Unleash Your Creativity: Video Marketing Strategies in 2023

It seems people and brands will do just about anything for your attention these days. From controversial campaigns, explosive comments and on-air stunts to exclusive one-time-only-limited-time-only offers, Muckbang challenges and AI-generated meta-humans. Attention is the new oil and its value is only increasing. This poses a challenge for video marketers, with so much content competing for a finite resource, we must develop new and innovative ways to make our content stand out, cut through and resonate with our audience.

This article will explore four proven tactics that you can deploy with your brand to create compelling video content that increases awareness, builds community and drives sales. We’ll cover the importance of keeping your content short and sweet, incorporating interactivity, optimising for mobile, and leveraging the power of personalisation. No matter where you or your audience are, these powerful video production tactics will take your content to the next level.

Keep it Short and Sweet

In the world of video marketing, less is more.

Your brand’s message is to your customers’ lives like hot sauce is to a burrito. There’s a little thrill when you crack it open, it adds heat and flavour, and in the right amount, it can take an experience from good to great. But just like hot sauce, with video marketing, you can have too much of a good thing. When we’re not expecting hot sauce in our burrito or receive too much all at once, a pleasant experience can turn ugly very fast. Of course, there are those that can’t get enough hot sauce and slather it on everything! But if speak to one of these brave souls, they’ll tell you they started out with small amounts, grew to love the flavour and now can’t live without it. We’ll end this tortured analogy here.

The lesson is, when creating video content at the top of your marketing funnel, condense your messaging into bite-sized, easily digestible portions. When creating for TikTok and Instagram aim under 1 minute for maximum engagement. With so many things competing for your audience’s attention, it’s crucial to keep your videos concise and to the point. Shorter videos tend to have greater retention, vitality, conversion and engagement.

Duration isn’t the only thing to keep in mind – be sure to include visuals that will grab and hold your viewer’s attention. Anything with movement is a good place to start, whether it’s someone going for a slam dunk or using expressive body language for a piece-to-camera. Motion graphics that articulate your brand’s message or visualise abstract concepts are excellent too. Finally, for both accessibility and SEO optimisation reasons, be sure to caption your videos. Captions allow your audience to continue watching even when the sound is off.

Make it Interactive

Do you want to play a game? Of course, you do! As human begins we love to test our skills and compete with others. Need an example? Let us introduce you to the wide world of sports. From the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games to arm wrestling and the humble round of backyard cricket – we love to play and engage at all levels. Ultimately, interacting and taking action is more fulfilling than simply observing an activity passively. It stimulates our brains, encourages commitment and builds connections and community. All things that we’d love for our audience to do with our brands. The good news is that you can capture some of this magic by making your videos interactive.

Quizzes, polls, and clickable links turn passive viewers into active participants, increasing engagement and the likelihood of them sharing your content. Here are a few ideas. If you’re a fitness brand, why not create an interactive video series that helps your audience get fit whilst also promoting your products? If you specialise in cakes that look like everyday objects, why not add a poll in your next video to get feedback from your audience on what to create next? If you offer training to B2B salespeople, why not create an interactive personality quiz so your audience can figure out the best sales technique for them?

Beyond increased engagement and a stronger connection between your brand and audience, there are other benefits to interactive video. Primarily, they provide valuable data. This could be survey results on your products and services or simply an understanding of what content your audience would like to see more of. The data collected through these interactive features can be used to better understand your audience, tailor your content, and make truly informed decisions for future marketing campaigns.

Optimise for Mobile

In case you’ve been living in a cave with no internet or visitors, subsisting off foraged nuts and berries while meditating on the scale of the universe and your place within it for the past ten years (which sounds incredible by the way), video has gone mobile. According to TechJury more than 75% of all video views come from mobile devices. Considering that in 2023, people are watching, on average 17 hours of online video per week – if you’re not tailoring your video content to mobile, then you’re missing out big time.

The easiest place to start is by shooting vertically. Vertical videos not only look better on mobile devices because they fill the screen, but they perform better too. On social platforms, 90% of vertical videos have a greater retention rate than traditional horizontal videos. Greater retention equals more time to convey your message and ultimately more awareness, loyalty and conversions. As a corporate video production company in Sydney, we’ve embraced this fact and offer vertical video iterations to our clients when creating marketing content.

The other small thing that will go a long way to optimise for mobile is to use captions. First of all, it’s an inclusive thing to do and ensures that more people can enjoy your content. Second, it comes in handy when your audience is viewing your video in an environment where sound would be inappropriate like on public transport or a very long, very boring company all-hands meeting at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon… Third, you want to include captions as it forces your audience to engage deeper with your content, in that they are consuming on multiple levels – listening to the audio, viewing the action and reading the text. This multimodal approach is favoured by some of the top content creators in the world like Mr. Beast. Finally, by incorporating .srt captions, you will dramatically improve the SEO performance of your content.

Personalise Your Content

You’ve probably heard that it’s more important than ever to have an effective marketing strategy for your business. Building an audience, cultivating brand loyalty and carving out your position in the market is critical for your business’s ongoing success. From our experience as a video production company in Sydney, we know that one of the most effective marketing strategies is to leverage personalised video for your audience.

A personalised video is a form of video content that is tailored specifically to the individual viewer. It involves customising elements such as the viewer’s name, preferences, past interactions, or other unique data points to create a more relevant and engaging experience. This targeted approach helps forge a deeper connection with the audience, resulting in higher engagement, customer loyalty, and improved marketing outcomes.

Personalising video helps connect more deeply with your audience and enhances engagement for several reasons by increasing relevance, emotional connection, and differentiation, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? We’ve actually written a whole article about personalised video, you can check it out here.

There you have it – four powerful tactics to help you create engaging video content that captures and holds attention. To make the most of what you’ve learned, remember to keep the following in mind:

1. Short and Sweet – Less is more, just like hot sauce. The more condensed your content is, the more potent it will be. Shorter content is sharable and achieves greater retention.
2. Interactivity – We want engaged advocates, not passive consumers. Deploy quizzes, polls and questions in your content to improve the audience’s experience of your brand and deliver value.
3. Mobile Optimisation – Video is mobile. We watch is everywhere we go. Make sure that it’s easy for your audience to engage with your brand on their favourite device with vertical video and captions.
4. Personalisation – Everyone loves the personal touch. It demonstrates thoughtfulness and builds deeper, more resilient connections between your brand and your audience.

By taking advantage of these simple tactics, you’ll be on your way to crafting a winning campaign in no time!