Why are Short Videos Effective for Marketing? 5 Tips for Creating Videos that Sell!

Video content is quickly becoming a popular method of marketing products and ideas to a content hungry class of people. In an effort to improve marketing returns, companies are putting together short video clips a few seconds to a few minutes long with rich content that attracts interested customers. Thus far the strategy has been effective and leads to higher sales revenue.

For example, researchers found that short clips (i.e. trailers) increased the amount of people watching movies. They were motivated by their emotional connections to the content. The study tracked web-based facial-expressions to determine viewers real time intentions to watch movies (Xuan, Shi, & Teixeira, 2018). Well constructed short video clips predicted the emotional intentions to watch a certain movie.

That leads us to the question of why such online marketing videos work? Companies are finding that these videos are a cost effective marketing method of reaching their audience in a way that inspires them to act. With modern software they can also be relatively easy to products and put online.

Reasons why a company may consider video marketing....

-Short clips are quick and easy to watch.

-Short don't require a lot of effort to watch reducing customer investment.

-Short clips are fairly easy to create in a cost effective manner.

-Short clips can be spread by social media without major data costs.

-Short clips are like a business card that points people to a website/business.

-Short clips can have rich messages.

-Short clips are more memorable.

-Short clips are emotional and can create motivation.

Videos are not only a way of disseminating interesting information they also are connected to emotions that lead to greater purchase motivation (Kujur & Singh, 2018). Emotional content impacts our feelings and perceptions. In turn, these feelings and perceptions lead to greater emotional purchasing.

Videos creates feelings such as, "I wish I could climb a mountain like them" which may lead to something like purchase of hiking boots; perhaps even the same ones shown in the commercial. The buyer may not have thought about how likely they are to do these things but instead acted off of impulse to make an impulse purchase.

When a company is lucky they may have one of their videos go viral. When this occurs they get loaded with with millions of clicks. Sometimes viral videos even hit the major news agencies such as CNN creating a huge bump in sales and brand awareness.

We also find that online dynamics such as links and offline social capital predict whether or not videos will go viral (Khan & Vong, 2014). People will share a video if they can create links to it and they have an active interest in it such as environmentalism, music, sports, etc..

Short videos are relatively cheap to produce, depending on quality and need, and can be an effective marketing tool. There are a few tips that can help you create an effective video.

1. Be unique and create and experience.

2. Tap emotions with imagery and sound.

3. Keep the video under a few minutes in length.

4. Use the video in groups that share similar interests to create sharing and links.

5. Sell your company in the video with clear final messages.

Khan, G. & Vong, S. (2014). Virality over Youtube: an empirical analysis. Internet Research, (24), 5.

Kujur, F. and Singh, S. (2018). Emotions as predictor for consumer engagement in YouTube advertisement. Journal of Advances in Management Research, 15 (2).

Xuan, L., Savannah W., S., Thales, T., et. al. (2018). Video content marketing: the making of clips. Journal of Marketing, 83 (4).