Video for Your Business: Where to Start

Ah. Where to start. You know you need video, you’ve read all the amazing stats about how video is a staple of content marketing. But you’ve never done it and how do you know what video to “lead off” your marketing efforts with? Fear not. That’s what this blog post is hear to help you with!

The initial inclination is to create a five to ten minute video that includes the value proposition, product demo, etc. all crammed into one video. You’re passionate about your product or service and can’t say enough about it. That’s a good thing! A better idea is to break that content up into ‘snackable’ bits of video content. In other words, don’t force everything you’ve got to say into one video. You’ve got about ten seconds to grab the viewers attention and about sixty or so seconds to keep it, after that unless the content is really engaging you start to see a precipitous drop off in viewership. The best idea is to break that content up into separate videos – do an ‘elevator pitch’ or value proposition, lead that video into a link to a product or service demo. From there you can link them to testimonial videos, deeper dive videos into the product/service functionality, recorded webinars, etc.

If you haven’t heard this one before, it generally takes on average about seven “interactions” with a brand before a prospective customer will purchase. So if it takes up to seven impressions of your marketing content to move a viewer to action, why would you want to stuff all of your video marketing ideas into one video? Why not spread it out into multiple touch points for the viewer and potential customer?

So where should you start?

If you have a limited budget and can only produce one video, where do you start and what do you do first? The most important is to start with the value proposition first. That home page explainer video, the first touch you have in many cases with your potential customers. You know your clients problems better than anyone, heck you came up with a solution to those problems. Speak to that. We usually like to start with a basic formula for our clients when doing value propositions:

1. Illustrate a typical problem your customers face
2. Show how your product or service alleviates that problem
3. End with a resolution of the problem

Eric Guerin is the founder of Adelie Studios. He chooses to use his creative powers for good and not evil by helping businesses to better market themselves using animated marketing videos. He can easily be bribed with coffee. Read more of Eric’s posts.