The word is finally out. Video marketing is so incredibly important to business owners today that it’s essential. You simply can’t do without it in the modern market if you want to succeed. Let alone compete with your competitors. Though text information won’t ever lose its necessity, video content is vastly more popular. Of all media forms, it’s the easiest to digest. Every single day YouTube logs over a billion hours of watch time. One billion. This alone should be enough proof to get the attention of anyone interested in digital marketing. If you want to succeed in the DM industry, you have to understand the power of video.
The Truth About Video
Video can be shared easier than any other media form. And sharing digital media is key to effective word-of-mouth exposure today. The majority of apps, for example, are being created and updated specifically to facilitate video content. All these software companies know that if their programs don’t do that, they’ll be outperformed. Consumers prefer video. Plain and simple. It’s engaging, versatile, entertaining, and offers a very big ROI.
There Are So Many Different Kinds Of Marketing Videos
Different types of businesses create different kinds of videos to serve their particular purpose. Depending on the industry, product, and customer, one kind of video may work where another may not. The good news is that there are lots of different kinds of marketing videos to choose from. Of course, before choosing the kind of video you’re going to make, you need to have a strategy. A content marketing strategy. Once you’ve got that laid out, you can then choose the right video type to fit your goals. Here are short explanations of four of the most common kinds of marketing videos.
Explainer Videos
Though some people claim that explainer videos are going out of style, data suggests otherwise. These videos are often made using some kind of animation. That’s because when you need to explain processes, ideas, philosophies, and systems, animation does that best. Business owners who need to deliver these kinds of messages often make explainer videos.
Interviews
Interview videos can be used to accomplish many different purposes. Testimonials using interviews can be very effective. If you have an influencer, such as a special guest of spokesperson, this kind of video is a good choice. One nice thing about interview videos is that you can take the audio and turn it into a podcast episode.
Product Reviews/Demos
Particularly if your business involves selling physical products on a retail level, demo videos are great. You should want to have a video on your site that shows your product or service in action. That way it’s not left up to the customer’s imagination. If they can see it, they’re much more likely to buy. Sometimes happy customers will create demo videos for you and share them online. This is even better. Or you can seek out influencers. An influencer is a person on social media who wants to gain a following by advertising for businesses. You give them your product to try and they review it. Free product in exchange for advertising. Also, product reviews in bulk can be used as market research.
Live Video
Live video is becoming more and more popular. Businesses are finding that it’s one of the best ways they can utilize social media for marketing purposes. It also allows you and your audience to become close. It’s a very personalized video marketing method.
These Stats Answer The Question Why Is Video So Important In Marketing?
If you’re not convinced already, here are some statistics relevant to the video marketing world. These answer the question Why is video so important in marketing? These statistics were pulled from recent poll data.
Video content provides the highest level of product understanding, say over 95% of marketers.
In the past, advertising and marketing were done with a direct sales pitch approach. Today, in the world of the internet and online shopping, things have changed. Now businesses are trending toward a more value-based approach. This is likely because of the millions and millions of instant choices consumers now have. Less than 20 years ago, your choice of a particular product was still limited to the supermarket shelves. Not anymore. Because of today’s vast number of product options, the hard sell approach isn’t as effective.
Video content is fantastic at delivering a value-based product message. Give the consumers a quick video they can watch that explains your service and its value. Sure, they may also watch videos from some of your competitors. That’s to be expected. But if you’ve positioned your product correctly with the help of video content, they’ll choose you!
By the year 2021, video will represent at least 80% of internet traffic worldwide.
Because watching videos is what most internet users do, search engines place a high priority on them. Companies like Google can see that video is what the consumer prefers. As a result, businesses making them usually get better SEO results. Make sure you know how to optimize your videos properly.
As of 2019, it’s estimated that video marketing is being used by over 80% of businesses.
Yes! This is great! In the not-too-distant-past, this number was much lower. But business owners are finally coming to grips with the facts. Video is what their customers want so they’re giving it to them. An explainer video that’s less than 2 minutes long can often make all the difference. It can provide, in that short time, sufficient education for a person to understand all they need to buy. Remember to tell a story in your video. Something they can relate to. Boring videos don’t tell stories.
By 2021, almost 15% of internet traffic will be live video.
The main platforms for live video these days are Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. People who understand the game of live video on social media can gain massive followings. And the more people who follow you, the more exposure you get. And more exposure almost always translates to more sales. We’ve heard of businesses using the time-sensitive nature of Snapchat to their advantage. Creating time-sensitive promotions available exclusively to people who follow them on social media and see a certain post. And that’s only one idea. Consider using live video to offer your customers a more personalized and intimate look into your company. It’s a good way to build loyalty.
Before buying something, over 90% of people prefer watching a video first.
The data here speaks for itself. If you have a video that people can watch showing your product in action, you will make more sales. Simple as that. Likewise, if you don’t have a video like this, you aren’t making as many sales as you could. In other words, you’re losing money. Many companies put these videos on their home page or on a landing page of some kind. This way the person has an opportunity to view the video right away. Also, putting these kinds of videos on your website is great in another way. People spend more time on your site! If they’re watching a video on your site, they’re likely going to stick around and explore.
Some Video Marketing Advice
Just so you know, the length of your video should depend on where you’re sharing it. For example, if you’re planning on sharing it straight to YouTube, around 2 minutes is a good length. But if you’re sharing it on Instagram, 30 seconds is better. Sharing to Facebook = around a minute. Sharing to Twitter = around 45 sec.
Make sure all the videos you create are mobile-friendly. Most people access the internet from their phones now, more than their computers.
All videos need to be optimized for SEO.
Track the performance of your videos. Don’t just put them out there and hope they’re doing their job. Use tracking software so you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. Check your metrics regularly.
Every video you make needs to have a call to action. Every one.
Is your website actually communicating the right message to your audience or turning them away? Don’t let yourself fall into the category of those who are doing things incorrectly! We’ve got plenty of tips that will help guide you to the perfect website and make sure you are sending the right message to your audience.
Take a look at this weeks Moron Monday video to learn what you should and shouldn’t be doing when it comes to your website.
If you missed last weeks episode, you can find it HERE! We talked about how to run successful video ads!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Hey, what’s up guys? I want to welcome you to another session of Moron Monday.
It’s not Monday, we call it Moron Monday because we just show you the different things that morons do in marketing, and especially video marketing.
Today is probably one of the most important episodes we’ve had. We’ve only had three, but it’s probably one of the most important episodes you’re going to see and continue to see, because we’re going to talk about the words. The words we use and the messaging we use. If you are a business and you are creating a website or you’re creating a new video, it’s really important that you say the right things to get people to take action.
If somebody comes to your website, they need to know what it is that you do immediately. It needs to pass the five second test.
If you’re creating a video, they need to know “Hey, what is this video about?”. Don’t go into some long old story before you tell them what it’s about. It’s like a trailer.
Whatever it is that you are using to get your message in front of people, you need to have your Unique Selling Proposition there.
And then same with your video message, it needs to be in there.
STEP NUMBER 1
This is probably where we see people screw up the most, is with simplicity.
I am a big fan of keeping things simple, and a lot of times when a customer comes to us and they’re like, “Hey, we want you guys to create our script,” (because we do all the scriptwriting when it comes to our videos), most of the time there’s a bit of a clash because what they’re focused on is actually confusing the heck out of the audience.
There’s that knowledge gap where they have been working in that industry, they know everything about it, and then you have a consumer who knows nothing about it.
What happens is they try to take all their jargon, all of their message, all of their features, and they just cram it into a video, and usually it doesn’t turn out good and it confuses the audience.
What we try to do is get them to step back and say, “Hey, let’s keep things simple and do not confuse.” Because if you confuse your audience, you’re going to lose them. They’re going to jump over to somebody else who doesn’t confuse them.
STEP NUMBER 2
And then the next thing, everything that you do needs to be customer and problem-solution focused.
Don’t go out there and say we, we, we, we, we.
You need to talk about what it is that you’re going to do for them.
How can you solve their problem? Because people really don’t care about your awards, they don’t care about that kind of stuff.
Now, you do need to show social proof, I’m not saying go get rid of all your awards, go get rid of all your testimonials. No. That comes a little later, like if you’re creating a website, social proof should be down below.
But you don’t want to start off with “we’re the number one lawyer in the world”. And I’m going to show you some examples of different sites.
I’m going to jump over to a simple screencast and give you guys an idea of what to do and what not to do on what makes sense.
So the very first site we’re going to go jump into is a lawyer site.
Lawyers are actually notorious for confusing their audience, and they love cramming so much information on above the fold.
It just doesn’t make sense. And people don’t pay attention to it anyway.
So the very first one I pulled up was this NevadaDivorce.net. And you will see above the fold, which above the fold is above the crease, you have a bunch of call to actions.
You have a ton of paragraphs. You have no idea what it is that these guys do, I mean they’re divorce attorneys, but it just says Nevada divorce and document service.
Now they have some bullet points, they have a whole paragraph here, paragraph there, and bunch of links on the right, call us … You just don’t know what it is that they actually do here, so most people will bounce.
Compare that to this. Neil Patel. If you don’t know who Neil Patel is, he’s one of the SEO experts out there. He ranks for a lot of different things.
But on his website he just says “Do you want more traffic?”
Great. You come there and you’re like, “Oh, what it is that Neil does? He gets me more traffic.” Do you want more traffic lead sales? Enter your URL below if you want to grow your traffic and revenue.
And then he has a website. Now, what he’ll do with this website is more of a lead capture. You put your information in here, and that’s it. That’s what his whole website is set up to do.
It’s simple, effective, and I like to use some of his stuff.
Here’s another attorney. I just kind of make fun of attorneys, sorry. But their websites are usually the worst.
So they start off, here’s my number. They’re the 702 Firm.
Now, you have a smiley, a mean, a half-smile guy here, and they’re awarded the best personal injury law firm. That is a hundred percent me, me-focused, it is not consumer-focused.
Best injury lawyers in Las Vegas…personal injuries…
They’re trying to do a lot of stuff with search engine optimization and load it in here, but this whole website does not talk one bit about the consumer.
Compared to this. This is StoryBrand.
If you don’t know who he is, he actually writes about clarifying your message. So workshops to help you clarify your message, that’s what he does.
He does workshops to help clarify message. And then he just says eliminate confusion, connect with customers, grow your company.
You can see that that is customer-focused and it’s not about him, he doesn’t say, “We do this, this, this, this,” it’s like no, you’re going to eliminate confusion, you’re going to connect with your audience, and grow your company.
And then in the background he actually shows a good image of what’s going on so there’s just no confusion.
Compared to this one, this is a mortgage one. So hundreds of mortgage options under one roof.
Then they have this slider here that is going way too fast. They have nothing here, they just have some images and then this creepy little thing that pops up.
And then if you scroll down, there’s this long old paragraph here that nobody reads.
If you looked at the bounce rate and just said, “Hey, what happened?”
Now, if you space it out it’s okay to do some paragraphs. I’ll show you what I’m testing right now.
Okay, if you jump over onto this page here. I’m testing some longer form because long form sales letters do work.
It doesn’t all need to be simple, but if you hit the website, a YouTube Campaign can grow your business.
Then I go into these long form paragraphs here, where I talk about what kind of results we get for customers, and this seems to be working.
But you’ll see I space it out. I very rarely have two sentences per paragraph. I space it out, I highlight it. I don’t make it look all slammed together where people aren’t going to read that stuff.
You don’t need to eliminate all the writing on a website. This seems to be working, and we’ll keep testing.
But the main point it, just don’t confuse your audience.
Keep things simple, don’t confuse them.
Go back through your material.
The best way to get the most out of these courses that we do is go back through your material and apply these things that we talk about. Look at your website messaging and say, “Am I confusing my audience? If they come here, do they know what it is that I do within five seconds?”
And then another big thing, on a website you should have your headline. You can have a sub-headline here.
Make sure you have a call to action. You want to say, “Hey, if you’re here at my website, this is what I want you to do. Here’s what you’re going to get.” Don’t forget to put a call to action, and most of those websites that I did show you did not have that.
Same with video. So video, it needs to kind of fall in the same format, but it’s a little different.
What we like to do on videos is a headline, problem, solution, call to action, and then we’ll extend it out.
There’s a lot of popular videos that have millions of views that follow this same formula. They will do a guarantee, another solution, another call to action.
But don’t forget this call to action in your videos. You want them to do something. After they engage with any of your material, whether it’s brochures, website, videos, you want to ask them to do something so that you can do business. So don’t forget that.
And that is it. Go through your stuff, make the changes, and we’ll see you on the next episode.
Hey, guys. I want to welcome you to the second episode of “Moron Monday“. This is where we talk about the dumb things (and good things) people are doing in marketing. Last week, we went over a little bit about video remarketing. I want to show you a little more on this. We’re going to go over the different ways you can target your audience. Remember, I’m Jace with Ydraw and Marketing Hy.
Here are the different ways you can run ads in front of your audience. This is specifically for YouTube. One cool thing that YouTube came out with last October is what’s called TrueView for action ads.
This year, they also came out with being able to target TVs. So you know if people are watching your videos right on their TVs.
1. Placement campaigns
What is a placement campaign? We’re able to handpick the videos we want to run your video ads in front of.
If you’re a financial company and you want to get in front of other financial videos or in front of your target audience who is watching financial videos, you are then able to run them a placement campaign, and you’re also able to target your competitor’s videos. A lot of people like doing this.
If your competitors have a YouTube channel, you’re able to run your videos in front of theirs.
2. Remarketing
We went over this last week, but you’re able to target your website visitors and your YouTube viewers. If they watch a video on your YouTube channel, you’re able to run them more YouTube ads, or if they go to your website, you’re able to run them YouTube ads.
3. In-Market Audiences
There’s four steps, but I just combined these. I ran out of whiteboard space.
You have keywords and in-market audiences. In-market is kind of like your TrueView for action. If they’re searching for a new car, we can run them a video ad if we have a new car video ad,or if you’re a car dealership.
I don’t know why car dealerships aren’t doing this, but what they should be doing is running video ads in their local area to people who are searching for cars. Simple to do, nobody’s doing it.
Same thing for restaurants. If you’re in a local area and you want to get a little bit of traction, you might as well be running your video ads to those who are searching for restaurants, or just in your local area because it’s so cheap.
4. Keywords
The last one is keyword base. You can go and focus on certain keywords like you would a pay-per-click campaign, or a search campaign on Google Ads. You can do the same thing on YouTube.
If people are searching for running shoes, you can have your video pop up at the top for running shoes. Got it? That’s a simple thing you can do for video ads.
If you have questions, just go to our site ydraw.com. We’d love to help you. We’d love to create some of these video campaigns for you. It’s cheap, and we’ll post on there some examples and some results that some of our clients have got.
You did it!! You’re ready to start making your video.
So what’s next? The Ydraw process has stood the test of time in creating awesome videos, so don’t worry, you’re in great hands. There are 3 steps to our process: The scripting and scene plan phase, art phase, and production phase.
Here are some tips and trips and to make the overall process smooth and enjoyable.
SCRIPTING AND SCENE PLAN PHASE
During this time you’ll work with a creative director to nail down your script and scene plan. We like to think of these videos as a teaser to your product or service. We want to make sure that just enough information is included so that it sparks interest in the topic, and causes the viewer to take action. We don’t want to include every minor detail involved in your product or service, as this is likely to bore your audience.
So what makes a video successful? The headline and call to action!
A headline is the first couple of sentences in your video. These sentences are what hook your viewer immediately! A call to action appears at the end of the video, and instructs your viewer to do something! It can be as simple as visit your website, click the link, fill out a form, etc.
Below are a few DOs and DON’Ts to creating your script.
DO:
-Share all your ideas with the creative director.
-Collaborate and discuss the MOST important information needed in your video. (Remember it’s a teaser!)
-Keep your audience in mind, and solve their needs.
DON’T:
-Ramble on about minor (non-important) details.
-Make your message all about you. (Remember, the viewer is the star!)
ARTPHASE
Once the script and scene plan is approved, we send it off to an artist!! (Check out our art styles page to see all the different options!) The artist then creates the artwork based on the information described in the scene plan. We love to send them reference images, color schemes, logos, and any other documents that help them create the scenes!
We send these scenes over to you so that you can meet with your team and talk through your changes. We want your artwork to be perfect!
Below are some DOs and DON’Ts in the artwork phase.
DO:
-Share your artwork with your team.
-Make sure the artwork tells your story.
DON’T:
-Get the opinion of every family member, neighbor, and person on the street you talk to. Involving too many people in your video’s production forces you to pick and choose whose opinion matters most, and definitely slows the process!
-Focus too much on minor details.
-Complicate the artwork. Keep in mind that simplicity is key!
PRODUCTIONPHASE
Once your artwork is approved, we send it into production. This is the best part. You get to sit back and relax while we bring your video to life! We’ll add in the voiceover, animation effects, and music and sfx, and send you the finished video link.
Overall, our advice to clients would be to not sweat the small stuff! Sometimes, we see our clients get hung up on minor details that often times have no impact on the video’s message. We love creating videos, and want you to enjoy the Ydraw process too!
Want to get started? Contact us today to start making an awesome video 🙂
So what are Motion Graphics and why should you use them? “Motion Graphics” is just a fancy term used to describe a mix between graphic design and animation. Most motion graphic videos you will see these days are purpose driven with the goal of presenting information to the viewer.
There are many reasons why you should choose to advertise or explain with Motion Graphics, the biggest reason being emotional response. Video creates an emotional connection with the person watching far quicker than any other content platform. Did you know that using video on your landing page could increase conversion rates by as much as 80%? Animated marketing videos in particular are a very useful tool to deliver your business idea in just a couple of seconds.
Another reason why Motion Graphics are the way to go is because it is perfect to explain a complex or abstract idea in a very simple, fast and compelling way. With an Internet attention span continuously decreasing this is a very valuable point to mention.
There are literally no limits when it comes to the creative aspect of Motion Graphics. You want a flying monkey in your video? Here’s a flying monkey. You want a man scuba diving off the coast of Bermuda with Great White Sharks? No problem the video can be created quickly and on a budget without the hassle of creating expensive sets and hiring film crews/actors.
Motion Graphics are extremely effective because we are all visual learners. People learn and understand much more efficiently when they are taught with the help of drawings, diagrams, charts and different designs.
If you are trying to determine how to create your next marketing video just remember, Motion Graphics is the way to go. There are literally no limits to what you can show with Motion Graphics. But more importantly, your audience will connect with the information or product you are presenting quickly and effectively.
Check out one our latest and greatest Motion Graphic videos below:
