We make hundreds of videos every year and have become increasingly obsessed with a few critical elements that ensure our videos resonate deeply and engage viewers effectively.
Here’s what we focus on:
1. Where Will People Watch It?
Understanding where your video will be watched is crucial. If this isn’t crystal clear before you start brainstorming, pre-production, shooting, or editing, you’re doing it wrong.
Each platform demands a different kind of video. It’s not as simple as resizing and posting the same content everywhere.
Why it matters: Context in video is everything. You must define it from the start. Over the years, we’ve shifted our strategy to create all vertical videos separately from any horizontal content or ads, instead of trying to edit everything from the same footage.
2. What Does Your Audience Actually Care About?
The messaging of your video needs to be focused on the viewer, not the brand or company. We love the Storybrand framework for dialing in great messaging.
The basic idea is that your viewer is the “hero” and our video or company is here as the “guide” to lead them to success. We identify the problems and villains along the way and figure out exactly what people care about and want.
Key insight: By making the viewer the hero of the story, we can create content that resonates deeply and feels personally relevant to the audience.
3. The First 5-10 Seconds of the Video
I am completely obsessed with the first 5-10 seconds of a video.
I start thinking about it as soon as we have an idea, and we often go through 3-5 variations to get it right. Whether it’s for ads or any other type of video, getting these initial seconds perfect is crucial.
Ideas we use: We often employ jokes, statistics, quick movements, big captions on screen, or questions to the audience. These tactics help grab attention immediately and encourage viewers to keep watching.
4. When Do People Fall Off?
We’re always analyzing our videos and stats after posting. We look at where people drop off and what’s happening in the video at that moment.
About once a week, we gather to review a video, examining viewer retention and click-through rates to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Actionable advice: Regularly reviewing these metrics helps us continuously improve and refine our content to better engage our audience.
Final Thoughts
You need to remember there’s a real person out there on their phone, watching on a TV or sitting at their desk watching your video.
It can get deceiving when hundreds of thousands of views start showing up. But each one is a real human.
We need to remember that and keep that person at the center of all the decisions we make.
