Today we welcome Jonny Elwyn to the Virool blog! Jonny is a freelance film editor and blogger who has spent the past decade living and working in London. You can check out some of his editing work at jonnyelwyn.co.uk, take a look at his ebook How To Be A Freelance Creative – a 100 page primer for any creative thinking of making the leap into the freelance world. A big thanks to Jonny for taking the time to answer a few of our questions.
—
What are the most important factors that would significantly impact the decision that the user makes (conversion) after watching a video?
That’s a “how-long is a piece of string” question, because it’s always going to be a mix of clarity (what you want them to do), emotional connection (that they will be moved to do it) and alignment to their needs (that they have a reason to do it).
A few examples:
• For me to share a funny vine takes nothing more than it to be amusing and for me to hit retweet.
• For me to share a 30-minute corporate animation about how the economy works, it has to be really good and contain valuable information.
• For me to share a video that is selling a product it either needs to be disguised or really useful.
There are no rules, as William Goldman says, “Nobody knows anything.”
Would it be accurate to say that the three points you made earlier (clarity, emotional connection and; alignment) can be used as an outline for driving conversion?
Yes, you could say that, but it’s pretty much the same thing as saying ”make it good.” It’s tricky to nail down specific advice that goes beyond basic principles as most people would say “Make it short because people’s attention spans are declining and you’ve got to hook them in the first second or two.” But that’s not true – people will read/watch/engage with long content – if it’s interesting/engaging/relevant enough.
Shorter is better will be true for a YouTube video advert that I’m forced to watch while waiting for the “skip this add in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 seconds…” button to activate, so it’s got to hook me for me not to skip it and watch it, and whether I’m going to take the suggested action is another matter.
Dollar Shave adverts are brilliant*, but I’ve never bought a razor blade from them. (*I just watched the whole ad again, even though all I was doing was looking for the link…)
So we’re back to the sheer force of numbers. Statistically speaking. I’ve never clicked on a banner ad in my life, but yet they are the drive-chain of the internet. Context is everything.
For longer lengths of video advertisements, what do you think are some factors that they may have in common?
If anything is going to hold up over a longer duration then it will be largely about maintaining a compelling, engaging, and emotional story throughout that time. For example, this film is 3:10. Or it has to be ‘novel’ and different like the Honda R interactive video or the Red Bull Danny Macaskill videos which can stretch to 10 minutes. Although these can get repetitive, pretty quickly, they were originally pretty interesting. So is a conversion views/shares or people drinking more Red Bull – how do you track that …tenuous! So either the story or the something ‘remarkable’ in the Seth Godin sense of the word.
—
Chris Tam is the SEO manager of Virool. Follow him on Twitter @chriswtam.
The post How to produce videos that convert appeared first on Virool.
