Making a great and captivating video takes effort and time – that’s just how it is. Sure, you can take your iPhone, point it towards something, and make a video without any planning or objective in mind. However, that is not a “good” video. That is not a video with clear objective and professionalism and today, what I will call “ the bullshit-barometer”, is getting better and better among people – especially the younger generation who was born with an iPad in their hands.
Because of this, in our times, marketing is getting more and more competitive – you need to know the latest strategies, almost before other marketers have them. You have to be aware of new market trends constantly and to facilitate these trends to benefit your brand and/or company. Furthermore, in a few years, when the Fortnite-playing youngsters in our world who were born with technology being the new child pacifier (you all know the parents who put their kids in front of Netflix or an iPad if their child wont behave) get the same buying power as the 30-50 year old people today – we are looking at an extremely demanding, multi-tasking and incredible difficult crowd to market to!
Firstly, their bullshit-barometer is on HIGH – secondly, their advertisement-blindness is so well developed, your ordinary Facebook and Ad-sense ads just wont exist for them (not to talk about their knowledge in how to install ad-blockers). Come on! If a 13-year old can make a decent video using just an iPhone on AUTO-setting: then you cannot expect your business to be taken seriously, if you do the same in a marketing-attempt. The bars are raised for what is engaging and professional.
That brings me back again to the question: what exactly makes a marketing video “good”? Sure, conversions are always the main objective – but what about brand awareness and the fact the audience will think about the video and content from time to time, because something was touched inside them. In my opinion, a good marketing video does not just sell stuff; it touches people. There are many ways to touch someone; you can make them smile, you can make them laugh, you can make them think about life in another way; if you can change their thought-patterns for just a moment, you have touched the person watching it.
That brings me back to my before-mentioned point about huge competition in the marketing space; actually, if you raise the bars, move away from all the bad marketing nonsense-videos and content out there, you find yourself in a land with no competition. All the other marketing videos and content will just become noise. Because of the recent technological development of video cameras, where everyone can buy a camera that can produce 4K quality, super-slow motion and decent sound, there have also been a significant raise of crap content. In some way, this makes it actually easier than ever to create good content; it’s like if you stand on a shore a late night, looking out into the horizon; feeling the wind on your cheeks, hearing the waves, seeing the violent sea; and suddenly you see an orb of light. You cannot focus on anything else looking out into the horizon; because everything else is background-noise. That is how good content and good videos are today. The good video is the orb of light while the violent and dark ocean is all the background-noise of crappy content.
So let’s create videos and content that moves people; that’s a good marketing video.