Business video marketing is a powerful tool.
When done well it can drive awareness, visibility and have a positive impact on sales. However at the heart of effective video marketing is engagement. It’s purpose is to provoke an emotional connection or response from the viewer (or customer), and provide a persuasive message about your product or service in a credible way.
But it’s useful when producing business video marketing to really understand why (and more importantly how) this works so that we can produce effective material.
I recently read a stat that proclaimed: “1 minute of video is worth 1.8 million words” – Forrester’s Research
Pretty bold stuff eh?
Now whatever you make of that stat it does offer some interesting food for thought about engagement and communication. Whether the stat is bang on, or has an element of exaggeration (not that we’d suggest this for a second) what it is essentially demonstrating is how people absorb messages and information.
When reading copy our brain processes the text our eyes see allowing us to consider its meaning. However, it relies on our imagination to take that message and form something that’s not simply a one dimensional message.
The power of business video marketing
The power of video lies in its ability to present visual and audible information that fuse to create a multi-dimensional sensory experience that can often be overwhelmingly more powerful that mere words alone. Lets take the humble “promotional corporate video” as an example to examine this closer.
Many of the usual elements that you will encounter in a typical promo video are strong tools when used alone (ie, action footage, music, people speaking to us etc). But when combined together they form something that’s much more irresistible. Video marketing combines people, words, thoughts, footage, emotions, stories and music to engage the viewer in a wider sensory experience that involves their eyes, ears, emotions and beliefs. We retain information from good video material because it involves these senses (ie sound and sight) in a way that triggers emotions. These sense driven emotions can be strong enough to override what we already think and it’s this alone that allows video marketing to communicate in an engaging and convincing way.
Ask a random selection of friends for their favourite lines from a film. I’d expect them all to have at least one or maybe dozens of lines that instantly spring to mind.
Now ask the same group of people for their favourite line from a book.
I’m prepared to bet that you will receive significantly fewer answers. Not because books are in any way a lesser art form to film, but because we absorb and retain information delivered through the medium of video quicker and easier.
Real World
Lets take a possible client brief and see how this actually works in the real world. A client has asked us to produce a piece of business video marketing that has a primary message of:
“We are a company who care.”
Now lets first estimate how many words of web copy or print copy we would need to effectively and convincingly convey this message. People are hard to spin these days and we would need to present a pretty convincing case possibly including testimonial text from existing clients, backed up with several paragraphs of copy to re-enforce this message of caring.
Now lets try to convey this same message through business video marketing.
There’s an old saying that “people buy people” and this is still true in today’s digital age. Just a couple of seconds of genuinely convincing footage showing a smart looking company employee warmly engaging with a customer tells us a great deal. We don’t even need to hear what they are saying. The power of sight and our trust of film is such that if the footage looks genuine, then we will accept it as being the truth and the message of “we care” may be instantly conveyed.
But lets not stop there.
Lets also imagine that we hear a voiceover talking to us as we are seeing the footage. If cast correctly the voiceover artist will have that warm, caring, (almost matronly) feel to their voice that we may associate with our parents, a favourite teacher or someone who has shown us real care in our own lives.
Again, we may only need to hear this voiceover deliver one or two words to instantly accept their warmth and sincerity. So we’re only 2 or 3 seconds into the video and already it has engaged us and effectively communicated the key message in 2 powerful sensory ways.
Now lets add in a gentle musical soundtrack to the background, Again, this needs to be selected well and be sector appropriate but music is one of the most important tools in the video marketing arsenal. Get it right and suddenly the visual, spoken and musical elements fuse and are elevated in their power to deliver a persuasive messages that is memorable, genuine, and long lasting.
This is the power of business video marketing, and this is why it can drive sales in such a credible and persuasive manner.
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