Video is the Future, but Adapt Your Content to the Channel

People love watching videos.

The average person watches between five and ten videos a day. In fact, I read that a website that has any video on it can multiply its chances to show on Google’s first page by 53, compared to a website with no video.

Businesses understand how important videos are to their marketing efforts, but the problem is that many people can’t create them.

Until recently it was a very costly thing to produce. Just recruiting the creative personnel needed for a project demands resources and time that your team simply might not have.

Today, creating a video is much easier. You can convey almost anything with stock footage - there’s so much out there that you can still be unique and creative.

Our goal at Promo was to make the whole video production process easier for people. Today, your business can find itself needing to produce content on a daily basis. You might be able to dedicate the resources for one video, but to find a winning campaign, you need the structure in place to produce videos on a regular basis.

The other thing to remember is that you need to optimize your content for the channel you’re publishing on. On Facebook and Instagram, for example, you want short and sweet videos, with footage that will grab people’s attention and stop them scrolling. The videos are also likely to be watched in silent mode, so make sure there’s a lot of text on screen and subtitles if there’s a voiceover.

YouTube videos can be longer and more targeted. Understanding the platform you’re publishing on, and who your video is reaching, can make a huge difference to the success of your campaign.

It’s not magic, though. Your sales won’t suddenly multiply when you publish a video. If your exposure is low, that’s something you’ll need to invest in. You also need to think about the kind of additional content you might produce around the video, and the way you go about doing it.

Video certainly isn’t the only important thing, but it helps.  

For inspiration, brands like Mailchimp and SodaStream produce high-quality video content that really represents their brand well.

Mailchimp have built an ingenious brand around a product that is not a very complex commodity, using a lot of humor and self-awareness. The ‘Mail Shrimp’ video is a must-watch.

Sodastream produce incredible videos that tell stories with substance. They’re not cheap but they’re not expensive, either, proving that you don’t need to break the bank to produce effective content.

Create, Create, Create

Often the biggest challenge is not the money, or the time, but the creative side of things. Locking down the message and the copy of your brand is the most important part of any campaign, video or otherwise.

At Promo, we actually created a calendar with a daily creative idea, in order to help people get the ball rolling when it came to coming up with ideas.

Once you’ve nailed that down, finding the right concept for a particular project is always a challenge. The key is to never stop trying with your content. Tools like Promo make it easy to easily produce material on a regular basis without too much investment. The more you create, the better you understand what works and what doesn’t work.

We had a Christmas ad at Promo of dancing cookies inside an oven. It brought crazy sales but nobody could predict it would be the winning ad.  

I think the most important thing is to create content that gives people something to talk about. The more people talk, the more aware people are going to be of your brand.

As long as you stay consistent, and always try new things, you’ll eventually find a winner.

Put Your Product to Work

There’s no greater proof of your product’s value than when you find yourself using it yourself on a regular basis.

A while back Promo participated in Social Media Marketing World in San Diego. It’s a big exhibition that draws many marketers, small business managers, and social media influencers.

Our aim was to get their attention. We had this idea where we picked twenty influencers and each day for twenty days before the exhibition we selected a ‘Star of the Day’ and made a video for them using our platform.

We tagged their social media accounts and it was lovely. People loved seeing themselves, and they shared the videos and eventually came to meet us at the event.

It wasn’t a big investment. We made a template and duplicated it. We personalized each one but it wasn’t this ingenious creative masterpiece. We did enough to get their attention.

At Promo, we used our product internally for everything we did. For every new job opportunity that we would publish, we would create a video that was tailored to the job description. For a software development position, we would sit with the team and identify the things that were important to them, and then create a job posting based on their feedback.

It made us stand out in people’s feeds, whether they were on Facebook or Linkedin. There are so many jobs out there for talented people, that you want to find a way to grab their attention.

Even once somebody was hired, we would ask them to create a Promo video introducing themselves. It was a way to get them comfortable with our product and also to break the ice for a new employee.

We would use Promo videos for birthdays and anniversaries, and any occasion that we celebrated. It helped everyone identify with the brand, and showed real-world applications of our product.

Brand Consistency is Key

Even if you’re using a tool like Promo, which works on pre-existing templates and stock footage, you need to make sure that your brand is shining through.

One of our clients was an Israeli company named Metaktekot, a company that provides virtual administrative services. They make great videos using Promo but the best thing is that you can immediately tell it’s them. They have a font, a style, and even the stories are similar.

You need to look after your brand and be consistent. Your colors, text animations, everything within the video needs to fit in with everything else you’re doing.

Sometimes, we even went back to the client and asked to make changes, because we wanted to help them with brand consistency.

Templates like the ones on Promo can save you plenty of time, but they aren’t nearly as effective as they would be if you tailored each video to your business’ unique message and identity.

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