In order for an ad to be successful, it’s got to do two things: engage and persuade. Your videos first eight seconds are its best chance at catching attention before your user moves on to their next piece of content. Then, whatever remaining time your video’s got left is your opportunity to persuade your user toward purchase. Especially on sites where tons of ads are shown, ad blindness quickly takes over. On your Facebook Feed, video content ads are only watched for an average of 5.7 seconds.
Basically, if you’re not capturing your audience in your video’s first eight seconds, you aren’t capturing them at all.
You’re nervous. Eight seconds isn’t long and communicating your brand message in 30 seconds is hard enough – how do you boil down everything you want to say into just eight seconds?
Well, for starters, you don’t. Those first eight seconds are crucial, but don’t take that to mean you have to say it all and make it stick in just that short amount of time. Instead, focus on what’ll really grab your audience’s attention in the quickest and most efficient way possible.
Luckily, we’ve got a little experience making videos. We’ve got a few handy tips we use time and time again to nail those first eye-catching seconds.
You’ve only got a few seconds, so before thinking about your script or your tagline or your voiceover, focus on the one thing that can actually make a big impact fast: your visuals.
Whatever your video content is about, it’s got to do one big thing – stop your audience from scrolling. Use bright colors, movement, close-ups, happy faces, and more to surprise and shock your viewer so they literally stop scrolling and start watching. Once you know you’ve got their attention, you can give your message more focus.
Your video can obviously be longer than one single sentence, but boiling down your brand mission or product/service offering into one clear and direct sentence is a great exercise. Not only does it make for a more focused video, but if you struggle to get it down that short, it could be a sign that your mission needs some refining.
Here are a few questions you can answer to boil down your message in a short and succinct way.
Remember, people scroll their feeds and their browsers with the sound off. Don’t expect people to ever stop, tap or click on your video content, listen to the audio, and then decide whether or not they’re interested.
Don’t get us wrong – sound is a crucial element of any video. But don’t rely on sound solely to get your message across, because users don’t have the time to pay attention to what your video is saying. Instead, tell them what they can’t hear with captions, text, or other informative word graphics. Not only do graphics and text grab a user’s attention (when’s the last time you looked at a word without reading it?), but they’re an effective way to give your audience more information in a more memorable way.
Effects are a great way to captivate, especially when you don’t have the biggest budget for actors, locations, creative setup, and more. With the right video effects, you can use a simple video, even stock footage or text-only videos, to create a beautiful and engaging piece of content that’ll help you attract the attention you deserve.
Take a look at what we did with this social video for Cheryl Saban Designs. We used just a few scenes of b-roll and tied it together with a few fade-ins, fade-outs, some text, and more. We also played with bold color and blurring effects to create something unique that relied mostly on effects along with beautiful footage of the product to draw viewers in and keep them engaged for the entire video.
Here at Modus Weddings we offer premium, cinematic wedding videography services to our couples. We film worldwide to capture beautiful wedding videos that capture all the details from your day.
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Email [email protected] or call us on 01233 273 273.
