Sunstone produces more and more video content, over 40 short-form videos the past 24 months, and for a good reason.

  • UPDATE for 2020: Here’s a new link to an excellent article from broadbandsearch with 14 facts you probably didn’t know about YouTube
  • 80% of consumers prefer watching a live video from a brand than reading a blog according to a 2018 HubSpot survey
  • 70% of consumers have shared a brand’s video according to a Wyzowl survey
  • And 72% of businesses say video improves their conversion rate; also Wyzol
  • 74% of users who watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service subsequently bought it
  • Short video social app TikTok, with 500M active users worldwide, was the most downloaded app on the Apple Store in Q1 2018. Here’s some great and recent stats on TikTok

So there’s no end of advice and evidence extolling the virtues of video content.

And with video engagement set to continue trending upwards for the foreseeable future, here’s some quick tips to ensure your brand leverages this opportunity:

  • Make video central to your content strategy. Oh, and try develop a content strategy and 12-month activity plan that binds the moving parts of brand, product, SEO, social and influencers. Easier said than done, I know!
  • Ensure video creation is social first thus ensuring your edits are formatted for social (optimal length and frame dimensions) and plentiful to support story-telling and evergreen campaigns. So often analogue-minded creative directors indulge themselves in long-form, ‘big reveal’ and big budget filming…and adapting the ‘hero’ footage for social is an afterthought at best. Believe me, this still happens alarmingly often.
  • Explainer video content, done well, is marketing kryptonite. It really is. A short, snappy ‘how to’ video showing your product or service in action and delighting consumers is essential and worth upping your production budget to achieve. Also, this is universal content you can publish everywhere. Remember the publisher golden rule of COPE; Create Once Publish Everywhere.
  • SEO the hell out your video listing. Video SEO is a full blown topic in itself, but start by thinking how you tag videos on social and how you construct video titles and descriptions in say YouTube. Oh, and be sure to build plentiful backlinks to your site in video descriptions where you can.
  • Rely on Captions. 85% of people watching video on facebook don’t enable sound. And only 30% of video views with sound off lasted more than 10secs. What does that tell you? Well, seeing as you ask:
    • Plan (or storyboard) your video to run with captions using an SRT file; that’s a speech>text file that YouTube creates and which you can easily import to facebook or Instagram. And don’t apply captions or credits into the film edit that will be obscured by speech captions that overlay the video. Facebook and Instagram also have native caption creation tools. Added bonus if you use the YouTube caption tool; Google indexes the speech>text files thus assisting the search ranking of your video
    • If your brand or product video is intended for worldwide markets and you want to invest in one edit, then consider removing speech altogether and reply on captions you can then apply in multiple languages to suit the market targeted
    • Reverse-engineer your video creative to start with a big-impact. People scrolling videos on their newsfeeds will give yours a cursory glance, so make the start as disruptive as you can; grab their attention and then tell your brilliant story in 60 seconds

If you got through this article in 60 seconds, you’re a world-champ reader BTW.

More to follow.

Best

Ewan