our attention. Texts or instant messages. Social media scrolling. Work emails and Slack pings. The stock market. NFTs. The news. Netflix. And then there is spending actual quality time with your family and friends, of course.
These days, everybody has a lot going on all the time. That’s just life in today’s world.
So, what does this have to do with short video content? We just established that people don’t have much time for anything, so that ten-minute product video with high production values that costs a small fortune to make? Yeah, nobody is watching that. Sorry!
But do you know what people will watch? A minute-long video that’s funny and engaging that piques people’s interest in the first few seconds.
Short and Sweet Videos Win Customer Attention
According to this study, 68% of consumers will happily watch a business or product video with a duration of one minute or less. On the other hand, less than 25% of potential customers will finish a video if it’s over ten minutes long.
So a good rule of thumb when it comes to videos is that shorter is better. However, it also depends on where you plan to share your video.
If it’s LinkedIn or YouTube, chances are you will retain some engagement even on a longer video if it’s a good video (we’ll come back to this point shortly). If you are active on Instagram or TikTok, you’re probably already aware that those audiences prefer much shorter videos, but it’s worth reiterating: a ten-minute video is not going to prosper on TikTok.
Optimizing Length for Platform is Important ﹘But You Still Have to Make a Good Video
Facebook estimates that 47% of a video’s value is delivered in the first 3 seconds. This means that regardless of whether you make a thirty-second video for Instagram or one that’s over ten minutes for YouTube, the success or failure of either video hinges on the quality of those first five seconds.
You’ve heard the phrase “first impressions matter,” and that’s also true for short video marketing content!
How to Make a Great Marketing Video
The million-dollar question!
Get to Know Your Audience
From what we’ve talked about already, it’s clear one of the most important components of successful short marketing videos is knowing your audience. We’ve established that you need to cater your videos to the specific platforms you plan to share them on, but knowing your audience goes beyond that. What do they like? What do they dislike? What pain points do they have? What’s their sense of humor?
The answers to these questions will give you valuable insight into how best to shape your video, what tone and style to use, what content to include, and, ultimately, what story to tell.
One key point here is that if you don’t fully understand your audience, you probably shouldn’t make a video. Just because short video content is effective doesn’t mean it’s going to work simply because you’re doing it. So make sure you do it right!
Be Transparent With Your Title and Description
There’s one surefire way to immediately lose video-watchers before they even get to the ten-second mark: tricking them into watching a video that isn’t what they think it is. Don’t get any funny ideas. You won’t win them over; you’ll just lose them.
We highly recommend using all available real estate﹘so the video’s title and description﹘to be as transparent and straightforward as possible about what people will be watching if they choose to play your video. No surprises = a good viewing experience.
With the emergence of social media platforms that focus on brevity (TikTok, Instagram), short video consumption is rising (and we’ve predicted it will rise again in 2022). As a result, savvy marketers are taking notice and integrating more video content into their marketing strategies. In fact, according to data from HubSpot, 51% of marketers who used short-form videos last year said they were going to up their spending on videos this year, while 38% said they’d spend the same amount.
By getting to know your audience, keeping things short, and being transparent about your content, you, too, can use video marketing to reach your overloaded, short-on-time audience!
