The Truth About Video Storytelling

Your Ally to Increase Brand Awareness and Sell Your Product

By Adriana Anderson

The most important content marketing trend in 2019 is video. According to Business Insider, over one million minutes of video are shared per second and over 80% of content consumed on the Internet is video. Visual storytelling will get you seen and will increase engagement for your brand. It’s more engaging, memorable, and popular than any other type of content. It is, hands-down, the content that you need to create.
 

WHAT’S THE BUZZ ABOUT PRODUCING VIDEO CONTENT?

Oh, only because YouTube is the second largest search engine next to Google. YouTube is a valuable resource for driving brand awareness and traffic to your website. Visual storytelling allows you to deliver your message in an engaging manner in a few seconds. It can help your audience research a purchase, learn a new skill, get a product review, or receive that little extra push to buy a product or service.

THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING

There are many ways that you can use video to tell your story. Here are some of our favorites:

1. Product Demo: What a great way to highlight a product or demonstrate a specific feature.
2. Tutorials: This type of content is one of the most searched-for online.
3. Testimonials: They show others that you have satisfied customers.
4. FAQs: Instead of reading thousands of words, your audience can watch short videos to get the answers they need.
5. Interviews: A great way to engage your audience and answer their burning questions. Sit down with a thought leader, customer, or team member for a chat. You can prepare questions in advance, interview-style, or gather questions from your community.
6. Behind-the-Scenes (BTS): Who doesn’t like to peek behind the curtains? BTS is a great way to show your company culture and build trust and connections with your community by showing the people what goes on behind closed doors.
7. Promotions: Grab your customers’ attention with an eye-catching visual story promoting a sale, service or event.
8. Events: Tap into your followers’ FOMO by posting visual stories from your own events, or events that you attend, like this one or this one. You can record and edit, or try live streaming.
9. Announcements: An engaging video is a fantastic way to build excitement around big news like an expansion, new product line, new release, or a project.
10. Commercial: Create your own commercial and advertise your products or services.
11. Brand Storytelling: Tell your brand’s story through video! Moving content does great for marketing reach and we love using video to tell a story.

GET FULL ATTENTION!

We have a few seconds to make a potential buyer notice our product. Here are our favorite tactics to make sure that video cuts through the noise and gets your audience’s full attention.

1. Entertain, inspire or educate: Video should be valuable and aim to educate, entertain, or inspire.
2. Be attention-grabbing: Grab attention in the first 8 seconds, or your audience may choose to go somewhere else.
3. Keep it short: Research shows that we have shorter attention spans than goldfish, who are able to focus on a task or object for 9 seconds. That means – as marketers – we’re all trying to sell to goldfish. No wonder it sometimes feels difficult!
4. Go vertical: Due to the popularity of smartphones, vertical videos have become more popular.
5. Sound: Video should work well without sound (most videos on social media are muted until the user chooses to turn on sound).
6. Add captions: Offer an accessible experience for people with disabilities, those who do not speak English as a first language, or people who are watching silently.
7. Make it shareable: Encourage people to share your video by including social share buttons.
8. Include a call to action: Tell your audience what you want from them: go to your website, share your video, sign up for your email list, etc.

WHY SHOULD YOU INVEST IN VIDEO?

Video is one of the best tools for marketers. Visual storytelling is easy to digest, entertaining and engaging, and it can give a potentially huge ROI through many channels.
Some of the benefits of visual storytelling are:

1. Builds trust and relationships with your customers
2. Increases credibility
3. Educates customers and potential customers
4. Improves your website’s Google rankings
5. Guarantees your brand a place on YouTube
6. Easy to share across your marketing mix (website, email, social media)

Whether you’re using video to showcase a product, service, or your company in general, it allows the consumer to feel connected to and confident in your brand.