Nowadays it’s a constant fight for your audience’s attention. With so much content constantly flying at them, if you don’t capture their curiosity quickly, you’ve had it. However, a method for delivering information that has stood the test of time is storytelling, which should feature as a cornerstone of your whole marketing strategy, not just your video content.
Why is storytelling so effective?
The key to any message getting through to an audience is for it to build mental and emotional connections with them. Whether the story you’re telling resonates with an individual emotionally or simply plays on their curiosity doesn’t matter – the point is to present something that is worth staying engaged with in order to see what happens next.
In a marketing sense, this is great as it provides you with a way of keeping all eyes on you and what you’re showing to the world for longer, meaning you have a greater chance of achieving your overall objectives.
Video is a fantastic medium for storytelling as it is naturally suited to it. Whilst it may be hard to build written content for your business in a way that takes the reader on the journey you want them to be on, it is remarkably easy with video, largely due to its multi-dimensional format. Everything the viewer sees and hears contributes to their experience of the story as opposed to words written on a page which can sometimes leave the reader with too much work to do themselves in order to fill in the gaps.
The key to telling a good story
Generally speaking, there are two things to bare in mind before you start work on building the narrative you want your audiences to see:
- Show, don’t tell
- Be worthy of their attention
If you deliver every excruciating detail of your message in the form of a voice over you will lose your viewers. Think of how you can portray the same thing in a variety of ways that people will still understand whilst remaining engaged.
A few other points to consider include:
Knowing your target audience and goals
One way or another, your business goals cannot be met without your audience. Therefore, it is essential that you know your target audience inside out – who are they and how should you interact with them? Being familiar with your audience will enable you to tailor-make narratives that appeal directly to them, and this specificity will help you to reach your goals more efficiently.
The narrative ingredients
If you were to pick apart any story, whether that be a classical fairytale or a modern day blockbuster, a basic formula would emerge very quickly. Typically, there is a hero, a problem (very often a person struggle), and the solution to it. Now, think of how you can work that into a piece of video content, or any form of content for that matter. Customer testimonials lend themselves wonderfully to this particular method, but with the right approach it becomes very easy to see how you can build engaging narratives with any type of video.
Choosing a format for your video content
This generally boils down to live-action video or animation. Animation may provide you with more flexibility when it comes to illustrating different concepts, however the viewer remains slightly more removed from the video so it may not carry the same emotional weight that live-action can due to the portrayal of real people that your viewers will recognise as themselves.
KC Creative 