Building emotional connections with your audience through video marketing
Written by Sam L Bowman | 28th July 2023
Video marketing has become a vital tool for businesses seeking to build meaningful connections with their audiences. In fact viewers are twice as likely to share a video with their friends compared to any other type of digital content. (1) Video enables us to utilize storytelling techniques in an engaging manner. Paired with strategic approaches, brands can use this to foster authentic relationships, shape brand perceptions, and prompt empowering actions.
In this article, we explore how you can leverage video marketing to create emotional connections with your audience and drive long-term loyalty.
In this article, we explore how you can leverage video marketing to create emotional connections with your audience and drive long-term loyalty.
The effect of video
Video seems to be more popular than ever, but why is this form of content so captivating? This can be explained when looking at a combination of factors:
- Authentic storytelling: Sharing real experiences and emotions is one of the best ways to create emotional connections with your audience. And video content provides you with an easy tool to do so. Videos make it possible to immerse your audience in a story, real or fictional, which creates a sense of empathy that resonates with the viewer and helps them retain given information longer in the brain. (2)
- Visual and auditory stimulation: Video content captivates our attention by engaging multiple senses simultaneously, resulting in a stronger emotional impact and higher levels of information retention. (3) In fact, 96% of marketers report that using video content helped them increase user understanding of their products or services. (4)
- Human connection: There is nothing more effective than human interaction when it comes to building an emotional connection with your audience. Videos featuring real humans increase trust in the viewer as they are able to connect to the characters on a personal level.
- Emotional cues: Videos can help guide your audience’s emotions through utilizing emotional cues. You can change the atmosphere and emotional reaction to your video by adapting the music, lighting, camera angles or editing techniques.
To build emotional connections with your audience, it’s important to focus on creating genuine, relatable, and meaningful content. Understanding your audience’s emotions and aspirations will help you tailor your videos to elicit the desired emotional response and establish a lasting connection.
There are three main ways video can help to foster emotional connections with your audience. Let’s dive in:
There are three main ways video can help to foster emotional connections with your audience. Let’s dive in:
Impacting Psychological Experiences
An increasing number of people are experiencing headline anxiety. The near-constant access to negative news stories on social media, clickbait headlines, and other content we are exposed to can trigger high levels of uncertainty and fear. Who among us isn’t familiar with the feeling of scrolling through a seemingly relentless stream of negative posts? One of the ways your brand can build positive emotional connections with consumers is by using video marketing to disrupt the dreaded doom scroll. Of course, this will not change anybody’s social media algorithm to display more positive content, but it will provide a respite from the droll and oftentimes negative content that most are faced with using social media on a daily basis.
Some of the ways you can offer a more positive psychological and emotional experience in your video marketing can include:
Some of the ways you can offer a more positive psychological and emotional experience in your video marketing can include:
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Inspirational and Motivational Videos:
Be a positive force in your consumers’ lives. You can do this by making video content that encourages and inspires your viewers with uplifting narratives. Share stories of resilience, success, personal growth, and overcoming challenges. You can get your staff, company leaders, or consumers involved with this. By providing a fresh perspective, you can redirect your audience’s attention toward ideas that raise their spirits rather than contribute to their worries. - Educational and Informative Videos: Share a little of your expertise to help your audience grow. You can make tutorials in engaging and easily digestible formats. This is a way to add extra value to your audience’s lives, rather than being another online element that triggers their anxiety. Practical tips may also help them feel they have greater control in a landscape in which it’s really easy to feel powerless. Also, many people love to do deep dives on complex educational topics as an enriching distraction.
Affecting audience perceptions
How your audience perceives your brand is important, and video marketing can play a large role by building an emotional connection to your brand. Proactively and regularly engaging in reputation management strategies helps to influence the public image of your brand in positive ways. This involves looking closely at what the public is saying about your company in reviews and social media posts. However, you may find it more effective to maintain good public perceptions by creating meaningful emotional connections with your video marketing.
Some solid ways to achieve this include:
- Behind-the-scenes and employee spotlights: Telling behind-the-scenes stories on video can be a great way to humanize your brand. Introduce the key contributors to your business, from executives to entry-level employees. Have them tell the story of their journey with your company and what they believe is meaningful about what they do. This human touch brings authenticity and transparency to your brand. It can also boost the sense of authority by introducing the source of expertise behind your explainer videos.
- Cause-related videos: Aligning your brand with social causes and values and creating emotional connections through video marketing can go a long way. You can boost this by making cause-related videos that showcase your company’s commitment to making a positive impact on society. Tell visual stories about why specific values are important to your business. Showcase charitable events and day-to-day activities that your company engages in. By highlighting your brand’s authentic efforts, your videos can show your company has a real sense of purpose and empathy.
Prompting empowering actions
Visual storytelling is one of your most powerful emotional tools — and while static pictures are great, there’s nothing like video to really elicit an emotional response. This isn’t just about the way narratives evoke strong feelings, though. When your video marketing makes a clear and positive emotional connection, it can also be a catalyst for action from your consumers. This means you can leverage visual storytelling techniques that empower your viewers to move beyond their passive engagement and instead start having great interactions with your brand.
Some strategies for this can include:
Some strategies for this can include:
- Strategic Call-To-Action (CTA) placement: Ideally, you would place CTAs at key moments in your video to build a positive connection to your brand. For instance, you can ask your viewers to leave comments about their reactions or to share their experiences. In explainer videos, you can use CTAs that lead viewers to content that helps them learn more. This can evoke feelings of satisfaction from the added value you provide.
- User-Generated-Content Some of the most powerful and positive storytelling won’t come directly from your business. User-Generated-Content (UGC) in your video marketing can be an inclusive and quite meaningful way to prompt action. After all, UGC can be an effective form of social proof. This is because it gives others a glimpse into genuine consumer experiences. So, invite your customers to send you their videos. Perhaps insert these in your longer video content or post them on social media channels. As a result, your videos might promote feelings of trust in your audience. This can then encourage your viewers to take similar decisive actions as the satisfied customers they’ve just seen.
Conclusion
Your brand can create emotional and psychological audience connections by utilizing video marketing. This could be instrumental in helping your business go beyond purely transactional relationships with consumers, which can foster trust and encourage long-term loyalty. Wherever possible, provide positive narratives and valuable educational resources to uplift viewers. Find ways to strategically utilize behind-the-scenes peeks at your business, cause-related videos, and calls to action.
In addition to these strategies, it is crucial to take the time to actively listen to your customers. This is, after all, a key component of any meaningful empathetic relationship. By genuinely making efforts to understand what your customers care about and what their needs are, you can tailor your video marketing efforts accordingly. This can have a greater emotional, psychological, and practical impact on your consumers.
In addition to these strategies, it is crucial to take the time to actively listen to your customers. This is, after all, a key component of any meaningful empathetic relationship. By genuinely making efforts to understand what your customers care about and what their needs are, you can tailor your video marketing efforts accordingly. This can have a greater emotional, psychological, and practical impact on your consumers.
