Opt-In, Not Interruptin’: Are the efforts you put into branded videos making an impact?
Thousands of brand videos make it onto the internet every day and sink without trace. Yoav Tourel looks at some of the key ingredients to making an impact in the medium.
In a marketing world that is shifting to content creation and distribution, video becomes a crucial ingredient of any content marketing campaign because of its ‘magic’.
Video is a powerful canvas that allows brands to tell a more meaningful, in-depth story to their audience.
Content marketers are certainly awake to the potential of video beyond just being a TVC or online video, and at Outbrain we’ve witnessed more and more brands choosing to leverage this format to educate, inspire, and add value to their audience.
Most importantly, in a world where the audience is saturated with content and engagement is king, branded video (almost by default) can’t be pushed on to viewers, but rather it invites them to opt in. That’s also part of the ‘magic’.
About Scale and Impact
The familiar content marketing ‘Haiku’ If You Blog And No One Reads It Did You Really Write It? Can also be applied to branded videos. The challenges are twofold: how to get views at a large enough scale to make an impact, and how to reach high numbers of interested people who want to engage with your brand’s story.
Here are few top tips that we’ve collected based on our work with leading Australian brands. These and more insights were also shared in a recent webinar we ran in collaboration with Mumbrella.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6amgu7RWa5A
Build it and they will come. How many great videos are out there waiting to be discovered and viewed?
People are hungry for video content that relates to their interests, whether it’s sports or science. Seize the moment of interest to invite the right audience to engage with your video (in a recent case study we ran, Conversant Media’s The Roar, a leading sports website, drove over 327,000 highly engaged viewers, reaching an audience who would watch a video in its entirety).
Let them opt in; no interruptin’. Nobody likes to be interrupted, but too often that’s exactly what online videos do. Remember you’re not producing an ad. For the person browsing on their smartphone during the commute to work, the video content you produce should be just as exciting, interesting and shareable as the content they find organically online. Leverage data and insights to find out as much as you can about what your target audience is interested in, how they consume, where and when.
No Specs, just stories. Lots of video content producers get really hung up on the ‘optimum length’ for a video.
In fact, there’s no standard length when it comes to branded video- most of the videos that run across Outbrain range between 1:30-9:00 minutes. As long as you are telling a compelling story to your audience and you invite them smartly (think about the titles or images you’re using in your invitation), the interested will come. Also, there are no rules dictating where your video is hosted. Whether your video sits on your owned environment, Facebook, Vimeo or any other site, if your content is interesting to your target audience, they will opt in and engage.
Play beyond the click. Making traffic your key KPI may make sense on paper, but if everyone who clicks on your video stops watching after a few seconds, there’s really no point. Make sure you’re driving the impact you’re after. Set KPIs that measure engagement, such as video completion, shares, registrations, buy now, etc. to achieve a genuine return on your investment.
From moment to momentum. You’ve seized the moment of interest, invited your audience in and engaged them – now leverage the valuable data you’ve collected to continue the momentum and feed any future marketing or programmatic activities. Consider this data as the gift the keeps on giving.
In an age of information overload, branded videos have the power to cut through the noise. However, brands need to get smarter if they want their video to have any real impact on their business. Inviting your audience to opt in at scale, optimising your KPIs and leveraging the valuable data you collect are the keys to a happy ending (or maybe it’s just the beginning).
- Yoav Tourel, Head of Account Strategy of Outbrain Australia & New Zealand
