Driving Engagement with Your Next Corporate Video
Engagement is the ultimate goal of any good corporate video campaign. While it is important to convey your message, it is not just enough to tell the audience that your product is good. You must convince them. This is where video engagement comes in. Audiences who interact with your video, and who pay close attention, are far more likely to become customers, and far more likely to become advocates for your brand. However, it’s not easy to create a video that conveys your message and drives engagement in your audience. We’ve put together a few key tactics to spur your audience to engage with your video content.
Tailor the video to your audience
Firstly, the key to driving audience engagement is knowing your audience and speaking to them directly. Too often, marketers will try to cast a wide net with their video in order to get the best return on their investment for the content. However, what drives engagement for one demographic will almost certainly fail to excite another demographic. In order to engage your potential customers, you must first gain a clear understanding of their interests and what motivates them. Information about your audience doesn’t always come cheap, but without a tailored approach to driving engagement, your video will fail to win over customers in an impactful way. Moreover, the same consumer data will be very valuable to future product development initiatives.
Finally, it is vital to future video marketing efforts that your marketing team analyze video engagement information from all existing content. This allows you to generate your own knowledge of your customers, which can in turn lead to even greater engagement with future video marketing content.
Optimize your video for the host platform
The internet is home to a vast array of online video hosting services. It is important to carefully consider which one of the many options is best for your video content. To this end, a savvy marketer must consider price, speed, interface, searchability, and the typical audience for each hosting service. Popular video hosting platforms include YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, Vidyard, and others. Before preparing your content, it is important to identify which hosting platform you will be posting the video on. Social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are typically far more effective for driving audience engagement. This is because these platforms have built-in functionalities such as comments and sharing that allow your audience to directly interact with your content.
Once you have chosen your video hosting platform, you can move forward with tailoring your content to that site. Each platform has a very unique set of restrictions and best practices for use, called “netiquette”. For example, while anyone can post an 8-minute video on Facebook, common knowledge dictates that the typical Facebook user will only watch 30 seconds of a video that appears in their news feed. On the other hand, Vimeo is an excellent hosting platform for high-quality corporate video content. In most cases, the audience for this content is already filtered to only include people who are highly interested in your products. As such, videos hosted on Vimeo can be far more detailed and longer-formed. It is important to understand these intricacies in order to tailor video content to the hosting platform in order to leverage that site’s unique offerings in order to drive engagement.
Keep it brief
One of the great video marketing blunders is crafting content that is too long. In the digital age, audience attention spans are far shorter than ever before. It is important to remember that your audience is only ever a few clicks away from an endless supply of funny cat videos. As such, your video content must pay respect to the audience’s desire to get to the message quickly. Of course, different types of videos call for different lengths, and such selections heavily rely on the audience characteristics and subject for each video. However, as a general rule it is very important that your video remain short and to the point. Think about it: when you had Tivo, did you really sit through the advertisements on your recorded shows? And that was before the triumphant rise of Netflix.
It is also important to recognise that true engagement means that your audience must be interested and attentive throughout the entire video. Hosting sites like YouTube keep track of how long a video plays for, and factors this into engagement analytics. This data in turn drives the search ranking function of the site. The longer your video, the more likely you are to lose engagement with the audience before the end, and the worse your video will perform in search rankings.
Be unique
Above all else, the biggest barrier to audience engagement is the availability of alternatives online. If your content fails to differentiate itself from the 300 hours of other video content that is uploaded YouTube in the 1 minute it takes to watch your video content. We could offer ideas on how to be unique, but the availability of the information would void the effort. In the end, novelty requires you to be genuine and to represent your brand and corporate culture. As such, the best way to be unique is to use the original ideas of your marketing team.
Comment below and let us know what kind of videos you find most engaging?
