How credible are short form videos in the age of digital marketing?

 15th January 2020    Opinion 

Gen Z is a demographic that has displayed a constant and consistent preference for content in video form over the years. According to ​credible reports​, more than 60% of the younger population consumes content from video platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. There has also been a significant hop, skip and jump from Facebook and Twitter tagged as ‘the platform for older people’ to newer and more hip platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. The world is clearly gravitating towards video content and hence the idea of marketing through videos makes a lot of sense in the current digital age.

Like any tool, videos also come in myriad varieties to suit each platform’s sensibilities. Though the optimum length of a video is about two minutes, different social media platforms have different strategies while working with video content. For example, while Facebook videos can typically take up about 90 to 120 seconds, Instagram is suitable for videos that are 30-seconds at the most, TikTok is even sharper at 15 seconds.

One of the main advantages of having marketing content in video format is that it is catchy, attracts attention and has certainly proven to be more engaging and consumer-friendly. Owing to the availability of cheap data and mobile phones, the amount of videos consumed by the population is giving more headway for shorter video formats like TikTok, which is clearly the current Gen Z favourite.

Video content tends to get more engagement owing to the number of shares, likes, and comments. Also, websites with interesting videos embedded in them regularly rake in more traffic. For instance, we dealt with two very popular brands namely Victorinox and Yes Bank with a lot of ideation and creativity while curating the video content.

For Victorinox, we created a connection through a story between the product and the influencer with Mother’s Day as a premise. The emotions that could not be captured through text were expressed through the video.

Another example ( seen above) is how we integrated a B2B product into our day to day life through a video campaign:

What it has helped us achieve is positive brand recall and a story shared with emotions.

Both these campaigns worked better in the video than other mediums because you could connect with the product and the protagonists in this. We also saw a tangible increase in the product and sales after the campaign with direct referrals from the video link.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is also highly essential for the optimum performance of videos. These include meta-tags and descriptions for each and every video, which the search engines, in turn, optimize for the users. Video content has always been a calculated risk, especially as the attention span of a Gen Z user is around eight seconds. But by playing the right cards with video-driven content strategy, the level of engagement can be phenomenal, to say the least.

The author, Rahat Beri, is the founder and MD of IMC firm, Blue Ocean.