Sad, but true. Especially if that wall is your home page, Facebook wall, or email marketing campaign.
This has less to do with writing and more to do with people’s changing preferences and attention spans. If not writing, what do they want?
Video killed more than the radio star…
In fact, for more than a decade, video has killed anything that stands in its way. Let’s look at the new reality:
74 percent of all online traffic will be video by 2017.
70 percent of marketing professionals report that video converts better than any other medium. (Marketing Profs)
Video on landing pages can increase conversions by 80 percent. (Unbounce)
Video in an email can boost open rates by 20 percent and increase click-through rates by 200 to 300 percent. (Forbes)
59 percent of viewers will watch a video that is less than one-minute to completion. (Wistia)
The average online use spends 88 percent more time on a website with a video (Mist Media)
64 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it. (comScore)
So the question now isn’t should you use video, it’s how effective do you want your video to be?
The top two video styles are very different: live, talking heads (real people); and animated whiteboard-style explainer videos.
What happens if you take a talking head video and go toe-to-toe with a whiteboard explainer video? One video scribing company did just that. Identical audio and identical lengths but one was “live” and one was whiteboard. Here’s what they found out:
Those viewers who had seen the whiteboard video performed better in four out of five memory tests.
The whiteboard video was three times more likely to be shared.
The whiteboard video was over twice as likely to be recommended.
Four out of ten whiteboard video viewers would have bought the service described in the video—twice as many as the talking head viewers.
Those are important findings—especially for the next time you’re considering video for your organization!
In 1944, two psychologists made a brief animated movie. Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s movie was part of a study entitled “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” and consisted of two triangles, a dot, and a box:
These inanimate objects moved around the screen and “interacted” with each other. When test subjects were asked to describe the actions of the triangles, dot, and box they explained what they saw in terms of a story.
“Oh, that one is a bully!”
“They’re fighting over the girl.”
“Oh no! The dot is trapped!”
Please understand, this simple animated black and white movie didn’t have music, didn’t have voices or sound effects—it was simply two triangles, a dot, and a box. Yet the only way to explain what the viewers were watching, each resorted to giving the objects personalities and telling a story!
“Results from a dozen prominent cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists have confirmed that human minds do rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understanding, making sense of, remembering our lives—as well as countless experiences and narratives along the way,” reports Kendall Haven, in his book Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story. He continues, “In our enlightened, literate, scientific, rational, advanced world, it is still story structure that lies at the core of human mental functioning.”
Stories are the most efficient and effective structural vehicles to use if you need to motivate, teach and communicate factual, conceptual, and tacit information (that’s stuff that has to do with attitudes, beliefs, values, and expectations).
For example, your product isn’t “just a desk lamp,” look at what Pixar did with their desk lamp!
Tell a story! Problem – Solution. A day in the life of… How it was before your product or service and how much better it is now. Here’s a Problem – Solution examle:
This is a brief animation we did for the National Safety Council for their campaign about “listening to your car”:
The takeaway is this: the next time your organization needs to provide employee orientation or training, or explain how your mousetrap is better than all other mousetraps, start with a story!
Have you ever had one of those weekends? A food fueled smorgasbord that leaves you with a meat hangover?
I did this last weekend.
(Pictured: a heart attack)
It was AMAZING! Three racks of ribs, two full home grown chickens and ten bratwursts.
I spend over 9 hours making this. That picture was taken near the very end and I had spent a very long time making sure that everything went perfectly. Boy did it ever.
(Pictured: Drool Factor 5)
The same thing can be said about anything: School, children, career, business. They all need nurturing. They all need taking care of. They need time to be mastered.
It’s the same with writing. You have to nurture the skill if you want to master it. Perhaps some think that it’s all just a matter of left to right, up to down, put it in an order to make sense and viola! You have some magical sentence that will change the world.
Or not. It does matter what the words say. I forgot to mention that.
In my line, that’s really all that matters. Especially when trying to write and explain concepts for companies that not only make sense, but are engaging and entertaining.
But hey, that’s our job.
There’s nothing that feels quite as nice as when a video comes together. Especially when that video is now creating traffic to your website.
The numbers don’t lie. 80% of Internet users recall watching a video ad on a website in the past month. Video sharing websites like YouTube are getting millions of hits a day. Since nearly the entire world is on board with this whole Internet thing, that’s a lot of people that could be watching videos about your company.
When Ydraw started we were making good videos that held audiences attention.
Then as the years went by, the videos went from good to great. Sort of like how the Beatles only got better after they replaced Paul after the car crash.
So as we venture into the future, we write.
Writing has always been second hand nature for me. To accurately represent feelings through action and dialogue have been a staple in my life ever since I can remember. A lot of it has been from working on movie sets with my dad, an accomplished Special Effects Technician.
Since I was a little kid I’ve always been on a movie set. My first memories of a movie set was going down to San Diego and seeing some jets used on ‘Top Gun’ and getting yelled at by Tom Cruise. I started working on movies since I was 15 and have a decent resume (not that my name appears on all of those movies, not a lot of people’s do).
But my passion wasn’t into making the production, but rather into creating the story. So I started writing and writing and then after that nap, more writing.
I still have some of those first attempts to put pen on paper and they are BAD.
In the same way when I started to smoke ribs, those first racks of ribs were terrible. Absolutely and horrifyingly terrible. I even made friends of mine eat them.
I still feel bad about that.
But today, my writing and my ribs are something I’m proud of. It took years to accomplish. Hours upon hours of practice. Now I’m being recognized for both. I have a great writing job here at Ydraw and my whenever anybody takes a taste of my ribs are blown away at the quality. The reason is simple.
Through nourishment and time-consuming effort, I have been able to cultivate the type of result that is extraordinary. And more importantly, a result I’m proud of.
Today businesses are struggling to raise brand awareness and achieve monthly sales. Without an online presence those goals are not easily reached, if they are reached at all. 90% of online shoppers said they found a video helped in making and buying decisions, 80% of internet users recall watching a video ad on a website in the past 30 days and 64% are more likely to make a purchase.
But why?
THE HUMAN BRAIN CAN PROCESS VISUAL CONCEPTS QUICKER. In a study last year, scientists found that the human brain can process an image that has been seen for just 13 milliseconds. Which means that the brain can process visual information 60,000 times faster than the time it takes for the brain to process text. This is why visuals can be used as a strong communication tool to gather potential consumers. Even the earliest versions of man communicated with each other through cave paintings. Those evolved to pictures with full meanings, to written text and have ended on video, the collaboration of visual and sound sensory. These two senses are the most basic form of understanding and are still the most effective means to present ideas to consumers.
IT WILL IMPACT LONG-TERM MEMORY RECALL. Reeling in your audience with stimulating images can lodge an idea inside the heads of consumers. That idea then calls the person to action. That action can manifest by a retrieval cue, based on an ad they saw before a YouTube video started, that stirs the consumers memory and redirects them to your website or your product on an online store. Video images are essentially being used as prompting that trigger the retrieval of long-term memory.
ONLINE VIEWING IS AT AN ALL-TIME HIGH. The number of video content posts from companies and individuals has risen by 94% in the United States and the average viewing session on YouTube is now 40 minutes and watch time on mobile devices have more than doubled since last year. 89 Million people in the United States alone with watch 1.2 billion online videos today and 52% of them say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchases. Any device that connects to the Internet now allows companies, large and small; to promote themselves in creative ways and let untapped revenue streams flow into their company.
VIDEOS ARE IDEAL FOR SOCIAL MEDIA. Videos are ready made to engage consumers and get them to click through to your website. In 2010 a marketing survey found that when marketers included an explainer video in an email, the click-through rate increased by 200% to 300%. Those numbers only multiply when applied to Facebook and Twitter. Videos are easy to share and easy to engage your key demographic.
There are many other statistics on video content and it’s effectiveness online and they further prove this point; an online presence is critical in today’s market, but that presence needs something to push and prod the consumer towards your company. Utilizing video to quickly explain to and easily share with consumers can dramatically increase the draw to your company and allow you to grow. Don’t be left behind as the online market changes the way consumers pay attention to companies and their products. Change with the market and get ahead of your competitors.
