#instamotion

Narrative videos are probably the most recognizable style of video besides animation. They use classic storytelling elements, including character building, conflict, and resolution, to tell your brand story in an entertaining and engaging way. They create a journey — one your viewer can easily follow and relate to. Because their goal is to tell a story, narrative videos often work best top of funnel, when users are just learning about the problem they face and you’re introducing your brand. Whether you tell the story of how your company came to be, the story of a frustrated customer finding you for the first time, or the story of a fictional hero character, your narrative should be memorable and help your brand stay on the mind of anyone who watches it.

are less about your brand’s visual aesthetics and focus more on expressing your company’s core value or mission statement in a documentary-style format. This is usually accomplished through interviews with key company representatives, like founders, employees, or satisfied customers.

 To make a big impression, it’s important your mini-doc keeps it short and sweet. You want to highlight excellent sound bites that tell viewers exactly who you are, all while maintaining their attention. While feature-length documentaries have enough time to develop a full, three-act story, mini-docs don’t. They have to establish their story by quickly answering three crucial questions: what, why, and how. What is the focus of this video? Why should the viewer care about this? How does your subject work? This helps you get key pieces of information to your audience in a fun and interesting way.

It can increase your search engine ranking, click-through rates, open rates and conversions. But you have to reach your target audience. YouTube is the second largest search engine (second to Google). What’s better: YouTube is owned by Google. So that means a properly tagged video can work wonders for your SEO.

Video Boosts Conversion Rates

23. The middle of the week is the most popular for B2B video views, with Tuesday between 7AM-11AM PST (10AM1PM EST) seeing the highest number of views.

Why it’s relevant: This seems oddly similar to the 2013-ish stat of ‘Emails are best sent on Tuesdays at 10am’ - but take it for what it is… guidance on testing out publishing and promotion dates/times for your users.

24. The average length of a video is 9 minutes, but 75% of all videos published in the last year are less than 2 minutes long.

Why it’s relevant: It’s important to produce content that’s purposeful and helpful first - but if you have content that can be longer, it’s worth testing out the success to see how your users will interact with it.

The report also notes that “there seems to be a shortage of videos that are 4-20 minutes in length and companies are doing one of two things: either they’re keeping their videos incredibly short or dumping large amounts of information into long-form content (like webinars). They’re not producing much in between.”

25. 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. (Source: Digiiday)

Video dominates. And not just on YouTube. In fact, four of the top six channels which global consumers use to watch video are social channels.

And it’s not like things are slowing down: Facebook’s EMEA Vice President Nicola Mendelsohn predicts that their content will probably be “all video” by 2021.

Plus, technology conglomerate Cisco reports that 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic will be video by 2021.

What does all this mean?

In short, businesses need to make video marketing an integral part of their business strategy, or risk being left behind.

Okay, check this out:

Referring to a study from video content creation platform Slidely, their VP of Communications Hila Shitrit Nissim said: “Considering 44 percent of people watch five or more videos online every single day, social video represents a wildly valuable opportunity for businesses across all industries.”

Now, think about television commercials.

TV ads are broadcast to the masses, and as such, they’re rarely personally relevant to the individuals who are forced to endure them. It’s fair to say that most people universally loathe TV adverts.

However, modern targeting techniques allow marketing videos to be highly relevant to individual consumers.