Digital marketing offers a variety of engaging mediums that marketers can use, including video. In the past few years, using video has become much more accessible and realistic for businesses of all sizes and it can be a great way to provide value while engaging potential customers.
Trends in digital marketing are always evolving, but it’s clear that video isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the trend in seems to be heading toward long-form video content, rather than short clips. There are many benefits of using long-form video in marketing, which can help engage audiences and drive better results.
The Psychological Power of Long-Form Video
Long-form video can be a powerful tool for marketers in a couple of different ways. There are ways to leverage this type of content, whether you’re just trying to build up brand awareness or push sales.
First, it can be extremely helpful for engaging audiences, whether you’re trying to reach new customers or retain existing customers. To engage with your audience, you need to create memorable content that captivates viewers with storytelling.
Making an emotional connection with audiences is much more difficult when you’re only working with short-form video. Because long-form video gives you the opportunity to do more storytelling, you can connect with people on a deeper level.
Long-form video is also a great way to build trust and credibility among the members of your audience, especially those who might be skeptical. People will only buy a product or invest in a service if they trust that a company will deliver the experience they expect.
Video content can allow your organization to build authority and establish thought leadership. That’s a powerful way to get more people engaging with your content and trusting your company organization.
Driving Results with Long-Form Video
By offering audiences more value and trust-building opportunities with long-form video content, marketers can drive increased results. Great video content can help increase brand awareness and exposure, which leads to a larger audience and better engagement on social media. It can also help boost search engine engagement.
Long-form video is also memorable. It can help with audience retention and long-form engagement. People are watching the videos for extended periods of time, making it more of an investment. Because of this, they’re more likely to comment, like, and share.
Engagement is what drives results. If your content is high-quality and shareable, it will ultimately improve the results and marketing ROI for the business. Finding examples of effective long-form video content can help you understand what drives results in video marketing. Sometimes, it’s not what you’d expect. Some of Dollar Shave Club’s most successful videos were actually very dull—but they worked!
Understanding Audience Behavior When Creating Long-Form Video
Long-form video is more challenging than short-form video from a production standpoint. You need to have a lot of high-quality content and the ability to produce an engaging video. That makes long-form video a larger investment for companies than many other types of content.
Careful planning and attention to the narrative arc can help you create videos that people actually want to watch. Think about how a documentary can captivate viewers. As you create your long-form content, can you take the storytelling techniques used in documentaries to make your videos more interesting? Your videos should have a clear beginning, middle, and end, plus strong hooks to catch your audience’s interest and keep it.
Balancing informative content with entertainment can be a challenge, but getting it right can lead to incredible engagement. Pay attention to video length and pacing as well, to ensure that people don’t lose interest and avoid your content in the future.
Be aware that once you start creating long-form video content, it is up to you to stay on top of the metrics and to make changes as needed. If people are dropping off after the first five minutes, for example, is that due to something in the video? What is the optimal video length? Are you providing enough value?
These are the kinds of questions to ask as you dive into the analytics. It’s important to tailor your long-form video content to align with your audience’s preferences. Since long-form video can be expensive to produce, conducting market research and surveys can help you identify what people are looking for before you get started.
Also, keep in mind that trends within the analytics could be affected by more than just the content itself. Make sure your IT infrastructure is solid so that people don’t experience frustration when trying to view your videos and click away.
Setting Clear Goals for Long-Form Video
If you want your long-form video strategy to be successful, it’s important to have clear goals for your content and to promote it as much as you can once it’s been published. While that’s true of every format, it’s especially true for content that can take substantial time and money to produce. Each video should have its own goal, in addition to the larger marketing goal of using long-form video.
Don’t forget that your videos can (and should) integrate with other approaches, such as SEO. The beauty of digital marketing is that your efforts can feed into one another over time, improving your results and creating a successful marketing ecosystem. If you aren’t yet using long-form video in your marketing plans, it’s time to think about starting.
