Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

It’s extremely likely that your target audience wants video content. Brands that create useful, engaging video will quickly surpass their competitors who don’t. So whether your brand sells baby strollers or enterprise-level cloud-based SaaS solutions, it makes sense to get into video.

Granted, video can be complicated and expensive. You could spend thousands of dollars on equipment, hire someone to shoot and edit the final product, or turn your conference room into a fully-functioning television studio. But there’s no need to go that far to see if video fits your content strategy.

Here are four cheap ways to get started with video content marketing....

Video marketers know we lack patience. So they're starting to tailor content for our dwindling attention spans. In fact, 56% of all videos published in the last year are less than 2 minutes long.

But marketers must innovate further because users expect different video lengths on different platforms. Odds are, they're more willing to watch a 2 minute long video on YouTube than on Twitter.

If you don't customize video length for each platform, then you're not fully catering to your audience. Sooner or later, the attention they give to your brand will wither away.

That's why we decided to create this handy, bookmarkable infographic about the optimal video length for the most popular video channels. To help you better engage your audience on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, we extracted insights from HubSpot's own social and YouTube data, and combined it with existing research in the area. ...

As part of our previous social media strategy, our posts were connected to lead generation goals -- and most had a strong tie to our brand and promoting our content. Now, our content is all about our audience -- and not all about us. We needed to refocus and remember that our audience members are people, just like us. If we wouldn’t want to see a piece of content in our Facebook News Feeds, why would our audience? We wanted to test the effect of focusing our content on our audience -- what they want to learn about, what their goals are, and even what struggles they face.

In short, we wanted to be more social, and less promotional.

This doesn't mean we recommend doing away with sharing blog content or ebooks on social media entirely. After all, it's hard to come up with new ideas for creating social media videos to share every day of the week. We're just saying you shouldn't post a link to a blog post or ebook on Facebook and call it a day. Instead, get inspired by the ideas and salient points, and repurpose your content into Facebook videos, Instagram albums, or Snapchat Stories. You can still use the good ideas -- but use them to create native social media content that performs better for the medium.

If your current social media strategy sounds like our previous, all-about-us approach, don't worry -- read on to learn how we've changed things up.

Think you need a professional production team to create a worthwhile explainer video? Think again. Compiling an explainer video doesn't have to be more complicated than putting together a slide deck in a Powerpoint presentation. You decide what to say, find some relevant graphics to jazz things up, and record a voiceover. 

Explainer videos should generally be 30-90 seconds in length, which translates into a written script of around 200 words or less in most cases. To get a good feel for crafting your own video, start by gathering some inspiration from brands doing it right. You’re bound to find something that resonates with you as a good example for brainstorming your own.

Here are 17 fabulous explainer videos across a wide variety of industries, media outlets, and publications to jumpstart your own project. You should have no trouble getting inspired to make an explainer video part of your marketing strategy....

Up until recently, you also needed to have someone in your team who knows their way around technology for creating and editing videos.

Luckily, there is now a plethora of video tools that make the process painless and surprisingly affordable.

Lumen5 is one of those tools. Now let’s see what this video creation platform is all about.

How it Works

Lumen5 is a perfect tool for marketers and business owners who blog. Why? Because it helps them easily turn blog posts into videos they can share on social media.

After a quick signup, you’ll be able to use Lumen5 for free to create short and shareable videos from any link.

For digital marketers, video represents a unique opportunity. Brand films don’t only attract and hold attentions far better than written or image based content, they also encourage a deeper and more meaningful engagement with audiences. With YouTube democratising the playing field, businesses big and small have the opportunity to grow huge audiences online.

When it comes to consumer engagement though, YouTube is only the tip of the iceberg. Social video gains a staggering 1200% more shares than text and image based content combined. Just look at this screenshot from Sprout Social’s Facebook stats to see how video puts other social content types in the shade.

Of course, video can be a tricky thing to pin down when it comes to ROI. Unlike search engine optimisation and paid advertising, video’s effects aren’t as easily trackable online and, along with the continuing misconception that it is prohibitively expensive, it’s perhaps no wonder that so many smaller companies are still resisting video.

Naturally, as a video marketer myself, I’d like to address these concerns, so in this article for the 60 Second Marketer, I’m going to walk you through the most common video marketing metrics to factors into your content strategy when establishing your goals and KPIs....

A study by Animoto asked 1,000 consumers what they want to see with regard to social video. It also surveyed 500 marketers to determine whether they are fulfilling those expectations.

Highlights from the study were compiled into an infographic, which includes the following findings:

• 39% of consumers are more likely to finish videos that have subtitles. (The infographic reports that, according to Digiday, 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound.)

• Preference between pre-recorded video and Facebook Live was split nearly down the middle, with pre-recorded video having just a slight edge (52% vs. 48%).

• 81% of marketers optimize their social videos for mobile....

So, what’s Mention anyway?

We get that question a lot. The thing is, it’s not always easy to understand what Mention does, what media monitoring is, or how we make your life easier.

So we decided to create a long overdue but short video to explain just that. It wasn’t easy, but we’re very glad we did it, and are quite happy with how it turned out:

So that’s our video. It’s only a minute long. But it took no less than 160 hours of researching, brainstorming, writing, a bit of screaming, and lots of trying. We learned heaps, and we’d like to share all of it with you.

If you’re thinking of creating a product video but don’t know where to start, read on to see every step we took and learn from our experience....

This short video was produced to show how quick and easy it is to produce a video from an existing blog post using the free Lumen 5 video tool. 

Lumen 5 is an AI-powered video creation platform that turns blog posts into engaging videos. Using the tool is easy, intuitive and surprisingly fast. After producing a few Lumen 5 videos, I expect you could create one in as little as 10 minutes from existing content like a blog post. You can see my original blog post here http://bit.ly/LaoTzu8 to compare it with the video produced so effortlessly.

The creative and marketing possibilities are very intriguing and so far Lumen 5 is free although it may offer more features for a price in the future. For now, it's an interesting tool to explore.

Businesses, bloggers, trainers, authors and really anyone can use it to produce social content to drive audience engagement online. Great thing is you can focus on your message, visuals and creativity without having to touch the technology. 

You can get more info and demos for the app at www.lumen5.com.