A few weeks ago a senior executive of Facebook predicted that it would be all video in five years with no text or photos. That seems highly unlikely to me, but it does reflect the rapidly growing importance of video for storytelling and engaging with audiences. There’s a good reason why brands will pay so much for TV ads.
Much of my early marketing career was spent producing videos for clients such as Lotus, IBM, and The Boston Globe. I always recommended that video was uniquely effective to communicate (1) a process or (2) emotion. Often the twinkle in the eye of the person giving the testimonial is worth far more than their actual words.
About 15 years ago the agency I owned developed an award-winning website for Speechworks, the voice recognition startup that eventually became part of Nuance. One of our innovations was to use 1-2 minute videos throughout the site. This was fairly rare in the early 2000s because of limits to bandwidth, but because our target audience was corporate we felt that they would have sufficient bandwidth. And they did. The website analytics told us that the pages with videos on them had a longer average time on the page than pages with just text and images, and that average time was about the length of the videos.
So use videos on your website, at events, on social media, on TV, and so forth, to really get your message across.
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