Invasion Of Short-Form Video In Marketing.
No matter what you do, you cannot escape what TikTok gave birth to.
Hey there! Have you been scrolling Facebook reels before you came to read this article? Or were you just swiping down on YouTube shorts? Well whatever platform you’ve glued your eyeballs onto, you are watching short-form videos (which are videos that last no longer than 3 minutes, this depends on the platform as well).
It seems like people can't get enough of it! Videos that are less than a minute made up 57% of the views on YouTube in July 2022 compared to 11% in 2020 (Harris, 2023). Marketers worldwide are beginning to see an opportunity to do umm… dentistry? Oh! no, wait! To do marketing! Well, why? To answer this, we must understand what makes short-form videos great.
As these videos don’t last for more than a minute or at max they may last for 2 minutes. It makes them incredibly short and chock full of information structured into bite-sized pieces. They are super engaging and can keep the viewer glued entirely on the video for a set amount of time. Its shortness is so powerful that for an entire minute, you have the viewer's full attention and focus on the video! This is probably the only thing in the world that’s better short than long…
Having this much power over someone should be illegal, but it isn't just yet. So to capitalize on this paradigm shift from injecting ads into long videos to injecting ads in short-form videos you should keep your eyes on the following trends.
1. Microlearning
The term microlearning means learning in a session that can be concluded within 10 minutes. However, short-form video has taken this to the extreme. The shorts that show certain tips and tricks or share a bit of knowledge that genuinely blows your mind are now known as microlearning content. If your brand is about sharing knowledge or educating people, trust me you do not want to miss out on this bandwagon.
2. Teasing Products
Does your brand have a new product that’s launching soon? Or do you just like to tease your customers? Well, short-form videos are here to tease your customers to oblivion! If you need to generate hype around your product/service showcase a bit of it, use it for a short while, or just unbox it in a short form video, I kid you not it will generate heaps of hype!
3. User Generated Content.
In Bangladesh, people often post shorts or reels on their social media when they’ve arrived for their morning brew in North-End or Tabaq which then get featured on their own social media channels. This greatly increases consumer engagement and gets the buzz going on about your product or service! If your customers generate their content with your product/service… well that's just free marketing right there.
4. Behind The Scenes Content
Increasingly, factories and agencies are starting to show what goes on behind the scenes. Kojima productions, a well-known game development studio recently showed a tour of their offices in their shorts section on YouTube. This not only generated hype for their new upcoming game but also made the fans see Kojima productions in a much more intimate manner, getting them to connect more with their favorite studio.
5. Challenges
Well, people often find the most creative uses of your product. For example, a certain lifestyle brand may sell sports bikes could challenge its customers to post a video of them doing a wheelie or a skid captioned by a #hashtagsomething can get people who use your products to use it more or may bring in new customers who may want to do the same challenge themselves!
These are some of the short-form video trends that are going on around the world. Many companies old and new are adopting this medium to do their marketing. It has proven to be quite effective as this form of video marketing has the greatest return on investment.
If you’re a business that's struggling to gain traction in social media do consider making some short-form videos promoting your business. Whether people like it or not, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are pushing short-form videos, and ads placed after them are targeted properly to the right audience. No matter what you do, you cannot escape what TikTok gave birth to.
Written by Muqaddim Jawad Noor
