How to Create Compelling Video Content That Captures Attention

Modern online marketing is all about video: video tutorials that give viewers detailed how-tos, fun infotainment that keeps viewers engaged in a brand or particular influence, and video snippets that pull shoppers into your store. But companies across multiple industries already know that video matters—it's the most common media format leveraged in marketing strategies and the media format with the highest ROI. The question is, how do you get eyes on your video content and ensure they're maxing out their ROI potential? This quick guide focuses on four key elements: storytelling, tactics for social media management, having quality on par with a video production company, and SEO optimization.

Start With Storytelling at the Core of Every Campaign

Broadly speaking, storytelling is the process of sharing a story through words, images, and motions. But in terms of marketing, storytelling is the process of sharing your brand, your product's USPs, or your company mission as a story. For example, rather than pushing a list of health benefits of your store's smoothies, you'll show a vibrant cast of characters enjoying your smoothies in contexts that care about their health. Rather than explaining the services your accounting business can handle, you'll story-tell a client's sense of relief for being able to outsource complex financial questions and actually make it home on time.

By switching your videos to focus on storytelling, you make your target audience the star of the show and better demonstrate how your products and services will help them. It's more engaging, it's more human, and the paradigm shift alone will help your team concentrate on the right messaging.

Know All Your Social Video Formats

As every digital marketing agency will tell you, it's important to post across multiple social media platforms. But a good content marketing strategy will narrow that advice down—instead of posting everywhere, rank the social media sites that matter to your business. Start with the first two or three, and add more as you can. 

Once you know your core socials, create a helpful video production style guide with the various formatting, size, length, and other requirements of each site. Having these requirements all on one cheat sheet will help you set up scenes, edit content, and even brainstorm with the requirements in mind. As a tactic, this will help you create more engaging visuals more efficiently. But it will also remove logistical barriers so your team can focus on the creative aspects instead.

If you work with a video production agency, they'll already know these numbers and be able to accommodate multiple options. But as a quick overview, here are the pixel standards for common sites:

• Facebook: 1280 x 720 (landscape video) or 720 x 1280 (portrait video)
• Instagram: 1080 x 1080
• LinkedIn: 4096 x 2304 (shared video) or 1920 x 1080 (landscape ads)
• X: 1920 x 1080

Prioritize High-Quality Video Production

A lot of brainstorming and planning goes into the content of videos, but it's just as important to manage the technical details of video quality. Grainy, dark, and unprofessional-looking video simply won't hold your audience's attention or give them a good impression of your brand. To create compelling video content, focus on the fundamentals while filming:

• Carefully frame the core focus of the scene.
• Take the highest-quality footage you can, and then you can compress or resize it later.
• Use multiple lighting sources to eliminate shadow (especially on faces). 
• Use separate audio equipment to take crisp audio that your team can edit and refine later.

Once you have high-quality footage, work with a professional video production company who is a power user of an industry-standard program. They'll be able to pace the video appropriately for today's social media trends and add the right video elements.

Embed Website Video in Long-Form Content

This is where search engine optimization comes into play. High-quality video is essential, and today's search engines and social media sites are getting better and better at determining when video is relevant to an audience. But savvy content marketers will help handle the heavy lifting by contextualizing videos throughout their web design. 

One of the best ways to do this is to embed video files in your site and surround them with text and image-based content. For example, if you have an in-depth tutorial for one of your products, include a long-form article on the same page that walks readers through the same steps and provides extra insight. Conversely, you might embed multiple short videos throughout a long pillar article. This doesn't just make the content more engaging (though that's also a valuable goal), but it also gives Google a much better understanding of every video's purpose.

Fill in All the Text Fields (Even the Ones No One Sees)

This is the other side of the coin for contextualizing your video. Add relevant, helpful text to all the text fields available in the interface. As a general rule, this includes:

• Description fields
• Room for hashtags or key terms
• Closed captions and transcripts (which both make your video more accessible and give bots more information to work with)
• Alt-text and metadata

Good social media management and content marketing strategies will have detailed workflows for uploading video, just as they do for ideating, filming, and editing video. If you have great content but search engines and social media algorithms can't fully grapple with it, it will disappear from your audience's feeds.

Maximize Your Video Content With a Local Video Production Company in Miami

This is just the tip of the iceberg for how to create compelling video content that captures your audience's attention. Instead of building processes from the ground up, jumpstart your video marketing strategies with the help of a local web development and digital marketing agency.

Decographic serves Miami businesses with comprehensive online marketing services, from email marketing campaigns with embedded video to full social media campaigns with hundreds of videos. 

Reach out today to get started.