Animated videosExtended ArticleVideo Animation: How to Engage and Captivate Your AudienceYou might know a little about all the different types of videos there are — welcome videos, how-to videos, brand videos, and more —… Read More have the power to engage and captivate your audience like no other. Animation is an interesting style because it can be used independently of the content in your video; almost any type of video can be made in the style of animation. But animation is especially powerful when it comes to explaining difficult-to-understand concepts or technology.Client: Cargopic It’s also a great for combining with other styles. You can have a lifestyle video that uses animated graphics or animated cutaways, or you can use it entirely on its own. It’s wonderfully versatile and spices up almost any video you create.

After you’ve honed in on your audience, focus in on where they spend the most time online. That is where you want to run your video content. For example, if your audience is on Facebook, you’ve got loads of helpful features to support your efforts and creative freedom. If your audience is largely on Instagram or YouTube, you’ll want to continue your analysis to see the style of video that works best on these highly visual platforms. 

You or your team can develop the videos themselves. If you plan to develop videos on a regular basis with a low budget, this may be the best option for you. However, if you do this you still want to ensure that the videos maintain a level of quality – even if they’re amateur productions. Spend some time researching how to create great video and consider taking a course that can provide you with additional insights.

You also want to use your data and insights to adjust your future video strategy. View-through rate should inform the length of your video, audience demographics should inform content, characters, and voice-over in your video, and most successful distribution channels should inform where to prioritize distribution efforts. Use this data to create a more detailed strategy next time around so you can set up any future marketing videos you create for success.
Just as important as your visual effects are your audio effects. Sound mixing, dialogue, narration, and music all come together to create the audio that’s heard when your video is watched. Even just adding a layer of ambient sound over a quiet scene can make the difference between what feels like a high-quality video and a low-quality one. Make sure a professional handles your audio mixing, so you have the perfect sound levels, foley effects, dialogue volume, and more.
As you begin creating videos, you'll notice a key difference between video scripts and your typical business blog post — the language. Video language should be relaxed, clear, and conversational. Avoid using complex sentence structures and eloquent clauses. Instead, connect with your audience by writing in first person and using visual language. Keep the language concise, but avoid jargon and buzzwords.
Video marketing strategies are nothing new. Just like you wouldn’t create a commercial and buy airtime during the Super Bowl without researching and strategizing, you shouldn’t create a digital marketing video without first doing the proper research and creating a plan. Your video marketing strategy will ultimately be what guides you — your budget, your timelines, your production processes, your conversion metrics, and more. So getting this written down and finalized should be step one of your video creation process.
Today, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google. Whenever someone wants to learn something visually, they head there. You've likely done it yourself countless times. So just ask yourself what you could teach in your business that would help consumers solve some pain point? What got you into business in the first place?
For example, we combined market research with video templates to create 68 unique but uniform pieces of thought leadership video content in less than a week for a large enterprise B2B business. Take a look at our case study to discover how our video content marketing work led to a bank of quality video content for our client to use across numerous campaigns.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as the surgance of video continues to climb. As Influencer and Best-Selling Author Joel Comm points out, “Instead of designing a graphic ad that’s likely to be ignored, you can create a simple video ad that people will actually watch and might even share.” And at the end of the day, that’s the point, creating something that viewers want to watch and spread across the web.
Instead, place a laptop below the eye-line of the camera. Break the script into short paragraphs and record it section by section until you capture a great take of each. If you plan in advance when the final video will show b-roll (supplementary footage or screenshots), you can have your talent read those lines directly off the laptop like a voice over.
Some brands and influencers have found an incredible niche on YouTube. YouTube personalities Casey Neistat and Amy Schmittauer are awesome examples of influencers with a loyal following while GoPro is the Cinderella story of brands making it big. Those, along with countless others, have discovered a formula for YouTube success and it has worked well.
Tone: Are you serious or sarcastic? A great approach to define your tone is to use the "We are ____, but we are not ____" exercise. In this framework, develop three bullets to help you understand the tone of the video content you're going to produce. For example, "We are humorous, but we are not over-the-top." These tone bullets are meant to guide you toward consistency.
What type of lead magnet should you build? That could either be an ebook, a cheat sheet, a checklist, a video and others. Of course, it's not just about the lead magnet. You have to have a squeeze page with sizzling sales copy to get people to drop into your funnel. But it all starts with a great lead magnet. The better it is, the more effective you'll be at reaching your audience.