As more and more businesses begin to use videos extensively for marketing, the focus is increasingly on creating videos that are truly able to engage viewers.
Although video engagement in itself remains a subjective metric, is important is clear as a gauge of how viewers respond and react to videos. More engaging videos are able to retain viewers better and provoke more reactions – including comments and shares.
If you want to create truly engaging marketing videos for your business, it needs to be planned as such. While planning a video encompasses many different areas, there are a few, in particular, you should focus on if you want to engage more viewers.
Define a Single Goal
Every marketing video needs to have a goal – and ideally, you should focus on just one per video. If you have too many goals and try to put across several messages in your video, each will just distract from the next.
Instead, you should define a single goal for your video, and focus its message on achieving that goal. Is your video designed to increase brand awareness? Promote a product? Capture leads?
Try to be as specific as possible about the goal that you want your video to achieve, and proceed to think about how it can do that.
Understand the Target Audience
In order to engage viewers, you need to first understand them – and that takes research. A good place to start however is to define your target audience in terms of their demographics, including their age group, gender, location, income, education, and so on.
From there you can dig deeper, and find out more about the demographic that you’re targeting. Try to discover their interests, preferences, problems, and ultimately the type of videos they respond to.
Throughout your research, you should try to identify information that you can use to plan your marketing video. That includes:
- What topics that the target audience may be interested in?
- Which platforms are best to publish the video to reach them?
- What types of videos seem to engage the target audience?
- Any types of background music that are a good culture fit?
As you can see there’s a lot of potentially valuable information that you can gain by researching your target audience and understanding them as thoroughly as possible.
Plan to Trigger an Emotional Reaction
Emotions drive engagement and action, making them one of the most important factors that you should consider. Every marketing video should be planned so that it is able to trigger an emotional reaction of some kind.
The exact emotion that you trigger isn’t really that important, but some of the more common ones that are used in marketing include joy, surprise, pride, amusement, or even fear and uncertainty. The more intensely viewers feel any emotion, the more likely they are to be driven into taking action – which will not only increase engagement but also help improve your video’s effectiveness.
Admittedly planning to trigger an emotional reaction isn’t easy – but a good place to start is by structuring your marketing video as a story. Based on your goal and the message of your video, find a way to portray it as a story that your viewers can relate to, and figure out how to get them to emotionally-invest in its outcome.
Make no mistake investing time and effort into this part of your marketing video’s plan is more than worthwhile.
Write the Script
After you’ve gone through the other steps described above, you should be finally ready to write a script for your marketing video. Try to be as detailed as possible when you write your script, and be sure to pen out not only the voiceover but also the visuals.
As you write your script, there are several factors that you should keep in mind to help make it more engaging:
- Always open with a hook
Marketing videos often lose lots of viewers in the first few seconds. To retain more viewers you should open every video with a hook that convinces them to stay and keep watching.
The hook should basically let viewers know what they stand to gain by watching the video. In other words, you should start your video by immediately outlining what it is about and how it will benefit viewers – preferably within 8 seconds or so.
- Plan how you will ‘show’ the message
One of the reasons why videos are more engaging than other mediums is they are able to visually deliver information. It is important that you capitalize on that, and so your script should plan not only the voiceover but also the visuals that accompany them.
For each point in your video, think about what visuals will accompany it. If necessary you could use other ways to plan the visuals, and creating storyboards is one of the more popular options.
Remember that the visuals in your video don’t necessarily have to be conventional video footage, and you could use animation or even screen recording footage if necessary. For example, you may want to record footage of apps using Movavi Screen Capture Studio, which is arguably the best screen recorder available.
- Keep it concise
As your video starts to take shape, you should have a rough idea of how long it will be. The optimal duration for videos will vary depending on your target audience and the platform it is being published on, but as a rule, all marketing videos should be concise.
If you feel your marketing video seems too long, try to see if there’s any way you can simplify the message and how it is delivered. Be direct, and avoid any tangents that could unnecessarily lengthen the video.
Final Words
Armed with a solid plan, you should be able to create marketing videos that are able to engage more viewers. Be sure to track the performance of your videos, however, and try to analyze and learn from them along the way.
That should help you to make improvements the next time you plan a marketing video.
