The Power of Video in Social Media Marketing: Boosting Brand Awareness

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, social media has become an indispensable tool for brands to connect with their audience. Among the various content formats available, video has emerged as a powerful medium for engaging users and conveying brand messages effectively. In this post, we'll explore the effectiveness of using video in social media posts and provide some best practices for planning the types of videos that can elevate your brand's presence.

The Impact of Video on Social Media

Enhanced Engagement

Video content is inherently more engaging than text or static images. Social media algorithms prioritize video content, making it more likely to appear in users' feeds. As a result, brands using video can capture the attention of their audience more effectively and keep them hooked for longer periods.

Increased Visibility

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter give preference to video content, leading to higher organic reach. This increased visibility not only helps in reaching a broader audience, but also contributes to building brand awareness.

Conveying Emotion and Storytelling

Video allows brands to convey emotions, tell stories, and create a more personal connection with their audience. Whether it's a behind-the-scenes look at the company culture or customer testimonials, video enables brands to humanize their identity and establish a deeper emotional bond with viewers.

Higher Conversion Rates

Studies show that incorporating video in marketing efforts leads to higher conversion rates. Whether it's driving sales or encouraging users to take a specific action, the dynamic nature of video content is more persuasive and influential.

Best Practices for Planning Video Content

Know Your Audience

Before creating any video content, it's crucial to understand your target audience. What are their preferences? What challenges do they face? What stage of the customer journey are they on? Tailor your video content to resonate with your audience's interests and needs.

Diversify Content Types

Experiment with various types of video content to keep your audience engaged. This could include product demos, tutorials, behind-the-scenes footage, customer testimonials, and even live streams. Diversification adds depth to your brand's content strategy.

Optimize for Mobile

Given the prevalence of mobile device usage, ensure that your videos are optimized for mobile viewing. Use captions, concise messaging, and visually appealing elements to capture attention quickly, even when users are scrolling through their feeds on smaller screens.

Consistent Branding

Maintain consistency in branding across all your videos. Use a consistent color palette, fonts, and messaging to reinforce your brand identity. This helps in creating a cohesive and recognizable brand image.

Quality Matters

While it's essential to be consistent, it's equally important to prioritize quality. Invest in good production values, including clear audio, sharp visuals, and engaging storytelling. Quality content reflects positively on your brand's professionalism and credibility.

Utilize Analytics

Regularly analyze the performance of your video content. Pay attention to metrics such as views, engagement, and conversion rates. Use this data to refine your content strategy and create videos that resonate more effectively with your audience.

Incorporating video into your social media strategy can significantly enhance your brand's effectiveness. By understanding your audience, diversifying content types, optimizing for mobile, maintaining consistent branding, prioritizing quality, and utilizing analytics, you can create compelling video content that not only captures attention but also drives meaningful engagement and conversions. Embrace the power of video and elevate your brand's social media presence to new heights.

Comment/Questions? Please reach out at info@kaimanbros.com

Decoding Effectiveness: Finding the Ideal Length for Awareness Marketing Videos for Emerging Brands

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, creating a lasting impression with your audience is paramount, especially for emerging brands seeking to establish their presence. One key tool in the marketer's arsenal is the awareness marketing video. The burning question: What is the most effective length for these videos?

The Attention Span Conundrum

As attention spans dwindle in our era of information overload, striking the right balance is crucial. The sweet spot for awareness marketing videos often hovers between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. This range aligns with the general attention span of online audiences, ensuring that your message is delivered succinctly without losing engagement.

Crafting a Captivating Narrative

Within this timeframe, it's essential to focus on creating a compelling narrative that introduces your brand's story, values, and unique selling propositions. Start with a hook to grab attention within the first few seconds and maintain momentum throughout. Keep in mind that the video should stimulate curiosity rather than overwhelming the viewer with information.

Platform Dynamics

Consider the platform where your video will be shared. Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter generally favor shorter videos, while platforms like YouTube may accommodate slightly longer content. Tailor your video length to fit the expectations and behaviors of the target audience on each platform.

Testing and Iteration

The effectiveness of video length can vary based on your specific audience and industry. Utilize analytics tools to monitor viewer engagement metrics and conduct A/B testing with different video lengths. This iterative process will help you pinpoint the optimal duration for your brand's awareness videos.

Mobile Optimization

Given the prevalence of mobile device usage, ensure that your videos are optimized for smaller screens. Keep visuals clear, and text legible. This optimization is not just about length but also about delivering a seamless and enjoyable viewing experience.

Final Word

In the realm of awareness marketing videos for emerging brands, the mantra is clear: keep it concise, captivating, and tailored to your audience. Experiment, analyze, and refine based on performance metrics. Ultimately, finding the most effective length is an ongoing process, and adaptability is key to staying relevant in the dynamic landscape of digital marketing.

Questions/Comments? Please reach out: info@kaimandigital.com

How To Produce Effective Marketing Videos Part 2 - Setting Goals

Set Your Goals And Targets

“If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.”

-Yogi Berra

Corporate marketing methods have evolved over time, but the last ten years have seen an explosion in the use of video as a primary marketing tool. This is the second in a series of posts about the production of effective marketing videos. The aim of this article is to introduce you to the second step in the planning process: goal setting.

Target Audience and Video Types (a quick refresher)

In our previous post, we covered the topic of the target audience and being aware of the customer journey. We identified specific stages in the customer journey and matched each stage with an audience type. Here’s a quick review:

• Stage I: Awareness (Audience type: Consumers that are not yet aware of your company or organization and products/services)

• Stage II: Consideration (Audience type: Consumers that may or may not be aware of your company or organization BUT are actively searching for similar companies and/or products/services)

• Stage III: Action (Audience type: Consumers that know your company or organization and are ready to make a purchase or join decision)

• Stage IV: Support (Audience type: Current customers and members)

Feel free to click here to read up on this article: Customer Journey and Audience Types

The Next Steps: Setting SMART Goals

So, now maybe you’ve figured out which type of video you need based on the stage and audience type. Great! That means it’s time to move to the next step in production planning: setting goals specific to your audience. Remember, marketers need more than quantity of content to run a successful campaign. Without setting what we call SMART goals, marketing teams often over-spend and under achieve.

Every stage of the customer journey (i.e., awareness, consideration, actions, support) will have its own set of goals. The ultimate goals for most marketing campaigns are to focus on “big victories” like increased sales and revenue growth. But there are so many variables impacting sales and profitability. That is why the best way to ensure your marketing video is having the desired impact is to set specific and measurable milestones.

We like to call this 'Attaining Small Victories'. The big victories, increased sales and profits, are actually the result of a series of small victories. Your small victories require specifically targeted goals.

Something all marketers should be aware of is the SMART Goals framework. This way of framing up goals has proven to be extremely effective in developing and implementing video goals for marketing campaigns in every kind of industry.

So, let’s take a look at this framework.

SMART Goals Framework

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Every goal you set for each video should contain all of these aspects.

Here’s an example. What if the goal for your upcoming marketing video is that it will increase the popularity of your products? The next thing to ask yourself would be, “Is this a SMART goal?” Let’s see what the goal would look like in the SMART framework:

Specific goals should be clear and concise. So, in looking at the goal, “increase the popularity of your products” there is vagueness. Which products? What do you mean by popularity? The example goal is not specific.

Measurable goals should be quantifiable and trackable. With our above example goal there are a lot of questions. Increase popularity by how much? How do you measure popularity? Therefore, the example goal is not measurable.

Achievable goals should be realistic and attainable. After we define what popularity means and how it's measured, only then can we set achievable milestones that represent small victories for the campaign. That makes our example goal unachievable because we don't have enough information to measure success.

Relevant goals should be closely related to the mission and goals of your business and to market and industry trends. The example goal is too vague to be called relevant.

Time-bound goals are confined to a specific period of time. The example goal is not time-bound. There is no start or stop period that provides a measurable and reportable period of time for the goal.

Ok, so now that we can see our example goal is NOT a SMART one…. let's re-write it.

First, let's make it specific. We'll focus on a specific product: iPad Pro

Now let's make it measurable: We'd like to see 1,800 'likes' on Twitter. Last quarter our iPad Pro marketing video received 1,500 'likes' on Twitter.

Let's make sure that it's achievable. A 20% increase in 'likes' appears to be a reasonable goal. After reviewing historical data, we see that a 10-20% increase would be a very good result. Many marketers set goals that are too aggressive (e.g., a 100% increase in 'likes') which leaves little chance for success. On the other hand, we don't want to set easily attainable goals (e.g., a 2% increase to 1,530 'likes'), either. Create a challenge for the team. Remember: big victories are often the result of lots of small victories!

Now let's make sure that our goal is relevant. We'd like the 20% increase in 'likes' to come from a specific group: business users. Increasing the popularity of a product is an important goal, but it is better to set a goal that is more relevant to your business. In this case we know that business users are more likely to purchase our product, so let's focus our goal on that audience.

Finally, let's make the goal time-bound. Maybe it looks something like this: Q2 of this year. We will have three months to reach our goal of 1,800 'likes'. We will also have two (or more) adjustment points (i.e., end of month 1 and end of month 2) where we can make changes to our video if the numbers are not moving in the right direction.

Now we have a SMART goal. Here's a comparison of our original goal and now our new SMART goal:

• Original Goal: Our video will increase the popularity of our products.

• New SMART Goal: Our video will increase the popularity of our iPad Pro series with business users by receiving at least 1,800 Twitter 'likes' during the second quarter of this year.

As we recap, the original goal was too vague, and it would have been difficult to tie your marketing video to any specific business success. The new SMART goal, however, gives your teams an opportunity to achieve small victories and show progress towards the many big victories ahead.

What's Next?

So, now we know to be clear and concise with our goal setting. We’ve also found our audience type based on the customer journey. What’s next in the planning phase of your video campaign? It’s now time to tie everything together with analytics.

Be on the lookout for our next post on analytics by checking back in over the coming days. Thanks for reading.

To learn more about effective marketing video production click here.

How To Produce Effective Marketing Videos (Part I)

Corporate marketing methods have evolved over time, but the last ten years have seen an explosion in the use of video as a primary marketing tool. This is the first in a series of articles about the production of effective marketing videos. The mission of this article is to introduce you to the initial steps of the production process: the planning phase.

A Change of Focus in Video Production

In the early days of video marketing, it was quantity that mattered most with less emphasis on the analytics and return on investment (ROI) it provided. Did the video reach the right audience? Was it creating the intended response in the viewer? Companies did not give much thought to these questions; at the time, just getting their messages out as frequently as possible was the priority. 

Fast forward to today’s marketing strategies and you will find that it is the complete opposite. Video marketing is a holistic business approach that requires production teams to consider a targeted, actionable and measurable way to reach and impact their viewer. Production quality, audience identification and analysis, as well as analytics have become indispensable concepts and tools for marketers.

Know Your Audience

So how critical is it to have these factors embedded into the planning phase of your video production? Let’s first consider the need for marketing videos. According to the current statistics, people are looking to video first and often before making purchasing decisions. Check out these numbers: 

• 72% of customers say they prefer to learn about a product or service by way of video. (Hubspot)

• 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day. (Hubspot)

• 85% of consumers want to see more video content from brands (Hubspot) and will look for videos related to a product or service before visiting the company. (Hubspot)

• 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool — up from 63% since 2019. (Hubspot)

• By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15% higher than it was in 2017. (Cisco)

• Social network video ad spending (U.S. only) is predicted to jump to $14.89 billion in 2021; that’s an increase of nearly $10 billion since 2017. (Forbes)

What these numbers reveal is that 1) most people prefer watching a video first in order to learn about products and services, 2) that businesses have recognized this and 3) organizations are drastically increasing their budgets in this area of marketing in order to be more effective in reaching their customers. 

So, with these things in mind, the next question might be, “What do I need to do in the planning phase to produce an effective video?” 

It all starts with a simple question, but the answer is crucial: Exactly, who is it that you want to reach? 

Pitching to the Right Audience

Regardless of the industry, the first priority when producing an effective marketing video is to know who it is that you are trying to reach. Every person viewing your marketing video is in one of four main stages which we call, “the customer journey”. Each stage has a specific audience type which is why the first goal in planning an effective marketing video is to figure out which audience type you are trying to reach. Take a look at these stages and see which audience type your organization is trying to reach: 

Customer Journey

• Stage I: Awareness (Audience type: Consumers that are not yet aware of your company or organization and products/services)

• Stage II: Consideration (Audience type: Consumers that may or may not be aware of your company or organization BUT are actively searching for similar companies and/or products/services)

• Stage III: Action (Audience type: Consumers that know your company or organization and are ready to make a purchase or join decision)

• Stage IV: Support (Audience type: Current customers and members)

Once you have determined your target audience, it is important to recognize that each stage and respective audience requires their own videos with unique messages. Why? Because with each stage and varying audience your SMART goals (which we discuss in depth in an upcoming article) and metrics will be different.  

Trying to produce a marketing video that covers multiple stages and audience types will create a longer, “mixed-mission” video. For example, attempting to create a single "awareness" and "action" video will lead to a lengthy video that is unable to hold the attention of key audiences. Often this means your viewer will skip ahead through the video or worse, ignore the video altogether. Along with missed viewers these videos lead to lots of wasted marketing dollars. 

That’s why when planning an effective marketing video, the very first step is to be laser focused on a specific audience type. Once you know the target audience, it’s time to set SMART goals and metrics. This too is part of your planning phase and is important to the effectiveness of your video. So, stay tuned for our upcoming blog post on how to match the right goals and metrics to your target audience. 

Please check back in the coming days for our next post where we’ll dig a little deeper into creating a video that reaches your intended audience with the right goals and measurements for optimal effectiveness. Thanks for reading.

To learn more about effective marketing video production click here www.kaimanbros.com/contact

Creating Effective eLearning Content

Today’s world is loaded with social media and high-tech, ever-changing technology, right? But did you realize that companies are seeing a direct effect on their employee training programs. Gone are the traditional classroom trainings where employees listen to a real live trainer and maybe follow along with a handbook.

These days, digital learning (e-Learning) is a popular way to train employees because it combines all the intriguing and engaging aspects that make social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest so popular. 

To get the most out of your e-Learning courses, take notes from what these social media sites provide. When you incorporate social media type features into your e-Learning course you get an effective course where engagement and retention soars. Let’s look at three critical things that have worked for the hottest social media sites and you should do when building your e-Learning course. 

1. KEEP IT SHORT. Do you know why Facebook is such a hit? It’s their short, direct messages. And they have a statistics to prove it. Facebook’s study found that posts with only 100-250 characters were 60% more likely to be shared, liked or commented on. These shorter posts received more engagement. It is the engaging that is critical to raises retention levels in the viewer! Studies show that we only remember about half of a message immediately after we hear it and after 8 hours only about 35% (Adler & Towne, 1993). This is why your best chance at having effectively trained employees is to keep your e-Learning courses short and to the point. So here are just a few tips to remember when developing short courses:

   1. Avoid adding information that is irrelevant. If it isn’t necessary keep it out!

   2. Try breaking up complex information into several courses and make these short messages memorable. Use a combination of videos, text and interactive features to really make the information stick.

2. KEEP IT VISUAL. The reason Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube and all the other social media networks are so popular is because of the enormous amount of visual content. Check out these stats: 100 million people actively watch videos on Youtube every week, pictures and videos on Pinterest have more traffic then posts from Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and StumbleUpon combined. As for Facebook, videos are shared 12x more than any text and link combined. So why are videos more popular? A few reasons- they are bright and colorful, they tell a story and they don’t require a lot of effort from the viewer. But besides the great features of videos- they do more than what any text can do. Having visual content increases recall and retention in viewers by 65%. This is the kind of retention you want in your employees, right? Therefore, it is critical that your e-Learning courses be visually appealing. Just be sure to have a variety of visual content and don’t forget to keep them short!

3. Keep it Engaging. The best teachers know that students learn about 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear but 70% and 80% of what they discuss and experience (William Glasser). So the goal in your e-Learning courses should be to engage your employee- help them grasp the information and then do something with it immediately afterwards. There active engagement helps them experience what they have just learned. Some of the best ways to have engaging courses is with interactive games, tests and surveys.

You want your e-Learning courses to be as impactful and as effective as possible. Remembering to keep those courses short, visual and engaging will produce a well-trained employee. 

High-Impact Conference Videos

Your annual customer conference or all-hands meeting is about to begin. Everyone is seated, the crowd goes quiet, and the lights go down. Suddenly your keynote speaker loses his place and takes your opening speech in another direction, and then the energy pumping music you had prepared is accidently switched with a teenage love song. Uh-oh. All your preplanned work for an awesome conference kickoff performance just went down the drain….in under 5 minutes. 

Sure, this is a worst-case scenario but one “hiccup” in your conference opener can set the mood for the rest of the conference. 

These days to avoid painful mishaps and unclear messaging, companies have started hiring video production companies to create high energy and impactful keynote and session videos. With these videos, conference goers get to hear from numerous company executives, guest speakers, and more via a high-impact, highly controlled A/V experience.

So what does your company get when they use high impact videos? Below are just a few of the benefits:

1. A Clear Message: Probably, your main goal at your conference is that the attendees not just hear the message but understand and retain it, right? Most of the time, a live message from a speaker is the most effective. But your opening number (as they say in theater) is what really grabs your conference goer and sends the message about what the company and conference is all about. There is no room for error at this point. When you prerecord your speakers you can edit, reword and included visual aids. By using video- you create your message, meaning it is the exact thing you want and will not change. Preparing a live message doesn’t have the same assurance- anything can happen.

2. Lower Risk: As I mentioned in the first point, when you use videos you lower your risk of losing out on the message. But there are other risks that take place as you open the conference. You may want to use high-energy music, show a video clip, and have a power point presentation to set the tone for your conference- all great ideas! But with multiple duties come multiple risks. With a kick-off video it is a one-stop shop. All the music, multiple interviews, power point slides are found with one push of the play button.

3. A Good Impression: A wise person once said, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Most likely, your conference’s opening ceremony is your biggest moment to make a great first impression. Not many speakers or power point presentations can beat out a great video that wraps up music, sound bites, action clips, humor, history and great animation into a brief package. Videos can do more in short period of time and use multi-faceted levels of messaging to make your attendee go “Wow, this is conference is incredible.” And that was just the opener.

Time and again, the companies we work with return to video production to kick off their conferences, annual director’s meetings and various other critical meetings where impressions and messaging are important.  You can find some great kick-off conference videos online or check out a few of ours at www.kaimanbros.com