Make it move

Recently on a family vacation in Colombia with my middle-aged parents and my selfie-stick obsessed younger brother, we were on a bus out of Bogota. I’d just arrived from Australia and was very jet-lagged. My brother, Zach, was clearly bored and took 10 seconds to film me nodding off beside him on the bus. The footage was funny, albeit at my expense. Of course he shared it across his personal and travel business pages where all of our Facebook and Instagram friends laughed at me and warned him of the wrath of an older sister.

While mildly annoyed, I couldn’t help but be entertained at the hundreds and then thousands of views the video received. My brother, fueled by the video’s reaction, boosted the post for $10 just to see how many people in the world would watch it. It finally tuckered out at around 92,000 views, and my family agreed it was my brother’s evil grin at the end that really made it so funny.

While it didn’t directly get Zach business, it definitely kept people entertained and demonstrated that you don’t need a huge Hollywood budget to create entertaining video that can be used for content marketing.

Going viral

Earlier in March, my partner, Josh, made a music video for Indie band Firekites. 3D animated and taking hundreds of hours to make, the video was pretty popular in Newcastle and content creators such as Lost at E Minor shared it. Then, one night he took a 15 second GIF of the video and shared it on Imgur. He realised immediately it was doing well, receiving lots of traction.

Firekites – Closing Forever Sky from Headjam on Vimeo.

The next morning Josh checked the views and laughed out loud. Overnight they’d leapt from thousands to MILLIONS. He linked the GiF back to the actual video, and the views there had jumped from 2,000 to 16,000 overnight. The video now has over 60,000 views.

While I don’t know if this was part of Firekites’ content marketing strategy, Josh leveraged a specific audience/ platform relationship that resulted in a prolific amount of shares and views.

Regardless if you have a self-made video or a professional piece of artwork, there’s more than one way to skin a cute cat video. If you want to make the most of your video content, consider the following:

The type of video.

My brother specialises in the bare-bones, adventure style travel, so he doesn’t want to create a polished video that would appeal to retirees looking for a cruise ship and buffet.

Your audience.

Will your audience actually have the time and means to watch a video while they’re battling to load three children and shopping into the car?

The platform.

Share strategically. Think about your audience and which social platforms they’re likely to us the most.

Your budget.

Think about repurposing your audience’s content or using apps like iMotion to create quick stop motion videos.

What’s your favourite video marketing campaign?