Did you know that goldfish now place ahead of humans when it comes to attention spans? According to a study, our ability to pay attention has drastically diminished over the years, placing even more pressure on marketers to grab and sustain prospective customers’ attention long enough to make an impression and maybe even get them to take action. This is why video marketing is so powerful.
Let’s explore why the human brain loves video and examine some examples of good video marketing, including some of our own. Don’t worry: We’ve broken it all down into bite-sized chunks that you can digest and incorporate into your own video marketing strategy.
Still with me? Let’s get going before one of us loses focus!
A picture says a thousand words, but video says even more. At Kuno, we’ve observed that emails and social posts with video outperform those without. While you don’t want to include a video in every email and post – think law of diminishing returns – you do want to incorporate videos into every aspect of your marketing strategy because they:
If you still aren’t convinced, maybe this will: According to HubSpot’s Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2024, “96% of people say they watch explainer videos to learn more about a product, and 89% report having been swayed to purchase.”
Your videos don’t have to be fancy. One of our clients achieved great success on YouTube just with their how-to videos for applying their products. That is smart marketing, especially since YouTube attracts viewers in the billions.
Whether you’re writing a biweekly blog or creating a product video, your writing should incorporate traditional storytelling elements, even if they aren’t immediately obvious. For these videos, we’ll look at the Hero’s Journey..png?width=567&height=412&name=GettyImages-1569067859%20%5BConverted%5D%20(1).png)
In a nutshell, the hero/customer is living an ordinary life when – WHAM! – an inciting incident starts them on a journey to overcome obstacles to reach a destination.
Heroes don’t accomplish their goals without a guide, though, and that is where we, as a company offering a product or service, enter the story. Harry Potter had Dumbledore, Luke Skywalker had Obi-Wan and Yoda. The customer has you.
Through your expertise on your products or services, you help customers overcome pain points to reach their goal.
This story’s hero is a professional at work, happily preparing to send a file that he’d probably spent days, even weeks, putting together, when...
The Inciting Incident: …he receives a notification in large letters “File Too Big.” Any busy marketer can relate to the frustration of wasting valuable time trying to figure out a tech problem that was supposed to make their lives easier. Meanwhile, deadlines loom.
The Guide: The guide, or solution, to the hero’s problem is Adobe Acrobat, the PDF reader everybody has, but also has the ability to compress large files. Notice that they don’t simply list Acrobat’s technical features. They show it solving the customer’s problem, who props his feet up on his desk and smiles, relaxed. His problem is solved.
We worked with Green Circle Growers for more than 15 years, but this video isn’t about the beautiful blooms they grow as one of the largest greenhouse growers in the United States.
The hero in this story is a horticulturist looking for a meaningful career.
The Inciting Incident: Like the last video, the incident is implied. Because we started this video with the statement that Green Circle Growers is not only growing plants, but growing as a company, we can assume the inciting incident was a job loss due to downsizing, or simply difficulty finding a job outside of small flower shops and nurseries.
The Guide: Our footage entices our horticulture hero with the huge variety of plants they could be working with and all of the innovations they’ll be exposed to if they work for this company. Then, we followed this with images and interviews featuring the social aspect of working with our client. Learning, growth, stability and connection. Isn’t that what everyone wants from a new employer?
With the increased popularity of hybrid work, an office space designer wanted to improve employee experience and found our client. For this video, we got right down to business by opening with our client’s customer talking about her pain points.
The Inciting Incident: There probably wasn’t one inciting incident in this story like we saw in the first video featuring Adobe Acrobat. The hero in this story found our client through ongoing frustration with the way her company scheduled their workspaces and sought an alternative to the clunky, time-consuming spreadsheets they’d been using.
The Guide: In swoops iOffice with their slick space management solution, enabling employees to schedule their workspace needs, including conference rooms, from their handheld devices, thereby improving employee experience.
Our last example features another famous brand and a classic video. The powerful Blendtec blender showed off its strength by blending unusual objects like iPhones, golf balls, and even a rake handle. Not surprisingly, these entertaining, creative videos attracted millions of views.
The Inciting Incident: The pain point is less obvious here than the preceding videos, but we can only assume that the average blender-seeking customer has, at some point, been frustrated with their blender’s docile nature.
The Guide: Blendtec bravely saves the day for anyone wanting a blender that handles anything and everything they feed it, food or otherwise. (Honestly, I don’t know whether to be impressed or mortified that this blender turned an iPhone into gray smoke and ashes).
Or maybe some Blendtec employees started happy hour a bit early by blending up some frozen margaritas on a Friday afternoon, one thing led to another, and this fun experiment turned into a great awareness-building video campaign. Who knows, but it works!
While all these videos are wildly different from one another, they all have one thing in common: The ability to address a target audience’s pain points on an emotional level through a vivid, multi-sensory story. These videos all told this through the eyes of the ‘main character,’ or hero of the story, which is always the customer.
Now that we’ve explored some examples of successful video marketing, what can you incorporate into your own video marketing strategy? While you want to have high production quality, you don’t have to have Adobe’s or Blendtec’s budget to create a video that provides value to your target audience.
After writing your script and selecting your footage and images, ask yourself if your video has these aspects:
Remember to keep it short and simple, because by the time you launch your video, who knows how far the human attention span will have fallen in the ranks of our fellow beasts.
And if you are a hero in need of a guide, the team at Kuno Creative is here to help! Contact us today to learn what our expert and upbeat video team can do to help you make your video project a success.
