Digital marketing is a fast-paced world and if you want to grow your business you're going to have to dive in deep and make sure that you are keeping up with your competition.
This can be a lot of pressure but with the advent of short-form video, you can scale your business very quickly if you know what you're doing. If you're ready to jump in here are some tips that will help.
Know Your Audience
The first thing you will have to do is to make sure that you know your audience. When it comes to short-form content you have to have a deep understanding of who will watch your video and why they don't want to watch your video.
This means that you have to peer closely into the interests, behaviours, and preferences of your audience when you are trying to create your content. You have to become like a spy and look at what your competitors are doing because this will inform you about which platforms your target audience is most active on.
There are so many places you can post short-form content, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and even Pinterest. You can't focus on all of these all at once especially when you're just kicking things off.
The best thing you can do is to make sure that you know what your audience wants.
Understand Content Styles
Once you've selected the right platform or platforms to start things off you need to recognize that there are distinct styles of content that work differently based on the platform that you are using.
Well, you can repurpose content and this should always be your aim. Sometimes you have to tweak it to fit a particular platform.
Again this is where you have to pay keen attention to what your competitors are doing and make sure that you tone things down so that they perfectly match what each platform requires. This is the only way you're going to grow.
Create Strong Hooks
You have to make sure that you craft strong hooks when you are doing short content. Remember that you have to catch people's attention in a few seconds, if you don't they'll be scrolling onto something else and this is the last thing you want. Algorithms such as TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram Reels take your audience retention into full consideration.
The longer you can keep people watching your video the more people they will push it out to. Your goal then is to keep as many eyeballs on your content for as long as possible.
This means that you have to craft strong hooks by saying or doing something as soon as the video starts to grab people's attention.
Make Things Visually Appealing
You must try to make things as visually appealing as possible. Try using some of the most eye-catching visuals you can find.
Your on-screen style is very important to how you convey the message. Make sure that the content you are making perfectly aligns with your Brand's identity.
You have to make sure that things are visually appealing in a situation where you need to grab attention in just a few seconds. Always double-check your video before it reaches the video encoding stage to make sure it is eye-catching, and jaw-dropping if possible, you need to make a good first impression.
Be Very Concise
One of the things you must do is to make sure that everything is concise. Whatever message you are sending you need to make sure that it is very succinct.
If you fail to do this you're going to have a hard time keeping people's attention and they will steer away from your content. This is the last thing you need. Once you get people yawning mentally, it's over for you and your video. They are moving on to the next part of the train with just a scroll. Staying as short and sweet as possible is the way to grab attention.
You may be wondering how you can chop things up to make the video work for you. Taking the knife to the video in your editing program requires a lot of skill.
You don't want to chop out too much of the valuable information but you don't want to keep it so long that people roll their eyes or shrug and move on. It's a delicate balancing act much like an acrobat walking a tightrope.
The best teacher is on the platform already. Look at those content creators who are crushing it and you will find all the ideas you need to edit your content.
