10 Hacks to Increase Video Engagement

In previous post, we explained why Video Marketing is essential to any business. Video can help to boost your business growth but you have to make sure people are engaging with your content. How do you do that? It’s pretty simple. Check out the 10 hacks to increase engagement of your videos:

1. Understand your audience

“Who is the target audience of this video? What do they need and want? Why would they want to watch this video? How does this video help them?”
Before you start making any videos, you need to understand your audience. Ask yourself the questions above, or even better, map out your customers by doing some customer segmentation. It is very important that you match content with the user intent. If the video isn’t relevant to your audience, they will not want to stick around to watch it all the way through, or even watch it in the first place.

2. Make your videos stand up with eye-catching thumbnails and titles

Simple and beautiful thumbnails can increase your engagement by 154%. QuickSprout
Whether you are posting your video on video sharing platforms like YouTube or social media, the first thing your audience is going to see is the thumbnail. I guarantee you that it is worth the time to put the effort into designing a unique thumbnail. In fact, according to YouTube Creator Academy, 90% of the best performing video productions on YouTube have a custom thumbnail. While making the thumbnail, you want to make sure that it matches the style of your brand and is relevant to the actual content in the video.
Next thing that will drive the audience to click on the video is the title. Make sure to keep it short and straight to the point. It should summarize what you are trying to deliver in the video. However, in saying that, don’t repeat the same mistake that Heineken did in 2018.

3. Personalize the video content

The inclusion of a human face in the pop-up increased conversions by 48%. VWO
Put a human face in your videos. Many researches have proven that faces grab attention better than anything else. It makes your brand to feel more human, creating a more distinct emotional connection. It also helps establish trust between your brand and the user.

4. Hook your audience

You would want to ask a question to catch your audience’s attention. You should have a fair understanding of who your audience are and what they want by now, so make sure that these questions deliver the need of your audience.
Asking a question in a video will prompt an answer from those watching it. For example, we made a video for the Introduction to Video Marketing Guidebook. We added “You might ask… What is Video Marketing?” at the beginning of the video as a hook to engage with the audience.

5. Include subtitles

85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound. Digiday

People usually use their mobile phones on-the-go these days, which means they watch videos without sound more often because watching videos with the volume up out in public spaces or at work is a phone etiquette no-no. In fact, 75% of all video plays are on mobile devices.
If your marketing videos aren’t optimized with subtitles, you’re missing out on a lot of potential engagement from viewers. People are most likely to look for two things within the first few seconds they click on a video: “Am I interested in the topic of the video?” and “Can I watch it without sound?”.
The process of adding subtitles into videos might be complicated and time-consuming in the past, but as the technology evolved, AI powered captioning is an option now. Subly offers editable, real-time video transcription. So there you go, now you don’t have to sit in front of your computer editing videos all day – just let the machine do its work for you.

6. Add Call to Action (CTA)

Calling to action makes a 31x difference, or 3100%, in converting viewers to subscribers.
Always remember to add CTAs in your video. You want to tell your audience what exactly you want them to do. If you want them to buy a product, state it explicitly. If you want them to check out your website, remind them to do so. Your audience wouldn’t know what you want unless you tell them. Upfront communication increases your user engagement.

Remember, CTAs should always inspire the viewer to take further action.

7. Add a soundtrack

Music is a powerful tool that can impact people’s emotions. It has the ability to set the tone for any video and helps create a connection with the viewers, which means it can affect how people respond to your video.
Finding a soundtrack that matches your video is not difficult. First, you need to determine what you are trying to accomplish with the music. Will it be the main focus or a supporting role behind dialogue? Then, you’ll want to work through other details like the genre, tempo, and mood to find the perfect soundtrack. Adding music into your video can do more than grabbing your audience’s attention, it can also help keep them around longer.

8. Keep it short

Humans have shorter attention spans than goldfish, who are able to focus on a task or object for 9 seconds. Wyzowl
Getting people to stick around on your video is a huge challenge these days with our decreasing attention spans. You want to make sure that you grab your viewers attention in the first few seconds. Adding questions in your video in the first few seconds is a good idea as it can hook your audience. Shorter attention span also means that the longer your video is, the lower user retention it has. Marketing guru Neil Patel has stated that videos under 1 minute have 80% user retention while videos that are 5-10 minutes long have only 50% retention.
However, this principle does not apply to every video. Videos with educational content tend to be longer as they require longer time to deliver valuable and important message in details, and the majority of viewers are most likely to stick around till the end.

9. Optimize your video

Never forget to apply the basic SEO principles.
Keyword research is very essential to marketing. You should always do this for anything that you try to market. You might want to plug keywords inside the keyword planner to determine the search volume and competition. This will help you reach potential customers.
After conducting the keyword research, make sure you use the keywords. Add them in your file name, title, description, tags… Basically add in keywords to everything.

10. Promote your video

You want to let people know that you have created a video, and you want to make sure people watch it, as many people as possible.
There are many ways to promote your video:
– Promote it on social media. Post your video on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, any platforms your target audience are using.
– Email to your subscribers. This will increase your email marketing engagement metrics as well.
– Write a blog. Write a blog and embed the video in your blog post. You would want to go into more details with your blog especially if your video is short. Provide context, statistics and info for the topic.
Not sure how? Check out the blog post we wrote to promote the marketing video we created for Subly.

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