The Ultimate Guide to Short-Form Video Content
Right now, short-form video material is hugely popular. This is demonstrated by the explosive growth of apps such as TikTok and the evolving nature of websites such as YouTube, which now tend to promote a short-form video format to users through YouTube Shorts rather than longer editing video formats. The trends may affect your business video marketing strategy. In this post, we’ll examine why short-form content so necessary, cover the top short-form video types, and the advantages of short-form video content marketing for your business together with award-winning Explain Ninja experts. Let’s go!
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What is Short Form Video Content?
What is short form content? Generally, a short-form video is any video under 60 seconds duration. Though some marketers agree that short-form video content can be as long as three minutes, our team agrees the ideal time for a short-form video is between 30 and 60 seconds, while the exact length varies based on the platform you’re applying for its promotion.
Talking about the scripts, content in the short form should be brief, sharp, and direct. It is intended to be extremely ‘edible’, meaning simple enough to absorb in a few minutes (or even seconds). Generally, a text is regarded as short-form material if it is at least 1,200 words long. However, you unlikely use the texts that long to include into the video plot. Discover more on script writing here.
Why is Short-Form Video So Important?
Short-form videos provide viewers with the necessary information without making them sit down and concentrate for ten minutes or even more. In a fraction of the time required by lengthy videos to do the same task, you may learn and have fun quicker and better via short videos.
Short-form content works best when expressing an opinion, conveying significant news or updates, or offering a bite-sized value. Short-form content can be created in good and bad ways, and there are appropriate and wrong times to publish it.
You may use short-form video for your business in a variety of ways. You may demonstrate a single function of your program, introduce a staff member, and show to users how to sign up for your platform, provide a brief product instruction, or provide behind-the-scenes information about your business. The sky’s the limit.
Types of Short-Form Video Content
Since short form videos are so universal and useful, have a look the most popular short form video types to vary in your marketing practice:
Educational Content or Tutorials
Any content that tries to benefit an audience by teaching them something new is considered educational content. A comprehensive e-learning course or in-depth ebook can be as basic as a collection of rapid how-to guidelines, a brief TikTok tutorial, or it can be as complex as both.
Showcase Products or Services
Gratitude for your clients is one of the simplest and best ways to demonstrate your commitment to providing excellent customer service. Thanking them for their purchases and asking for testimonials, recommendations, or comments is one way to achieve this. Explainer videos are the best way to showcase new products, features or explain how to use them.
User-Generated Content
Asking for testimonials, recommendations, or comments will do to collect user generated content (UGC). Normally, UGC is the data that an unpaid author contributes to a website. The details could be a picture, a video, a blog or discussion forum post, a poll response, or a social networking website comment.
Answer FAQs
FAQ videos are a popular genre here. Normally they’re placed on a web page that provides brief responses to consumer inquiries. In order to help people access information fast, the replies should be succinct and straightforward, so should the videos.
Event Videos
What is a video of an event? A pre-event video promo, a teaser, or a post-event highlight is all examples of event videos. They are excellent strategies for raising interest in your business event on social media and other platforms. There may be Tiktok shorts videos, Instagram shorts or short reels video to prepare for your marketing.
Behind the Scenes
Behind the scenes short video ideas are one of the most extraordinary. They allow you create highly engaging videos for any occasion, niche or industry. They are also the most anticipated in promos, movie teasers or film credits.
Also, feel free to find more information on different types of explainer videos with us.
Advantages of Short Form Video Content Marketing
We’re through with certain short content types, now it’s high time to pass over to the advantages they may provide your business with. Here are at least five advantages of short videos for your marketing strategy:
1. Short videos are cost effective
The fact that short films are more affordable to produce than longer ones is one of their main advantages. This is because creating short-form videos requires fewer resources and time which means better returns as compared to making long-form videos.
2. They are easier to repurpose
You can apply short form movies across a variety of apps because they are very simple to reuse. You can also easily recycle your movies as paid advertisements because they are so brief. Making short form videos eliminates this concern because many platforms have duration restrictions on advertisements. Discover about 20 ways to repurpose your video content from our team.
3. Perfect for social media
Since mobile is booming, social media users demand short form videos. Short form videos and social media are often associated as one and the same. So by providing them with what they want, you may boost your presence and popularity there. Again, you can make long story short by repurposing your video content and cutting it to fit your preferred social media platform or other.
4. Combat shortening attention spans
It is possible to have a human attention span of 2 seconds or longer. Between 2000 and 2015, the average human attention span shrank by about 25%. What can we say about now! Now the average is 8.25 seconds and ever-shrinking. Thus, shorter videos are more convenient to process within that span. They can help viewers remember your films longer and is a terrific method to offset viewers’ shortening attention spans.
5. Everyone likes videos
A global survey by YouGov America found that 69% of people are using a second digital device (i.e. a phone) while using media. This means that short-form content is more likely to be more popular among mobile users who watch media while on the go. Thus, it goes without saying that people enjoy short form videos. In fact, they don’t just enjoy them, they prefer them over other formats.
Best Practices, Tips & Tricks
Now let’s proceed to some how-to-make short videos best practices, tips and tricks for the ultimate results for your marketing initiatives. Have a look and follow these best practices if you wish to use short-form video in your social media marketing strategy successfully:
Hook your audience quick
A strong technique to pique the interest of your audience in your video presentation is with a hook. Anything that piques interest and is relevant can be used, such a visual narrative, a question, a statistic, a quote, or another element.
Post consistently and promote
To grow organically via quality video content, try to post something at least once a day and ideally twice on social media, and at least once a week on other platforms like your website blog, YouTube channel or other.
The shorter the better
Keep your short form video content as short as the platform needs it, with reels of 1-3 seconds and a total length of 8-30 seconds long.
Be consistent
This might promote involvement and help create a great community! Make your fans feel like they are a part of your company by sharing behind-the-scenes content or other content types.
Provide catchy CTAs
Add a CTA to the caption or the end of videos. You can include a CTA to the conclusion of videos if you wish to switch viewers between the platforms – having a contest that requires followers to enter on Instagram instead of TikTok, or vice versa, is another strategy.
Share incentives
Add rewards and a link to a straightforward form to your bio (these usually work the best). If you include the incentive as a CTA to check out the link in your bio at the end of videos or as a pinned remark, you can encourage people to sign up through that link as well.
Engage your community
After posting, be the first to leave a comment on your own video. To get your followers to respond, pose a question, etc. Endure generating more content by your users themselves.
Showcase user-generated content
Asking for testimonials, recommendations, or allowing comments will do to collect user generated content (UGC) and engage even more people out of your community to the content discussions to increase awareness.
Jump on trends
Post within two days of seeing a trend as the lifespans are extremely short. Trending enables users to see what’s going on both on YouTube and globally. Trending videos attempts to highlight videos and shorts that appeal to a variety of viewers.
Repurpose relevant content
Converting blog articles into videos can help you make a short video and craft fresh content that drives more traffic to your site. Earn on viral videos. If one of your videos goes viral, lean into that creative and go extra hard on engaging with the community and posting.
Apply visual storytelling
Include your ideas for short videos into your storytelling techniques to drive more engagement. Visual storytelling is a way to tell a story using incredible visuals: motion graphics, digital illustrations, animation, live videos, and engaging script.
Short-Form Video Trends to Look Out For with Examples
According to the HubSpot Blog’s Marketing Industry Trends Survey, 51% of marketers who already utilize short-form video intend to raise their spending in the next years. 38%, on the other hand, intend to at least keep investing the same sum in promotion over short video platforms.
What’s the short form media guide without the brightest video short format examples? Review some of the top video trends with the quality short form videos examples handpicked by our experts. Enjoy them.
TikTok
An analysis on social media trends found that 42% of marketers that used branded challenges claimed they outperformed expectations. Viral material focused on dances, music, and sounds was how short-form videos originally became viral. Brands now have the ability to create viral challenges, noises, and filters on TikTok. Here’s a brand piece from Colgate:
Instagram Reels
Instagram influencer marketing has been long used by brands. This is nothing new. In short-form video content, more brands are using short form of instagram videos, though. For instance, well-known TikTok influencer TiffFoods often appeared in an advertisement for food company Fly by Jing to advertise its most latest products and more.
YouTube Shorts
Anyone can reach a new audience using YouTube Shorts and YouTube short video format by utilizing simply a smartphone and the Shorts camera in the YouTube app. With our multi-segment camera, you can easily construct short-form videos that are up to 60 seconds long using YouTube’s Shorts creation tools. For example:
Video explainers
Teasers are the latest short video marketing format too. They may last anywhere from six to sixty seconds. This is also the typical duration of a short-form video like a video explainer. As a result, businesses can use short-form video platforms to sell their goods naturally.
Because it doesn’t need a big budget, it has the ability to go viral, and it raises awareness of your business, it may be quite powerful. Consider the typical advert:
Short-form Videos vs Long-form Video Content: Which One Is Better?
While short-form videos are excellent for grabbing viewers’ attention right away, long-form films allow marketers to tell a more in-depth story and establish a more personal connection with their audience. In fact, with increasing watch times, TV is currently YouTube’s screen with the highest growth. At the same time, more trendy formats like TikTok, Instagram, etc. are gaining momentum.
Explain Ninja has been dealing with both video formats for various niches and industries. The latest video trends make us think more in favor of short videos for business as they suit more channels at once and are a universal promotional means. Whether you put it into your website banner, media or ad, you more than win because you may repurpose your content and produce even more opportunities for wider audience coverage on nearly each accessible digital platform.
To find out more about what is short-form video, the types, the production process, and beyond, feel free to book an intro call with our expert right away.
Conclusion
The future of marketing is after the short-form video, including animated explainer videos. Brands and customers both adore it, and apps are even being created and explicitly updated for short-form video content placement and promotion: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or similar allow sharing short-form videos in stories that engage and turn your website visitors into your clients.
Whatever short-form video format you decide on, keep in mind that in order to create a short video and actually build connections and expand your community, you must stay precise, personalized, unique, and interesting. By all means, make informative and informational movies to target the bottom of the funnel. Start it out with our useful tips and take a look at our works of explainer videos to inspire.
