Video is one of the most powerful tools available to brands to drive growth and customer loyalty. Moving stories connect with audiences, lift engagement rates, increase conversions and can make your brand story stick.
But brands are up against it and need to get even smarter with video marketing. A recent study showed that consumers wouldn’t care if 81% of brands sold across Europe just disappeared (Havas Group’s Meaningful Brands 2019). Read on to find out how video can help you tell better brand stories that make your customers care.
Emotional video content
Humans are hardwired to understand the world through stories. That’s why emotionally driven stories are the most effective kind of video content. In the science lab, it’s been shown that we’re more likely to donate money when we are emotionally engaged in a strong story arc (e.g. a narrative, which establishes characters who are faced with a challenge, ending with an exciting climax). Importantly, they will donate more money, the more emotionally engaged they are.
With the power to elicit behaviour change, emotional storytelling is essential for brands to help them make connections with customers and drive growth. You need to find the emotional drivers that will work for your target audience to encourage them to watch and take up your CTA. The more factual elements of your offer can be included in video content but must be used to back up your heartfelt messages.
Focus on your customer, avoid the spork effect
One common mistake in video marketing is the attempt to do too much in one video. It is essential to be focused on what you want to achieve, what drives your target audience, and the context of watching. If you try to do everything in a single film and list all your brand selling points, you’ll end up with people switching off. My term for this is the spork effect – it’s neither a spoon or a fork, so what is it good for?
An easy way to solve this is to ask yourself, “So what…?” For each message, try to put yourself into the shoes of the viewer and ask if it is relevant to them. Aim to identify one clear message which will resonate with your audience, reinforced through the film.
Leverage personalised video
As more and more brands pivot to a video strategy, personalisation can give your brand the edge. We’ve seen the results for ourselves. Email campaigns with personalised video content regularly achieve 50% plus open rates and 40% CTR (compared to the average industry standard of 1.8%).
Personalised content can be as varied as the data that you have permission to use. Even adding a name in a video greeting can help to build connections with your customers by making them feel valued. For instance, if you were exhibiting at Marketing Week Live, it would be a memorable follow-up to send a personalised video email post-event.
Meet us at Marketing Week Live
For more tips on how to grow your brand with video, come along to meet our MD Jon Mowat at Marketing Week Live. He’ll be on stand MF41 and catch his talk “The Magic Formula for Video Marketing” on the Brand Engagement and Innovation Stage on 6 March at 11.45 am and 7 March at 11.10am.