STEP ONE – Don’t try to make a viral video. That’s the first piece of feedback I got from Benton Crane, Co-Founder Managing Director of Harmone Brothers, a video marketing agency that’s doing things differently. You may not have heard of Harmone Brothers but you have most definitely seen their work. They are the genius behind Poo Pourri, Squatty Potty, and Purple. Their videos often garner upwards of 150M+ views, have provided one company a 13,000% increase in web traffic and have put new brands on the industry map in days. Crane, however, let’s clients know that Harmone is not in the business of creating viral videos and if anyone promises you that, you should be skeptical. « By nature virility is unpredictable. You may have captured lighting in a bottle, and that’s great, but it’s not formulaic, it’s not repeatable”.
The Harmone Brother’s were some of the early pioneers of YouTube marketing when they leveraged the platform for their company Orabrush back in 2009. ”Prior to them YouTube was limited to cat videos, no one had grown a business solely on YouTube but they did just that.” Says Crane.
Video consumption is growing by 100% every year, reports HubSpot and YouTube says its primetime audience is bigger then the top 10 TV shows combined. Additionally, from a customer adoption perspective, the HubSpot report shows that 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.
It’s become every entrepreneur’s dream to create that one video that drives awareness, conversions and growth. Here are a few takeaways from my chat with Benton that unwrap the mystery behind creating the ultimate video campaign.
Craft strong creative that’s ‘sharable’
Harmone is widely known for taking uncomfortable topics and making them comfortable by adding a dose of humour. Given that humour has played such a core role in several of their successes, I wanted to know, how important is humour to a campaigns success?
The answer, “Not necessary. Humour helps when you are trying to build a share-ability component” says Crane and shares are key for increased views and wide spread coverage.
Research by SocialBankers on Facebook ads shows that shares directly correlate with viral reach more than any other kind of interaction including likes and comments. “There are only a few things that are social acceptable to share” says Crane “inspiration can work too but by nature humour is more sharable than any other content type.” While humour is not a necessary predictor of success, for wide spread reach you should hone in on content that is easy and socially acceptable to share.