How To Diversify Your Content and Supercharge Your Marketing Department With Video

I’m sure you have already seen many statistics that demonstrate the importance of video marketing, and so I won’t bore you with another list of them. Instead, have just one:

Viewers retain 95% of  message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.

For the sake of this blog, all the statistics surrounding how many videos are posted online every 30 seconds, or what percentage of internet traffic they account for, are entirely irrelevant. What matters to us marketers is:

1. What content will generate profit and increase our ROI?
2. How can we generate more click-throughs and website visits?
3. What will take our marketing to the next level?

The issue is that video has become so popular amongst marketers, so much so that a lot of companies tend to think that anything in video form will work. Except, if the content isn’t engaging and exciting, it won’t. That’s why most testimonial or case study videos tend to flop – after all, why would you spend your precious time stopping mid-scroll to watch that?

It’s time to put stuffy, corporate content aside and put some life into our marketing – making both the marketing budget and the boss happy!  

Our case study comes from O Communications, who worked with the team at NCFE to develop a campaign to recruit the best tech talent that the north has to offer.

The O team devised the idea of a job advert and accompanying video, completely written in .net code, the specialised code of the developers that NCFE were wishing to recruit.

The video was promoted through social media in Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh with the strapline “[city] we’re coming for your developers” as well as being shared organically online.

The campaign was a heralded success with over 5,300 clicks through to the specific developer vacancy page on the NCFE website and positive feedback from the NCFE HR team on the heightened quality of the applications that they were receiving.

Over 216,000 people saw the campaign on social media and the videos were watched from start to end a total of 6189 times, showing that the messaging was relevant and interesting to the people consuming it.

At Digital Union, we have also been working hard behind the scenes on upping our video marketing game. We recently filmed a video with Gilbert Corrales, CEO of ad-tech company Leaf Grow, which we will be publishing very soon. To break things down a little, these were the objectives behind the video:

• To demonstrate what Digital Union does and offers to creative digital and tech companies – we wanted to amplify this message in an easier-to-digest format. The video is a direct example of collaborating with businesses and using our network to our advantage.
• To demonstrate what Leaf Grow does and can do for other companies here in the North East and beyond. We have discovered that there are a lot of hidden gems up here, which people simply don’t know about!
• To discuss a topic relevant to our whole membership base and beyond: social media marketing, audience creation and advertising
• To unveil both the positives and downfalls of the North East business community, especially from someone who isn’t originally from here (Gilbert hails from Costa Rica!) and specifically chose Newcastle as a base for their startup.
• To identify gaps in our own efforts – it was important for us to ask the difficult question of “What are we lacking? What could the North East business community do better?” in order to continue progressing while celebrating what we have already achieved.

I filmed this on my Canon Powershot compact camera and used a free app called Voice Record 7 on my iPhone to record the audio, which I overlayed on the video as it was better quality than the camera mic.

This was a very long piece of content (40 minutes), but not all video content needs to be deep-dive, long-form. For example, over Easter we held a raffle for a giant Easter Egg. We pulled the winner out of the hat on video for a bit of extra content for social media! This was only a 10-second video filmed on my iPhone, but was super effective.

Another way of creating super engaging video content is by using the vertical format – even better if you’re filming on a smartphone. Vertical videos are very ‘social media-friendly’ and also work great on platforms such as IGTV (Instagram TV).

When it comes to video marketing, it’s most important that you experiment and collaborate! You may be surprised at who you can reach out to for great content, whether it’s another business that shares the same values (such as the video we did with Leaf Grow) or even a colleague to chat about an exciting project you’re working on.

If you’re a marketer looking to diversify your content strategy and supercharge your marketing with video, you may be interested in our upcoming #DUSocial Video Production and Marketing Masterclass. This is a Masterclass for professionals and will be a deep-dive into narrative structure,  storyboarding, distributing your content, and more. Spaces are limited, grab yours today!