Short video content as an advanced marketing tool

If you look at the feed of almost any social network today, the first thing you will see is a huge number of short videos. This can be humor, educational content, advertising, some moments from life and much more. This is what really attracts the attention of the audience today and holds it for a fairly long period of time. This aspect is very important today, when the attention of the user audience has become a truly scarce resource.

Statistics show that a modern person who lives an extremely active rhythm of life simply does not have enough time to watch long content. But short videos, lasting a few seconds, are great for the audience and captivate them. It is not for nothing that leading social networks have begun to actively use this format in practice, providing brands and bloggers with a lot of opportunities for experimentation and unusual, creative interaction with the audience.

The era of short videos began in 2013 with the Vine platform. Although it did not last long, only until 2017, it showed the market all the promise and usefulness of short 6-second videos, which literally became viral in a matter of minutes after their appearance. The accelerated development of this format was also given by the immediate simplicity of their creation. To get such content, you do not need to have expensive equipment, learn the basics of editing: videos are literally shot from a smartphone and immediately uploaded to the network. But time restrictions are a challenge for authors, an opportunity to show their creativity in a limited period of time.

Very quickly, other social networks and platforms appreciated the promise of this format. For example, in 2013, Instagram began using 15-second video stories, and Facebook launched automatic playback of videos in the user feed. Currently, short video content has become one of the key tools in marketing. Leading platforms are actively developing and promoting this format, providing themselves with large-scale coverage and excellent results in practice.

In today's review, we will reveal the secret of the success of short videos, we will tell you how they managed to win the universal attention of the user audience. We will give a number of points that will make marketers think about the need to implement this format in their work strategies. We will get acquainted with the main platforms where short videos give the best results in practice. We will give a number of ideas for preparing such video content and tell you how to get a truly successful video at the end. The information provided will help you assess the prospects of this solution and effectively use it in your own practice. So, first things first.

What is the reason for the increased popularity of short videos?

Some of the latest studies show that about half of all Internet users regularly watch short videos, preferring the vertical format that is already typical today. This is largely due to the fact that about 95% of people watch media through their smartphones. Thanks to the increase in Internet speed, short videos are loaded as quickly as possible, allowing users to receive and study information literally in real time.

Here are some other statistics that will help you see the promise of short videos as such:

• over 80% of all Internet traffic is video content;
• the number of registered users in the TikTok social network has now exceeded 2 billion, over 50% of whom are highly active and consume about 200 million hours of content daily;
• about 75% of Instagram's two billion user audience is are Reels fans, with short videos accounting for 17.6 million hours of daily viewing;
• Instagram and Facebook users play over 140 billion Reels daily;
• TikTok is projected to reach 2.3 billion people by 2027, indicating steady and gradual growth in viewership.

We have provided these statistics so that you can see the prospects of using short videos for marketing purposes, to make sure that this format is in high demand among people today and this trend is not planning to decline in the foreseeable future.

The Impact of Short Content on User Behavior

Currently, short videos have become not only one of the main formats for audience content consumption, but have also significantly influenced people's habits. And here it is worth highlighting a number of key points:

1. Decreased attention span. The modern audience is used to consuming content as quickly as possible, without complex insights. The average duration of a short video today is 8 seconds. But here it is very important to catch people's attention literally from the first second. Long videos, which require the audience not only to watch, but also to comprehend what they saw, are becoming less and less relevant.
2. Decisions on the advisability of a purchase are made after watching short content. More than half of the audience understands in just a few seconds that they need this product. Such videos work better than classic advertising.
3. Most video content is consumed vertically. People watch it from their smartphones literally on the go, in public transport, during lunch breaks, before bed, including without sound. Therefore, you need to adapt your materials for such playback, making them available to the widest possible audience.
4. Building an emotional connection with the brand. Relatively short videos evoke faster emotions compared to the same photo or text content, help build trust, and also stimulate impulsive purchases.
5. Changing the way people shop as such. Now, the audience does not necessarily have to go to the store to get acquainted with certain products, because such a short video can provide important and detailed information about the products. And all this without the intrusiveness that would be typical of classic advertising.
6. Maximum simplicity, which inspires more trust from the audience. Today, people have stopped responding to perfectly constructed staged scenes. They are more interested in authenticity, naturalness, and naturalness. And this is what short videos are able to convey perfectly.

As you can see, the preferences and interests of the user audience have recently undergone a number of certain changes. This means that any business representative who would like to provide their company with stable and effective promotion, as well as the marketers working for them, must take into account current trends and follow them when developing their own strategies.

Reasons why marketers rely on short videos

If you analyze the history of the last few years, you can see that short videos have become a truly revolutionary breakthrough in lead generation. With their help and with the right organization, a business will be able to actively attract the target audience to its business and there are several good reasons for this:

• Short videos are the highest return on investment. Such forms of attraction as likes, reposts, and final sales were assessed here.
• This format is extremely easy and quick to adapt to absolutely any market niche and the products and audience presented in it. You can easily and quickly add subtitles, viral sounds or local effects here, increasing the individuality and uniqueness of the content.
• The time, effort, and money spent on preparing and launching short videos will be minimal in comparison with classic commercials. Also, you will not need expensive equipment or machinery. All work can be done through a personal smartphone. The editing itself is also performed through the built-in editors of social networks.
• The ability to attract an audience to create content for you. Modern users are quite active in various interactive activities, unpacking products, writing short reviews, and also noting the brand itself in their materials.
• Maximum precise targeting of the audience. Here you can easily use targeting, personalization, and many other tools that are typical for promoting products on social networks.
• Direct and prompt interaction with the target audience. People will leave comments under your publications, likes, and various other marks. This is what will allow you to look at your business from the outside, assess strengths and weaknesses, learn how to respond to certain situations as quickly as possible, and even smooth out the negative if such a problem arises.
• Ensuring the widest possible coverage of various demographic and age groups, the ability to easily select appropriate video content for the specific audience. That is, you can promote the same product with different narratives, reaching the widest possible audience.
• Practice has shown that short videos significantly increase brand visibility. The fact is that both social networks and search engines, such as Google, rank video content higher in search results, and the same Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok are integrated directly into search algorithms, which contributes to a noticeable increase in organic traffic.

Now that you know what benefits short videos provide for business promotion, it's time to get to know this strategy in more detail and learn how to launch it as part of your own campaign.

The best platforms for promoting short videos

The success of promotion, including with the help of short videos, directly depends on how correctly you choose the appropriate platform. In this case, it is very important to understand which of the social networks attracts more attention from your target audience, how, in principle, the audience's attention is distributed within these platforms. If we analyze the latest research, we can identify 6 platforms where the user audience is most widely represented:

1. VK Video.
2. TikTok.
3. Telegram.
4. Instagram
5. Zen Platform.
6. YouTube Shorts.

Now we will consider each of these options in as much detail as possible so that you can assess the prospects of using this or that option directly in your practice.

VK Video

One of the most popular social networks today, where short videos directly occupy leading positions in views - VKontakte. In particular, here we are talking about such a platform as VK Clips. Every day it becomes an increasingly powerful and advanced tool in the hands of modern brands, attracting more and more target audience.

This was largely due to the fact that VK Clips has a separate application specifically for smartphones. There are many opportunities for organic traffic growth, including through the involvement of well-known opinion leaders who have exclusive content that is interesting to the viewer. This is what allows you to maintain audience engagement and interest at a high level over a long period of time.

Against the background of other analogues, VK Clips allows you to embed links directly into advertising videos. This option is not provided on many other platforms today. This can be implemented if you upload the video not as a regular clip, but do it through the advertising tools of the VKontakte social network. Thanks to this, your short video will have a clickable link to the official website of your business, a page on a social network, a landing page. Thanks to such features, this platform has become really popular among modern managers, webmasters who want to provide stable traffic to their resources directly from videos.

TikTok

TikTok is one of the youngest social networks, but this did not prevent it from making worthy competition to more famous and “old” market leaders. Short videos are also in very high demand here, although the Russian audience still periodically encounters problems when downloading new content or when gaining access to it. A number of its functions are still at the testing stage today, that is, they are not available to everyone. But many experts agree that such a problem will be eliminated in the foreseeable future.

But already today, despite such problems, TikTok enjoys a consistently high demand among the audience. People actively watch videos here, and business representatives use the platform's capabilities to launch viral content. Such success is largely due to the platform's special algorithm, which allows even new videos that have just appeared on the platform to get into recommendations.

That is, bloggers and brands can reach their target audience as quickly as possible. This option also does not work very well in practice yet, but technical difficulties are planned to be eliminated in the foreseeable future. But even without this, the TikTok audience actively interacts with other publications, including those that have been posted on the platform for quite a long time.

Telegram

Telegram — This is a rather interesting and unique messenger, the capabilities of which have long since gone far beyond the scope of ordinary message forwarding. This is precisely what largely ensures the extremely wide demand and popularity of the platform. Thus, according to statistics, about 52% of all social network users watch short videos here.

One of the features of Telegram is the ability to record so-called "circles". These are short videos that are perceived by the audience as native content. They will be automatically downloaded to user devices. Practice shows that such material is perceived quite positively by users. It is quite easy to fit it into the overall contact strategy of your brand.

But here it is important to understand that today this messenger has a number of limitations, which must be taken into account in practice. As an option, there is no search or convenient grid for videos like on other platforms, which in itself will become an additional difficulty in promotion. It is also important to understand that if the videos are large, users may refuse to download them, which will immediately reduce the viewing figures. In addition, you will not be able to embed clickable links here. This will have to be done in the text itself under such a "circle", which in itself reduces the possibilities for launching direct traffic from the video. That is, here the user will have to watch the video and read the text placed under it, and then follow the link in it.

Instagram

Despite the presence of quite serious restrictions on the use of this platform, it still remains extremely popular and in demand among the audience, as well as among various business representatives. Even the need to use additional tools to bypass blocking does not stop users from viewing their favorite content. Yes, the audience here has decreased somewhat, but there are still a huge number of active fans.

So-called reels are used here as one of the rather powerful promotion tools. Many business representatives use them as additional tools for promotion, noting the fairly good efficiency of such short videos. They provide mass coverage, especially in those niches where other platforms show weak results.

Zen platform

After the Zen platform left the Yandex system and was successfully integrated into the VKontakte environment, many business representatives began to use it to post short videos. As surprising as it may sound, but here the materials gain significantly more views than on other platforms. Many experts agree that this is due to the very specificity of the Zen audience. These are people who are used to consuming fairly voluminous longreads, texts. And all this systematically also applies to the video format of publications.

Business representatives chose this platform for themselves also because the videos are well ranked by search engines, while providing fairly good organic coverage and targeted traffic. But still, in comparison with large videos, short videos give the best results in terms of engagement. Let us repeat that this way it is much easier for the audience to understand the essence of the material, minimize the time and effort to get acquainted with the content, and make the decision about the purchase as quickly as possible.

YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts can rightfully be called analogs of TikTok, Instagram Reels, but only based on the YouTube video hosting. Despite the fact that today there is no full-fledged monetization, this content format still continues to attract a huge number of users. The business is betting on the large audience of the video hosting, as well as on the sufficient simplicity of creating and promoting short videos.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that here it will also be impossible to embed clickable links directly into the videos themselves, but the description to them is quite suitable for these purposes. Initially, links could be embedded in videos here, but relatively recently YouTube disabled this option. Among other things, this also reduced the possibilities for direct transition to other pages. This, of course, will limit part of the targeted traffic, but still the audience reach is quite impressive. But here you will have the opportunity to attract people's attention to your pages or products using other elements of this platform.

Features of ranking short videos

Modern social network algorithms work quite simply. They perceive new content depending on whether the previous publication received the required minimum views. That is, if your publications give an average of 5,000 views, and then you launch one disastrous video that is viewed by 100 people, then your subsequent videos may not come close to the early average statistical data.

This means that you will have to put a lot of effort into constantly launching high-quality content, the kind that will generate a lot of positive feedback from the audience. That is, you clearly cannot relax here if you want to constantly hold the attention of potential customers. At the same time, you do not necessarily have to publish several videos every day. Statistics show that the best results are achieved by posting 2-3 publications per week. The main thing is that they are of high quality, and the process itself is regular.

Interesting ideas for short marketing videos

Despite all the prospects that short videos open up for business, not everyone uses them in practice. Statistics show that about 35% of marketers ignore this opportunity, because they believe that it requires a lot of time to implement, and another 15% simply do not know where to start working in this direction. But this is nothing more than a misconception, since short videos are quite easy to both create and post, and social networks will take on all the rest of the work. They will promote your content themselves.

But still, you can’t do without an original idea. If you are just starting your work in this direction, then you can take the following points into account:

• Popular sounds today, challenges. Regardless of the time when you are working, there will definitely be melodies that arouse increased interest among the audience literally here and now. These are the ones that should be used as a basis for future videos. As for challenges, the essence here is the same: you just need to adapt these trends to the specifics of your business.
• Unpacking products. This trend is far from new on the market, but, nevertheless, it is still in high demand among the audience. Only here it is important for you to transform this process a little, turning it into an original acquaintance with your products. This is your opportunity to demonstrate them to potential buyers in the most effective way, to emphasize those moments that you consider most important, presentable, capable of influencing the audience.
• Before/After. Also not new, but at the same time an extremely popular format among the audience, which can be safely used in advertising cosmetics, various services, household chemicals and more. Here you simply demonstrate to people how much your product can improve their experience, solve an existing problem.
• Life hacks, tips. Here you can also reproduce a situation in which your product will be indispensable, useful. Also here you can provide a number of practical tips, tricks for using the product, show its hidden feature.
• Demonstration of the backstage of business. This is what attracts the attention of a huge number of users. People are really interested in seeing how their favorite company works, how its employees live outside of workdays. Alternatively, by demonstrating the product packaging before sending it, you can show people how meticulous you are about this work and want the customer to receive the parcel without any damage.
• Myths and reality. Regardless of the market niche you work in, you can always find opinions that are far from the truth. And here in short videos you can debunk these myths, thereby demonstrating your expertise, convincing the audience of the erroneousness of many statements. For example, there is an opinion that light-colored clothes make you look fat. And if you sell clothes, then you have the opportunity to debunk this myth. Make a short video with a curvy lady dressing her in an elegant light-colored suit, thereby demonstrating how stylish and elegant an image you managed to create, emphasize the attractiveness of her forms and hide certain figure flaws.
• Videos with your reactions to user reviews. Here you can record a short video of gratitude for the feedback from the audience, for their responsible approach. If the review was negative, then show that you want to solve this problem. You can compare your products with similar ones, unobtrusively highlight the advantage. But the main thing here is do not denigrate competitors.
• Implemented cases. In such videos, you can show what pains and problems of the audience you managed to solve with the help of your product. If this is a service, then show how extraordinary a project you managed to implement thanks to your own ingenuity, as well as a sincere desire to perfectly fulfill the client's order.
• Humorous videos. This is something that is guaranteed to be appreciated by the mass audience. People always react positively to such content. To enhance the effect, you can use today's relevant memes and trends. Show funny and unusual situations from the everyday life of your business. There are a lot of options here, and you will definitely find something that will interest your target audience.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that the formats presented above give excellent results when publishing on TikTok, VK Video, Instagram Reels, Telegram, YouTube Shorts, etc. Do not miss such opportunities, as statistics show that short videos on average receive 1200% more shares than traditional text or even photo content. The variety of formats will allow you to experiment as much as you want, make your feed as bright and diverse as possible, and help you get away from monotony and boredom.

Additional recommendations for preparing short videos

Despite all its simplicity, preparing short video content can still cause a number of difficulties, especially for novice managers, those who have not yet found the ideal balance between quality, usefulness, interest, and time costs. And here the following tips will show significant help:

1. Think through the plot of your future video down to the smallest detail. It is important to make it so that it captures the attention of a potential buyer literally from the first second. That is, do not make long speeches, but immediately get down to business. If you manage to capture the attention of the audience, then you will be able to hold it until the end. Focus on a bright frame, a key phrase, do not forget about a light intrigue.
2. Create such videos that will look as natural as possible. Move away from staged shots. All this does not work today. You must be as sincere and open to the audience as possible. This is what will provide you with more attention, increase engagement, will contribute to the fact that people will independently and quite sincerely want to share your content with their friends. That is, at the end, you should get content that will look user-generated.
3. Do not overdo it with creativity. Your video should be simple and understandable, easy to perceive. That is, the audience should not get the impression that you are making something up or hiding something. There should be no room for guesswork, no need for people to draw their own conclusions. That is, everything here should be as simple and clear as possible.
4. The shooting should be done with good lighting. This can be done even if you are working within a limited budget, with a small team. With good lighting, you can improve the overall quality of your video even when using an ordinary smartphone.
5. If we are talking about a short video, it really should be short. Its optimal duration is 15 seconds, maximum 30, but no more. Otherwise, it will be a completely different content format, completely different requirements will be imposed on it, and its specifics will be different. But at the same time, every second should be distinguished by good dynamism. This is the key to high efficiency.
6. Be sure to add subtitles to the video. We have already mentioned today that the audience very often watches such videos in public places, transport, and it is not always possible to turn on the sound. And if you add subtitles here, you will convey your idea to the audience even without sound. Statistics show that such a solution increases the percentage of views, increases user satisfaction, and improves engagement.
7. You should not disclose all the information at once. It is important for you to initially interest people, to make them want to watch your material to the end. Moreover, you can create intrigue in one publication and make a lead-in to the next one, thereby launching a series of videos, the release of which your subscribers will eagerly await.
8. No need to complicate ideas. Let us repeat that your creatives should be as simple to perceive as possible and captivate literally from the first seconds. It is optimal to initially test your strategy on small groups, and then launch larger projects, minimizing certain errors.
9. If possible, use a team of specialists. It is clear that professional filming will always be better than amateur, but do not forget to make it look as natural as possible. If there is no financial opportunity, then pay maximum attention to sound and lighting.

Use these recommendations, and you will be able to create a short video yourself, which will become an excellent unobtrusive advertisement of your product, services and will cause a positive reaction from the target audience.

Let's sum it up

Short videos are a truly advanced modern tool for interacting with the target audience, increasing conversion rates, coverage. Thousands of successfully implemented cases show how effective they can be in practice if implemented correctly. They will provide significant assistance not only in B2C, but also in a more specific B2B business. Just follow the recommendations we have given above, choose the most suitable promotion channel for yourself, test the initial version on a small audience before mass launching it on the market.

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