Video has become one of the most successful types of content you can produce to achieve your business goals. High quality video content can create awareness, interest, excitement, and engagement from potential customers.
However, a poorly made video may bring adverse results and harm your brand image. There are a lot of important elements that you have to consider when you want to create a high quality video that your target audience will love.
Once you are able to understand these elements more, you will be able to create an engaging video that will achieve great results for your business.
Why should you create engaging video content for your target audience?
The metric of engagement shows how committed your viewers are to your video content. It is usually measured or monitored by the actions these viewers make while watching your videos.
The main ways viewers can show that they are engaging with your videos are through liking a video, sharing a video, and posting a comment on a video. This brings more awareness to your brands and products. Compared to those who just simply watch your video, viewers who interact with it are more interested in your content, and by extension, your business.
Usually, businesses are looking to reach a certain number of engagements or engagement rate as part of the goals of their video. They can set different goals for likes, shares, and comments depending on what engagement metric they want to focus on.
8 Elements of an Engaging Video
Now that you know why you should focus on creating engaging video content, here are the 8 elements that you have to consider when making your videos:
1. The beginning of your video
The beginning of your video, specifically the first 10-15 seconds is a crucial element to having an engaging video. If you do not grab your audience's attention in these seconds, there is a good chance they will move on to watch another video.
You must immediately hook your audience in the first few seconds by briefly mentioning what the video will be about and by saying a thought-provoking or attention-grabbing statement that you will elaborate further on in the video.
Doing this keeps your audiences interested enough to watch the entire video which will make them more likely to engage with it.
2. The length of your video
The length of your videos as another important element that you should place a focus on when trying to make an engaging video.
A good video duration can be somewhere between 30 seconds to as long as 10 minutes. The most appropriate video length will depend on the company, the story it wants to tell, the objective, and the target audience.
For example, a video for a website homepage can last for about 2-4 minutes, whereas a video that will be used at an event can be longer and a video for social media can be shorter at just around 10-30 seconds.
3. Your video’s emotional component
Having the right emotion in your videos helps them become more engaging. Viewers take action by a combination of their thoughts and emotions.
If you try to just present data and information without anything else, you will have an uninteresting video that will not captivate viewers.
You have to find a way to present important information that connects to people at an emotional and personal level. This makes viewers feel more involved in your video’s content and will give them the push to engage with it.
4. The story in your video
If you want engaging videos, they need to have a compelling story. This means that you need to create a good script and storyboard to visualize the story you want to tell.
Storytelling through videos is a great way for you to draw in viewers, spread messages, and can also be an effective way of providing information.
There are a lot of different ways to incorporate stories in a video. A simple structure would be having a beginning, middle, and end wherein you can present a problem at the start and provide your product or service as the solution to that problem.
5. Your video’s music
Music is another vital element that you can use to elevate the emotions of your video or make them more exciting so that viewers are more likely to engage with them.
Using upbeat music can inspire dynamism, action, and movement while using slower music can invoke more serious emotions.
It is important to choose your music wisely because using the wrong style of music or making it too loud can distract viewers from the story and message of your video.
6. The video graphics you will use
The graphics and effects that you will use in your videos are also equally important in making your videos engaging for your viewers.
Using the appropriate graphics can hook your audience immediately and enhance your video visually so that more viewers can become more curious about what your video content is about.
7. The video’s call to action prompt
Always remember to have a call to action prompt in your video. These prompts help remind viewers to engage and perform the specific action that you want them to make.
Try not to mention your call to action too many times in the video as this will have an opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve.
Go back to your goals and objectives as these will help you decide on a strong call to action for your video. An example of this is to remind viewers to like, comment, or share your video or even clicking a link or visiting your webpage.
8. The social media platform you will upload on
Since you are creating these videos for social media, it is also crucial for you to know which platform you are creating the video content for.
This is because all social media platforms have their own different and unique audiences. What may appeal to users on a certain platform may not work on another.
It is crucial not just to take note of the audiences present for each social platform, but also the preferred video specifications, formats and lengths that perform best for each platform.
Conclusion
Once you can carefully go over all of these 8 elements when creating your video, you will be able to have a great video that your viewers will love to engage with by liking, commenting, and sharing them.
