Video in digital marketing, part 1: Your audience and your style
As digital marketers, we see and support all kinds of campaigns and creative projects, and video always stands out for its unique ability to engage with a viewer and tell a story. Before deciding to embrace video, though, you need to define your target audience, review best practices for using the format, and determine the best deployment strategy for getting the most out of your investment.

How do people watch video?

More specifically, how do your customers watch video? If you haven’t considered this idea, it is a good place to start.

Web videos are watched at an extraordinary rate, but statistics about this trend generally point to video entertainment like Netflix and YouTube. Marketing videos are a bit different in that they are either consumed as advertisements or in the workplace.

So how will your target audience watch your video? Here are some ideas to consider:
  • Will they stream via smartphones, tablets, or desktops?
  • How will they get to the videos—via social media prompts, email links, or some other communication?
  • Are they likely to view with—or without—the sound turned on?
  • How long will they have to watch a video?
  • What treatment would work best—video, animation, typography, or a combination?
  • Does their age, job title, education level, or some other characteristic affect their probable viewing habits?
The answers to these questions will establish guidelines for your video content and style. For example, if your video will be promoted through an email campaign, and 70% of your emails are opened via mobile, then you can predict that most of your views will be mobile. How does accommodating for the smaller, more intimate screen size affect production choices? Will many people be watching with the sound off because they happened to open the email while in an inconvenient place?

What type of video?

This list is not exhaustive, but these are common uses for video within a marketing mix. Generally any given video might straddle all these concepts.

Brand awareness

Because videos are interesting and can communicate so much so quickly, they are great vehicles for brand awareness. For example, TBH Creative created a video for Baker Hill to help establish their AppGen loan origination product. The piece combines animation and recorded video into one branded piece that explains the product and gives personality to the brand.

Informational

When you want to help customers understand your product/service, offer tips for how to buy or use it, or explain how something works, utilize an informational video. These videos can be set up as tutorials, how-tos, live event streams, testimonials, process explanations, and more. Here is an example from TBH Creative client Kermans Flooring. This informational video was created to help clients understand different carpet options for both style and function. This video’s goal was to show that Kermans is an expert in flooring and boost SEO while also arming potential customers with confidence before they come into a store looking for carpet.

Connective

Some videos explore a theme or solution that is critical to a brand or product so that viewers make an association with that topic and the brand itself. For example, you may remember this viral video released by Dove a couple years ago. The video’s story about seeing beauty in yourself connected to Dove’s “real beauty” campaign. It is inspiring and shareable; both qualities helped build Dove’s brand awareness.

Straight advertisement

Established brands often can create short advertisements that are connective, because they already have an established brand (such as Coca-Cola). Newer companies need to lean on brand awareness, as they are hoping to earn market share and communicate a unique benefit of their product/service (like Dollar Shave Club). Others are often promoting a particular sale or new function, like this commercial from OrthoIndy that showcases their urgent care services.

What’s the next step?

Having a clear understanding of your audience and the type of video you want to make is important. Determining answers to the concepts above will set the table to establish guidelines for your concept and style. No matter the choices, there is one fact that is paramount to online video according to an awesomely informative infographic from Hubspot:
5% of viewers will stop watching a video after one minute and 60% after two minutes
Do you need to find new ways to use digital marketing to communicate? TBH Creative works with clients every day to construct campaigns and marketing strategies that make the most of your content, including online video.
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