With attention spans of 8.25 seconds, shorter than that of the average goldfish, you don’t have a lot of time to grab the attention of your target audience. Explainer video and other short videos could be a great direction to go in to grab that attention! In a recent survey, 78% of respondents saw an increase in website traffic after posting a video, while 83% saw increased time spent on the website and number of leads. Another 44% saw sales increases. But why is this last number so low? It’s low because it’s difficult to engage with your audience. The tips below describe how to make a good video to save money and improve results.
Hook Your Audience
How do you hook your audience and keep them interested through the entire video? One option is to make a great offer that will be made available at the end of the video. Another option is to take your explainer video in a different direction than most, so that viewers stay interested in the topic at hand. You could also take a unique angle on your topic, which grabs the attention and keeps your audience engaged. These approaches help make your videos more engaging to your audience, keeping them watching and building interest in your product or service.
Emotional Appeals
A great way to be engaging with your audience is by combining ethos, logos and pathos, which combine the speaker’s ethos, or credibility and authority; the message’s logos, or logic and reason; and the audience’s pathos, or passion and emotion. To combine these in your emotional appeal and improve audience engagement, start by explaining your authority and credibility, such as your degree, years of experience in the industry or similar credentials. Continue into your message, adding statistics and processes to ensure they understand the reasoning behind your argument; then appeal to the audience’s emotion and passion by bringing in a story or emotional appeal, such as a life insurance agent talking about a family becoming destitute following an unexpected death.
Magic of Cinematography & Lighting
Cinematography is the process of using movement and camera framing of a scene to build interest and keep them interested in the video. This can include zooming in, panning across a scene, changing the angle to impact the emotion of the scene and similar aspects. But how do you pull this off without an entire production crew? Simple methods, such as working through your video script and figuring out how you’ll change the framing, motion and similar aspects, can be handled by a second person operating your camera. You could also look at the drama that can be created by lighting, such as adding a flash or changing the light’s focus on a particular point of interest, such as the current discussion point, to draw the eye to it.
Snappy Editing Techniques
Transitions can also create interest in your video. For example, a standard cut simply stops one part of your video and starts another, while a cross-fade or cross-dissolve changes from one scene to another, commonly used to denote time changes as a night shot changes to a morning shot. A J-cut or L-cut switches from one individual to another when the current visual is not the individual speaking.
Important of Music & Sound Effects
Sound also affects your audience, such as amplifying feelings in an emotional appeal. However, it’s important to determine whether you want to use licensed or royalty-free music and sounds, such as whether you want licensed music to stand out from the crowd or royalty-free music to control sounds. You can also use sound effects to make your video more interesting and immersive, such as transitioning to a surprise with a particular noise or showing a particular action through sound, such as a door opening or closing.
Importance of Color
Colors have specific meaning in video and can impact your audience’s psychology, as can the gradient of the color. For example, darker or saddened tones can imply a sad or serious topic, while bright tones suggest energy, and soft tones provide a peaceful and relaxing experience.
Beyond the tone of the colors, specific colors have meaning, with secondary colors often combining the characteristics of their component primaries:
- Red: Power, energy, love, passion, danger.
- Blue: Peace, idealistic, spiritual, trust, compassion.
- Yellow: Joy, happiness, energy, intelligence, stimulation.
- Orange: Enthusiasm, creativity, energy, stimulation, determination.
- Green: Nature, growth, calm, sincerity, freshness.
- Purple: Luxury, nobility, wisdom, independence, creativity.
- Pink: Gentleness, youth, tenderness, hope, optimism.
- Brown: Stability, wisdom, reliability, resistance, maturity.
- White: Purity, perfection, cleanliness, faith, safety.
- Black: Elegance, death, mystery, power, authority.
By implementing these factors into your videos, your company will enjoy superior levels of engagement and interest from your audience. This will, in turn, drive better outcomes and growth for your business.
