Growing up, television ads were powerful sources of influence, raising me on images of my best and worst selves.

During the 30-seconds sprints that peppered my favorite TV shows, I got to watch my ideal self as I brushed with a particular toothpaste, ate certain organic fruit, or bought the latest gadget. In other moments within those same ad spots, I was shown just how sad my life must be without that toothpaste, fruit, or gadget. This formula of fast, catchy advertisement has been a video marketing strategy norm for decades—but with the recent advent of digital media, the practice’s effectiveness has come somewhat into question. As consumers are given the tools to interact more immediately with an ever-growing number of brands, hyperbolic interrupt advertising has begun to seem more overtly obstructive and manipulative.

For many marketers and brands, this meant moving toward new digital advertising media. But for some, the internet provided an opportunity to speak about one’s brand story in new, authentic ways, inviting audiences in and (hopefully) retaining them longer.

It is from this school of marketing thought that we’ve seen a surge in a particular style of content: the documentary. Real stories about real people told in accessible ways. But is this just a passé tactic, a momentary trick that will fade as marketing technology and practices march on? Or is it possible that brands now hold a unique position to tell particular stories that haven’t been told before?

How Documentaries Killed the Short-Form Strategy

All discussion of tone or authenticity aside, one of the initial obstacles for advertisers looking to use docu-style narratives was the inherently short form of ads. While fully produced documentaries can range all over from a few minutes to feature length, there wasn’t really an established formula that could allow for an intimate human story to develop in 30–40 seconds.

The result was that as consumers began to demand more authenticity and transparency from brands, traditional short forms weren’t going to be able to keep up. Some brands have attempted to smash these sorts of stories into 30- to 60-second windows in an effort to create easily shared native advertising content. But even in the most successful among these ads—Misty Copeland’s spot with Under Armour, for example—the audience is only given the impression of a story without getting to fully experience it.

There are obvious reasons that brands might not have immediately made the jump to longer-form docu-narratives. Productions are longer and more costly, longer videos tend to have greater viewer dropoff, and, even with great source material, the skill to tell the story of someone’s life or an important event can be extremely difficult—as displayed by the relative stumblings of Misty’s feature length debut. But today, with a little creativity, it’s possible to beat those issues to produce powerful visual stories that connect with your audience. So how can you take advantage of this form in your video marketing strategy?

Understand Your Medium—Then Break It

Guinness took an excellent approach to the documentary marketing challenge back in 2014 with the release of “Sapeurs“—part of the brand’s Made of More campaign. Instead of launching a full-length documentary, they split the native advertising campaign into two parts—a 90-second spot that could be used in a wide variety of digital ad spaces or easily shared (or select costly television spaces), and then a longer seven minute piece entitled “The Men Inside the Suits,” which went into more documentary depth about each of the characters depicted in the short.

By breaking the video medium in two, Guinness was able to tell a single story in a way that broadened the number of possible spaces it could speak. In addition, the brand created a way to measure its audience’s interest in the story: interaction on the shorter piece provided a vehicle for spreading visibility and gauging initial interest, while the longer piece provided additional value, continued the story, and gave the brand a way to measure how much of its audience wanted to continue to engage with the story after the shorter spot.

Collections of shorter character profiles, long-form articles that follow up shorter videos, collections of interviews or podcast series—all these techniques can enable your brand to balance cost and format in a way that best suits its story and budget. The key is to find ways to create multiple pieces of content around a single story—each of which should contribute their own value to the audience (i.e. don’t regurgitate the same material into different formats) and give your brand a way to nurture people through a funnel of engagement with its story.

Every brand has a story to tell. But where many brands search for this story through expensive ad agencies, elaborate campaigns, or appeals to contrived ideals, documentary content encourages brands to return to their simplest foundations. Authenticity isn’t an ingredient or metric that can be slapped onto a project, but it presents easily when the people and history behind your brand are brought into focus.

A video of a team of New Zealand cops busting out a rhythm in an elevator is gaining attention online.

The video, posted on the NZ Police Recruitment Facebook page with the hashtag #ElevatorCops, shows police officers entering an elevator and starting a beat by banging on the walls. As more officers enter, they join in, adding to the music.

Police senior social media adviser Simon Flanagan said the video was part of a campaign they were doing called Beyond the Blue, which aimed to show diversity and different interests police had.

« We didn’t actually do it in a police station, it was shot in an unused elevator in a hospital in Auckland, » Flanagan said.

He estimated the video took 1-2 hours to shoot.

So far the video on Facebook has received at least 1500 likes and more than 300 shares.

« One of our core values is obviously valuing diversity. It’s just really to show people that underneath the uniform we’re human and just as diverse as anyone else, » Flanagan said.

Everyone involved in making the video was « really enthusiastic ». Flanagan said it brought together frontline staff and those who did more behind the scenes work.

NZ Police went viral earlier this year with the Running Man dance video, which received more than 9.5 million views.

Secure messaging app Telegram is about to get a lot more fun, with the addition of a bot-powered Gaming Platform.

« That’s right: you can now use bots to play games in your chats, complete with graphics and sound, » the Telegram team wrote in a Monday blog post. At launch, about 30 HTML5 games are ready to be played on Telegram, most of them published by developer Gamee, including arcade titles Mr. Muscle and Karate Kido and sports and racing titles Football Star and Kung Fu Inc.

One of the best parts — this new Gaming Platform doesn’t require any disk space, and won’t add a single byte to the size of the Telegram app since the underlying technology is HTML5 and games are loaded on-demand as needed, just like webpages.

To start a game, just interact with the @gamee bot directly, or invoke it from any of your chats by typing « @gamee » in a group. Then, choose a game and start playing with your friends. When you spot a good game, you can challenge your friends by simply sharing it with them.

You can find other games by typing « @gamebot » in any chat, including the self-explanatory Math Battle and retro pirate title Corsairs.

« The best part of the Telegram Gaming Platform is the competition across all your existing chats, » the team wrote. « We save high scores for every game played in every chat, and you can instantly check out how you and your friends are doing against each other. » When there’s a new leader on the scoreboard, all players will be notified that they need to elevate their game.

Telegram promised « hundreds » of HTML5-based games in the future, and said building them is easy for developers with this API. Math Battle, for instance, took the company’s developer just three hours to build while Corsairs was up and running within five hours, including sound, graphics, and animations.

« Telegram games can be anything from simple arcades and puzzles to multiplayer 3D-shooters and real-time strategy games, » the team wrote.

Note that games will work on iPhones 4 and newer and Android 4.4 devices and newer. You’ll need Telegram 3.13 or higher to play.

Over the past five years, the pressure to use videos as part of your small business marketing efforts has grown exponentially.

As a small business owner however, you’re constantly bombarded with “things you should be doing” and the “next best thing.” To many, video falls into the same categories.

Happily, the usefulness of video marketing has been proven many times over by compelling statistics like the ones below.

Take some time to look them through and you’ll be hitting the record button faster than you can say, “Money.”

Video Consumption is Up and Heading Higher

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, by 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic.

This data was backed up during a 2015 Q3 call, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network was generating 8 billion video views daily, and while Snapchat had 15 times fewer users, it generated almost as many video views at 7+ billion.

People Often Prefer Video

Many people just like video more than text. In fact, 59 percent of executives would rather watch video than read text while four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product then read about it.

Seventy-four percent of millennials find video helpful when comparison-shopping while 60 percent prefer to watch a video to reading a newsletter.

Video Marketing is Super Effective

Video can increase your leads and sales and boost your bottom line:

Video Increases Your Marketing Reach and Duration

If you want to stay top of mind, you’ll be glad to know that 80 percent of users recall a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days.

Videos turn watchers into advocates as 92 percent of mobile video consumers share videos with others while social video generates 1200 percent more shares than text and images combined.

You’ll also get more visitors on your website using video because companies using video enjoy 41 percent more web traffic from search than non-users and video drives a whopping 157 percent increase in organic traffic from search engines.

Video Drives More Leads

If you’re looking for customers to take action, then consider adding video to your emails for a 200-300 percent increase in click-through rate. Another tactic: combining video with full-page ads boosts engagement by 22 percent.

Sell real estate? Then you’ll want to know: listings that include a video receive 403 percent more inquiries than those without.

Fifty percent of executives look for more information after seeing a product or service in a video. In fact, 65 percent of them visit the marketer’s website and 39 percent call a vendor after viewing a video.

Video Drives More Sales

According to 70 percent of marketers, video produces more conversions than any other type of content. This pays off nicely for ecommerce sellers who have found that using product videos can increase product purchases on an online store by 144 percent

Even if you don’t have an online store, including video on a landing page can increase conversion by 80 percent and after watching video, 64 percent of users are likely to buy a product online.

Video is effective on both desktop and mobile devices: the average conversion rate for websites using video is 4.8 percent compared to 2.9 percent for those that do not use video while 40 percent of customers state that video increases the chance that they’ll purchase a product on their mobile device.

Simply put, videos drive sales: 74 percent of users who watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service subsequently bought it and 77 percent of consumers say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video.

Finally, 90 percent of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision making process and that’s a good thing.

Video Contributes to the Bottom Line

The biggest advocates for video marketing seem to be the businesses and marketers who use the approach. In fact, 76.5 percent of marketers and SMB owners that have used video marketing said that it had a direct impact on their business.

And finally, a doozy of a statistic: businesses using video grow company revenue 49 percent faster year-over-year than organizations without video.

Ready, Set, Action!

With these video marketing statistics in mind, you may want to make the studio your next stop. Go ahead, all the benefits of video marketing await.

Record Button Photo via Shutterstock

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