Take some cues from Hollywood for your marketing videos
In the entertainment industry, movie trailers are imperative for creating excitement surrounding an upcoming film. The movie industry make billions of dollars each year, but much of the monetary success depends upon a few 1 to 2- minute movie trailers for promotion. When an industry spends millions each year into making short video clips as attention grabbing and entertaining as possible, marketers should take note.
Here are 4 tips video marketers can learn from movie trailers:
1. Start your video with a powerful hook
Great movie trailers don’t start off with a lull in the storyline – they begin with a bang. Trailers start off with dramatic music, an unexpected noise, or an interesting conversation between characters to capture the audience’s attention. As we’ve covered in multiple blogs, humans have a shorter attention span than goldfish – we now clock in at a whopping 8-seconds. Marketers only have seconds to capture your audience’s attention.
The key is to start off with something interesting, then after you have them hooked, bring in your company name and product information.
2. Utilize emotion in your videos
Movie trailers do a great job of this – they always elicit some sort of emotion. Keep in mind that emotion doesn’t necessarily have to mean sadness. There’s no need to make your audience cry, but you should give them the feels (to some extent). That feeling could be frustration with their current process, amusement, excitement, or trust – whatever helps convince your audience that they need your product or service. After all, emotion is theone key ingredient for memorable videos.
A great movie trailer provides some sort of story – without giving too much away. And for your marketing videos, you can utilize a similar approach. You could create a story from your brand or product narrative. Whatever approach you take, convert information into a story to create an authentic human experience for audiences that makes the information more entertaining and easier to understand, retain, and recall.
3. Post-production creates the real story in your video
Occasionally, you’ll watch a movie and think, that was totally different from the trailer. A bad editing job can mislead the audience into believing that the trailer is about something totally different than the movie. Reality TV stars are notorious for complaining about bad editing – sometimes the story can change from camera, to final cut thanks to post-production. But post-production can also turn sub-par footage into a great video. It truly depends on the editor. To avoid telling a different story than initially intended, as a marketer there are a few things you can do. Storyboarding a video idea, creating shot list and working with a video content partner to truly empower your vision.
On a funny note, here are 10 movies whose trailers have been recut to completely change up their genre: link. That’s the power of post-production – editing can completely transform a story.
4. Create a sense of anticipation
You want your audience to take some sort of action after viewing your content – plain and simple. A movie trailer hasn’t done its job if you don’t want to see the movie after viewing it. Marketing videos should take a similar approach.
Marketers should give audiences a taste of your offering, but leave them wanting more. In marketing, you also need to take advantage of the viewership. Don’t allow them to leave, and rely on them to come back later to potentially buy. Utilize the proper CTA or a contact form directly in the video to encourage your audience to take action. Any viewer who has made it to the end of a video is invested – use this to your advantage, and move them farther along in the buyer’s journey. For more tips on incorporating video into your buyer’s journey, check out this blog.Even if your marketing dollars pale in comparison to the Hollywood movie budgets, you can take a few notes from the big dogs on the West Coast and incorporate them into your next visual content campaign. A great place to start - partner with a video content agency to bring your video production and other visual content pieces up to the next level.
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