If your website is up and running and you want to give it that extra special touch, a video could very well be the way to go. Videos can be used to show your mission statement, values and procedures. You might have someone you can work with to commission a video, but whether you have a team or you’re shooting solo, here are a few principles to help guide you.
DO Try New Things
There are a lot of videos on the internet. With the sheer amount of content that passes through the web on a daily basis, trends form, thrive, and pass in a heartbeat. So even if a joke or format seems fun to try, by the time you press record, it might have already passed the scope of popularity and taken a dive straight into the pit of dead memes.
It’s scarier to try something new, but that initiative might be exactly what’s necessary to draw the attention of your audience. And even if you aren’t breaking the limit with every video you do, your content should still express who you are as a person and a brand. People like people — not walking slogans without a heart.
DON’T Overdo It
When you’re creating video content for your website, there are certain strategies that may be well intentioned, but they may come off as aggravating in practice. They can even limit the time someone spends on your page.
This could be a distracting video banner or a video that autoplays and forces the user to fumble for the pause button. These are the kinds of things that just don’t need to happen, and when they do, they usually pull focus away from the value a website can offer.
A video should be short. In fact, it’s been reported that a majority of viewers will only watch a video to the end if it’s less than a minute long. And you shouldn’t depend too much on sound, as it’s likely a user will be watching your video with their volume muted.
Adding captions will not only make sure that your information is expressed to everyone who watches it, but it will also make your video more accessible, too.
DO Make a Strategy
As you look into website analytics, your focus will depend on the goals you set for your video. This will likely require planning and maybe a team to consult with. It would be helpful to write a call-to-action in your script if one applies. This will create a concrete end-goal that you can use to measure your video’s success.
If you’re creating an instructional video, you’ll want to make sure you communicate as simply as possible, boiling down complex ideas to their core components and keeping the information you want to express understandable and jargon-free. All of this works to widen your scope to include every possible person that may be suited towards your brand or business.
DON’T Be Impatient
When you work hard on content like a video, you’ll likely put a lot of yourself into production. So once it’s there for public consumption, there will probably be a quiet part of you hoping that it’ll be an instant success. That’s perfectly understandable, but it probably isn’t going to happen.
That’s not a bad thing! Instant virality means notoriety, which isn’t entirely positive, and it might not be what you’re even looking for. Video content is a process with a learning curve. Even if you look at the stats and find your video is doing terribly, that’s not a mark on you as a person. Just learn, adapt, and evolve.
Using some of these tips as a guide, you can successfully expand the scope of your website. As more people are able to see who you are, you’ll likely find that viewers turn into patrons even more quickly than you expected!
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