Short-form videos are a great way to engage with your audience on a regular basis and reach a new audience. Most social media platforms have adapted to offering great short-form video capabilities. Think Instagram Reels, YouTube Short, TikTok, and even creating video series on Pinterest. Read this blog post, where we’ll share some short-form video marketing tips for 2022.
Summary:
- Focus on Quality Vs. Quantity
- Use Subtitles to Make Your Content More Accessible
- Take Advantage of Trends
- Work With What You Already Have
- Create Recurring Content Series
Focus on Quality Vs. Quantity
With so many changes in the industry, keeping up with the latest trends can be challenging. If you’re creating short-form video content, here are a few tips to help you get ahead of the curve:
- Focus on quality and not quantity. While posting as much content as possible is tempting, viewers are more likely to watch high-quality, engaging videos. High-quality doesn’t mean expensive—in fact, it could be as simple as improving your lighting or using better CTA’s. You can buy a ring light for as little as $20 and if you don’t have the funds for a ring light, find the window in your home with the best natural light and record your videos there.
- Have a clear message and hook at the beginning of your video. Think about how you might tell your story in just one sentence—that will make it easier for viewers to understand what you have to say and whether they connect with your story. If the hook of your video makes them problem-aware, agitates them or they find it relatable, they are more likely to engage and come back for more.
- Make sure that your video is relevant to your audience and not just something you think sounds cool. Back to our point above, it also helps if they feel like they can relate to what’s happening in some way.
Use Subtitles to Make Your Content More Accessible
The idea of being able to communicate with your audience through video is amazing, but you must always remember that every piece of content you put out there also needs to be accessible.
The visuals and soundtrack won’t always be enough. The same applies to speaking slowly. Speaking slowly doesn’t mean that your content is accessible. Yes, it’s more comprehensible, but there is a difference between comprehensible and accessible.
Keep in mind that not everyone watches videos with the audio on, and subtitles also help when it comes to accessibility for those who may be hearing impaired.
Take Advantage of Trends
Trends are a great way to take advantage of an existing audience. That’s why it’s helpful to explore trending hashtags or themes and find ways to connect your brand with them.
For example, the #10YearChallenge was an incredibly successful trend for brands on social media because it allowed people to be creative and reminisce about their past.
Is there a trending hashtag you can use? Is there a trend you can create yourself? In addition to trends, it’s also important to be original and add your own spin to what you do. While taking advantage of trends, remember to utilize what makes you unique as a brand.
Work With What You Already Have
As you’re working with video, don’t forget to use the resources that are already available to you. You can do this in a variety of ways. For example, your brand likely has a website, social media channels and other content that can be repurposed.
Consider repurposing some of these pieces into short-form videos by choosing a text-based piece, animating it and then adding voice-over video to them. This is an easy way to create video content for social media without the stress of having to start from scratch.
You might also consider pulling together some clips from old videos and creating new ones out of them. This is a great way to create a spin-off from content that did really well in the past. The goal is simply to think creatively about how you can leverage what you already have access to in order to create new short-form video content. Something else that you can do is use most of your blog posts as content anchors and use them for video outlines.
Content repurposing is a real time saver and also allows you to reach more people since we are delivering content in more formats.
Create Recurring Content Series
A recurring content series is a type of video that’s released on a regular schedule, generally in a specific format. When you create one, your audience will know what to expect and look forward to it! You can create recurring content series in other formats such as blogs, Tweets, Idea Pins, the sky is the limit.
What makes up a successful recurring content series? Recurring content series can come in many different formats, but they all share some common features:
- They’re similar enough from one episode to the next that your audience recognizes them as part of an ongoing story or theme—but each episode stands on its own as its own piece of work, too.
- The length can varie, but is generally similar to the previous or next videos.
- The branding of your series matters. You’ll want to give it a name and label your videos. Example: 10 Days of Tips for XYZ, Day 3. By labelling your content, it’ll allow your past viewers and new viewers to know where they are at and also encourages them to view the previous videos and come back for more.
- It can be repurposed. A successful recurring series can be repurposed to other platforms or content formats. For example: consider creating a newsletter with the series once you have published all the videos.
We hope that these tips will help you create more short-form video content for your brand.
