Some cool, counterintuitive findings We have a client, here at Copel Communications, that tasks us with writing a lot of short marketing videos for them. They get posted on YouTube. We also do lots of other stuff for this client: blogs, ads, case studies, and so on. One day, not long ago, they asked us to write a blog about a video we’d already written. At first, this seemed to be a head-scratcher. Video is, by its nature, the densest and most elegant way of communicating; it’s common to pack, say, five minutes worth of info into a three-minute video, simply because you have the layering of images, titles, and voiceover. So why would you want to write a blog about that video? Isn’t that redundant? A smarter way of looking at things At first, we thought—we assumed—that this must be, solely, for SEO purposes. That is, helping the search-bots to find the videos. Thus, the audience must be “search bots,” and not “real humans,” right? Wrong. This client, by the way, is very smart. They’d analyzed the behavior of their site and YouTube visitors, and determined that intermingling a blog with a video would provide a synergistic effect. Were they right? The blog, in case you haven’t guessed, wasn’t very hard to write; after all, we still had the original script we’d penned to create the video in the first place. It wasn’t a copy-and-paste job, because 1) video scripting is written differently than blog copy, and 2) a real human reader would feel cheated to read the exact same thing that they’d get from the video. Indeed, it was somewhat liberating for us: These videos have a tight time-cap on them; in the blog, we were a little freer to play, and could add details and embellishments that we couldn't put into the original script. So once posted, it looked like this: There would be a headline to the blog article, followed by a paragraph or two, and then copy that would say, “We made a whole video on this topic; here it is.” Below that, there would be a big tile, imported from YouTube, for watching the video. Below that, the article would continue, broken up with interesting graphics—some of which were borrowed from the original video elements. But did it pay off? Once this posted, the client went back to their analytics. And boy did their hunch pay off. Turns out that not everyone wants to read the entire blog. They might just want to consume a paragraph or two, and then watch the video. Or they might just view a part of the video, pause it, and then skim the rest of the article and its illustrations. The point is that this hybrid approach paid off handsomely, providing a veritable smorgasbord to the client’s site visitors. Icing on the cake: It fed those search-bots, too. Hybrid power This is not the end of the story. To this day, this client tasks us with the one-two punch of video-plus-blog all the time, and the results keep on pouring in. But it goes beyond that. Think about it: A hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds, and you needn’t restrict it to just blogs and videos. We’ll do social and retargeting ads for the same campaign. We’ll do email campaigns that tie to a new landing page for a given offer or audience. The lesson here: Never assume your audience is consuming solely one medium. They’re not. And if you’re serving them only one, you’re missing out. Have a creative or marketing challenge that’s keeping you up at night? Contact us. We’d love to help.
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