Video marketing can appear to be quite casual. Videos can “go viral” with no advance warning if they catch people’s mood in the right place at the right time. Or they can skulk in a backwater with almost no views. Or anywhere between those two extremes.
What you need to include in your video depends on what your desired end result is.
If your desired result is a viral video that breaks almost every viewing record on YouTube then I wish you good luck but you’re probably better off looking through the most popular videos on YouTube and hoping you can use those for inspiration.
But if you simply want a batch of videos in your YouTube account that attract a slow but steady stream of people who are potentially interested in your products then here are some ideas of what to include.
A brief introduction
And that really should be brief. I often just start my videos with the word “Hi” followed by “this video is about” and then whatever my keyword phrase is.
Take your cue from television programs – a lot of them start straight in, with the titles almost as an afterthought a few minutes into the show.
They’ve done more research than we’re ever likely to and that seems to be the format for a majority of recent popular shows.
Then use an interesting snippet
Give the viewer a taster of what is likely to come in the rest of the video.
Maybe even run through the bullet points you’re going to be covering and remind your viewer that they’ll get more in-depth information as the video progresses.
As a general rule, people are most likely to drop out of watching your video early on. Possibly because it doesn’t cater for what they were interested in or possibly because they think they won’t learn anything new.
Which leads us on neatly to the next point:
Include something new or unusual
I know there’s really nothing new under the sun. But that doesn’t mean that everyone knows everything – far from it.
If you’re always finding people’s eyes lighting up when you talk about something and they’re telling you they never knew that tip before, that’s an excellent item to include in your video.
It’s easy to get too close to a subject and assume that everyone knows what you’re talking about. That’s rarely the case and it’s actually often the simpler things that get ignored or forgotten or just missed.
If some of the information you deal with hides in plain sight, that’s an excellent thing to talk about.
In the same way as we never almost visit the tourist attractions in our home town, we tend to miss the obvious when it comes to things on the internet.
Don’t talk down to people but do talk about things!
I find the best approach with this is often to blame myself for getting too complicated and ignoring the basics.
That gives me something to talk about and means that I’m not picking on anyone who’d get upset.
Try it – it’s a nice twist on the basic “things you never knew” idea.
If you’d like to know more, take a look at my video creation crash course.