The 3 Types of Video Marketing Every Brand Needs

Transcript is auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly edited; it may contain small errors.

So a lot of brands are making their audience feel like the third wheel. It's kind of like content that makes someone feel like you had to be there to understand it — like looking through the last few pages of someone else's yearbook, who are those people? It's kind of like we're treating social media like it's made for individuals, but there's so many opportunities being missed when that's all it's being used for.

Known For podcast, episode seven. Take one.

This is pretty much everywhere — I'm seeing this on healthcare profiles, doctor's offices, dentists, aesthetic practices, corporate. There's no context, and I think it's more than a missed opportunity, I think it's actively pushing people away. It's the worst-case scenario — they see your profile and think less of you, or think less of your practice.

Why would they think less of your practice?

Because they don't connect — it's all these subconscious cues. They see that, and it's all internally focused, and it reads as, they don't care about me, or, this is a waste of my time. That's even worse, I feel like it's so disrespectful — I lost something because of this.

So what we want to talk about today is what social media marketing should look like. When someone gets on your brand's profile, what should they see? Specifically, what video should they see? Because right now, video is really powerful for conversion, and it's the most opportunity people have to engage — it's so engaging. So we're going to talk about three types of video your brand needs to make in order to engage your audience, but also help them find you and connect with you.

I know we talk about it a lot, but what's the difference between posting and intentional marketing? Posting is when it's kind of an afterthought — something happens and you're like, oh, I need to document that, that's when you're posting like the selfies. Marketing is when you've thought about it beforehand, or there's something coming up, and it's more intentional. It's easier to think about if you're thinking about sales, like, here's how you know if your brand is just posting versus marketing.

So there's three things you want to think about. You want to look at your profile, look at all your online presence touch points, and ask yourself: are there reasons for my customers to trust me? Do I have education? Do I have some sort of content that communicates my credibility? Is confidence coming across in these videos, are they well done, are they polished? You want people to see this content and think, oh, I can trust them, they know what they're doing — so you want to make sure you have that, there's got to be a reason to listen, a reason to watch.

The types of education videos that work really well are like, three things you need to think about, because you're always going to be listening for that third one — or giving a number, so people know, oh, okay, there's only five, let me stay for the fifth one. If you're talking about a myth or a misunderstanding, address the myth, explain why people think a certain way about something, and then get to what it actually is — whatever's causing the misunderstanding, it's got to be done in a way that revolves around the platform people are going to be watching. So there's a little bit of technique involved in education for it to be effective.

You also want to have reasons for people to feel connected to your brand, and I think the easiest way to think about this content is your values. A really common value for companies is family, or integrity — so you've got to show that, you can't just say those things, you have to illustrate it. Whether that's content that shows the founder's family, illustrating it in a way that makes people feel, oh, that could be my family — that's why it's so important to gather those stories, and when you get a really good review, you want to give people reasons to connect to your brand in an emotional way, because consumers make emotional decisions. If they're seeing an emotional situation where someone feels like they're finally in a place where they can belong, surrounded by friends, feeling really confident around them — is your organization a place that understands me and my needs, implicitly, without having to explain or over-explain myself? The education content and even the credibility pieces really connect to the logic side of consumers' brains, connection content relates to the emotional side, and you kind of have to touch on both for effective marketing.

So the third type of content you want to make sure you have is content that your customer or prospective customer would want to share with someone. Because think about it, when you share a reel or any kind of content with somebody, you feel really good when that person likes it, enjoys it, says something back to you about it, because it says something about you, it validates you. And if it's something you relate to and they relate to, there's value there, and you've given them something that's added value to that relationship, added value to their identity — and they didn't even pay you for it, but they probably will if they're a customer, because they've already started attaching themselves to your brand. It's important to make that content for those psychological reasons, but also because that's the way platforms are working right now — shareability is really the highest data metric that shows performance right now. So you want to make sure you have that kind of content. Education content is actually really great for that, if it's done well, it's really helpful for people to share.

So if you have those three things, you have a solid marketing strategy. If you have one of those things, you need to make sure you're using the others too. I will say, on the shareability piece, you want to be on the right side of shareability — you want to be shared for the right reasons, you don't want to be shared because you're the butt of someone's joke. You want to be on the value side of it — we're sharing this content because it's valuable, because we're in on the joke with this company, with this person, with this personality, not because, hey, look how ridiculous this is. Check your comments section.

So if your profile is missing one of those reasons, one of those types of content, you probably need to address it and be more intentional. And when we help brands really add that content intentionally for marketing purposes, there's three different approaches we take — we always say there needs to be polish, there needs to be personal, and there needs to be platform-optimized. Let's dive into those a little more.

When we talk about polish, we're talking about high-quality content produced at a really high level — it has a lot of value to it, and it says, we are serious, we take ourselves seriously, you can take us seriously too. This is stuff that lives at the top of your profile, highlighting key people in your organization, whether doctors, executives, and so on, establishing credibility because of the level of quality. It's important to point this out about polish content, because right now, user-generated content is really effective for some industries, especially product industries like e-commerce, anything really focused on the product. If you have a service business, or a personal brand, there's something to be said about authenticity, and having a way for your audience to interact with you as you are, authentically. User-generated content is another way of saying amateur, and it's important, you need some of it. But if you don't have the polish piece to show that we take ourselves seriously, that we're a real thing, a real organization, it kind of falls on deaf ears.

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A good way to know if you need a polished piece — and when we say polish, we're talking about brand videos, profiles, professionally done videos, culture videos, something someone can watch with ease and a high level of trust — is to focus on the intent of why someone is watching it. If someone's making decisions about trust, and it's got a high dollar value connected to it, then they need to be able to watch it with ease and brevity, and you need to think about what the experience needs to be. That's a good way to know if you need some polish.

Another thing that's really important — you need personal content, and what I mean by that is, people connect with people, people connect with humans. When you have a brand, and you're thinking about a brand's Instagram profile or LinkedIn page, people are not going to connect with your logo, they're going to connect with the people who come to mind when they think of your logo — those personalities and those values, not the logo itself. So feature the people who communicate those values, whether that's your employees, your customers, or the founder, showcasing individuals and telling those stories, focusing on the transformation, is what creates that personal-connection content. The strategy we recommend is, instead of making all this content for your company profile page, equip your employees and the personalities that really embody your brand to make content and share it on their own page, because that's going to be more powerful than just posting quotes. So those are a couple of ways to make things personal, and there's a way that also communicates the polish too — you can communicate personal and polished pieces together and let them be in synchrony. Especially with doctor's offices, sharing patient testimonials, really sharing the personal side of those stories but doing it in a professional, polished way. And sometimes you need to do that in a more polished way, because if you're trying to listen to somebody's story but you can't hear them, or it's noisy, the polish makes it more digestible in those situations.

Speaking of digestible — so polish, personal, the third one is platform-optimized. You want to think about the intent of why someone is there, why they're scrolling, why they're on your website, why they're on LinkedIn, what they're trying to take away. Content has to be designed in a way that the algorithm will want to show it to somebody else. A couple things to keep in mind: is there a hook, are you giving them a reason to continue to watch, is it digestible? Usually that looks like having shorter sentences, a shorter video overall, cutting and changing the angle every few seconds.

I think often when brands avoid social media, or it feels intimidating, it's because people think they just have to follow social media trends and it feels disingenuous, off brand. There is a way to mimic those trends, to implement them in a way that's branded and professional, because the way trends work, you kind of have to leverage them for discoverability. People go on social media now as a search engine, and they're looking to find brands, content that will — subconsciously they're looking for entertainment. And if they stumble on your content and it's entertaining, engaging, or informational, they're going to watch it. How long they watch it is how much you've optimized it for the platform. If you want it to go far, you've got to fit in that ecosystem, it's got to work there, and it might not work on other ecosystems, so you've got to adjust accordingly.

I like that you said the word ecosystem, because they all kind of synchronize together — the polish, the personal, and the platform. They all work together to create this experience for people to understand and get a grasp of your brand, what you stand for, what you sell, to really build that familiarity. They work in tandem — different touch points satisfying different emotional and subconscious needs. The polish is saying, we are serious, you can take us seriously too. Personal is saying, hey, we're like you, we can be your friends, we can connect, you can let your guard down. And platform-optimized — it belongs here, it's going to go far, but more important, the people seeing it are saying, it belongs in my feed, the thing I consume fits here, so I will fit there.

So all three are important, but if you had to pick one, which one to start with could change — it's going to change business to business, but really you need all three. Some are going to tick two boxes, some just check one, so it might be all three, might find some unicorns in there. The trick, too, is not just saying, okay, I'm going to make 30% polished content and 50% personal content and I don't know what's left of my mind for the other 20% — it's, okay, I made this batch of content, it's been out in the wild for three or four weeks, I'm looking at the analytics, and hey, this worked really well, we're going to double down on this, this type of content did not convert for our business, I'm not going to spend any more time or effort here. It's a continual tweaking, adjusting, analyzing, and optimizing what you're doing to increase how far it goes and ultimately acquire new customers. Otherwise, the algorithm and the culture and the trends are just going to leave you behind. There's a lot of different variables to consider, and most brands need all three. But you can't just throw it out there for three weeks and say, oh, that didn't work. It's a practice, there's repetition involved, you need data, and you need to be able to adjust and not hold anything too precious.

So today we covered three different types of content, three different types of videos brands need to think about when building and developing their online presence. And if you've done your posting-versus-marketing audit and you realize you probably need to focus on one of these, or all of them, think about your goals — do you need more traffic, do you need more conversions, do you need more sales? And that's something we can help you with too — this is what we do for our clients, thinking through those three categories in synchrony, but also individually, for what will best serve their viewers, their audience. Sometimes having an outside perspective can really help you understand what's working and what's not.

As we wrap up this episode, if there's anything that really stood out to you, that really resonated with you and helped you understand how to move forward with marketing for your brand, would you let us know? Leave a review, send us an email, give us that feedback so we can know what's serving you best — it helps guide our decisions for content moving forward that will best serve you as our listeners. Thanks so much for listening to the Known For podcast, and we'll see you next time.

Known For is a Griffith Media podcast recorded on the volume wall at Big Screen Studios in Dallas, Texas. This episode was produced by the Griffith Media team. Find out more about our agency, how we can help your business grow through marketing, video and design at www.griffith.media. Or find out more about the studio at bigscreentx.com.