As you start a new year of marketing your businesses and organizations, you’ll definitely think about including video into your campaigns. Video is the easiest and most difficult medium to use. It is also the cheapest and most expensive way to communicate your message. The least time consuming as well as the most resource-draining. How can this be?
Our ability to create content at any given moment is the reason behind this paradox. You’re probably reading this blog post on a video studio powerful enough to create a B-movie. All you really need to do to create any piece of video content is: Point. Shoot. Post. You don’t even need to invest a dime more to continually distribute some sort of video content than what you’re already shelling out in 24-installments to your mobile service provider.
But, video for the sake of video is really ignoring the power of video. The power of video is the ability to break through all of the clutter and engage directly to a large group of viewers and clearly communicate your message and your value. You owe the person on the other end of your video link or social media content an enjoyable experience while you have their attention. That person is going to make a decision whether to continue with your content within the first two seconds.
Can the viewer see the video? Is the picture up to the standard of the rest of the video they’ll watch? Will the viewer experience animations and text in a way that they’re more likely to remember the video’s message? Can they hear the message? Is the quality of the sound up to the standards the viewer is expecting? Will the viewer be distracted by noise or editing glitches? Is the video structured in a way that makes sense to someone watching?
These questions come from a larger list of questions you’ll need to ask yourself when you’re considering video from the viewer’s perspective. It is important to think of who you’re talking to and their capacity, interests, consumption habits, devices, etc. while you’re producing a video. People marketing their business normally think of what they can do before what they should do and what their viewers expect and require thus really affecting their ability to communicate and really exhausting their time, money and resources. They then fail to gain much value from their investment on video and steer away from video marketing in the future.
