Video Is the Most Emotional Medium There Is
Meryl came into the Wistia office a few weeks back and made coffee, as she always does. Then she made a video.
The video is just Meryl, reciting a haiku about coffee and the universe. It’s kind of out there.
She made it because she thought it might make some teammates laugh and introduce Soapbox to some folks on Twitter. With the flexibility to create something bizarre, she went for it.
We find that it’s the offbeat stuff featuring real people that pulls in audiences the most — both internally on Slack, and in our external marketing. That’s because our brains are wired to create strong connections with the people featured in the videos we watch. Video stirs up emotions. Good video gets us to feel something.
Video is the most emotional medium through which businesses connect with customers. Every business should use video. If you aren’t, you’re underutilizing people and emotion in your business.
Products can be boring, but the people who work on them definitely aren’t
For a group of people who think about video all day, it sure took us a while to make a video featuring ourselves. Instead, the first hundred videos that we made for Wistia were formulaic product videos, featuring some very dry screencasts all about the product and how to use it. I thought these were great, and that this was exactly what you do when trying to grow a B2B SaaS company.
They all performed terribly.
For many years at Wistia, we were terrified of putting ourselves on camera at all. Making videos of ourselves felt like an enormous risk: Wistia was selling to serious businesses, so we thought we had to be serious as well. We kept telling ourselves that professional, serious people don’t goof off on camera and then share the results with their customers.
The first video we made that actually showed our faces wasn’t exactly “goofy.” In fact, it looks pretty tame to me now, though it does have some sweet 3D lettering.
It didn’t go viral, and it didn’t get a million views. But something else about it caught our attention: the video had a 78% engagement rate, which means that people on average watched it 78% of the way through. People were watching 78% of a video that just showed us working around the office. With our names swooping by in 3D over our heads.
The video that felt the most foreign to us — and the most risky and uncomfortable — performed way, way better than anything we had done before. It was also a lot more fun to make. And it was the first Wistia video that hinted at the full potential of what we could do with our own product.
I studied film in school, and yet, when I started Wistia, I tried to shut out glimmer of creativity from my video business. I had thought that just telling people we were good at video would work. It did not. That one video with the 3D letters and a 78% engagement rate set us on a path to showing people that we’re good at video.
And, nowadays, we get to be kind of weird with video too.
Give your people (and yourself) permission to be weird
The videos that we’re producing now can get pretty bizarre. That’s because some of our biggest creative risks have given us the greatest measurable results.
When launching Wistia for Chrome, we made a Facebook video of a bunch of us dressed in full monochrome spandex, performing an interpretive dance of the Chrome logo. It has almost 60k views.
That’s not an accident. When you’re sitting on Facebook, you’re not going to connect with a standard product announcement video that’s mostly screencasts. We know this. We’ve seen those videos flop. Whatever kind of product video we make, it’s competing against a million entertainment, news, and sports videos, plus all the videos your friends are putting up.
But when you see a group of weirdos dressed in spandex in your news feed — that’s going to grab your attention.
We didn’t get to videos like this overnight. It’s been a constant cycle of trying outrageous ideas, seeing how they do, and testing how far we can push ourselves on camera. What’s the simplest video we can make? What’s the strangest? What’s that one idea that came to us in the shower, that we’re almost embarrassed to pitch? Let’s try that.
Start with hello
You don’t have to start with the spandex. You just have to start with an introduction that says, hey, this is who we are, and this is what we do.
The most boring business in the world still has weird, fun, and interesting people behind it. Here are some tips to get you started putting them on camera:
- Keep it loose: Having a rough idea of what you’re going to say on camera is always a good idea, but writing out and memorizing a whole script will make you appear stiff. Keep it conversational and don’t worry about every little mistake. Mistakes only make you seem more authentic.
- Show faces: Our brains are hardwired to respond to faces. We’re highly attuned to them. Putting slides of your product in your video is great, but adding a human face will capture attention and help you connect with your viewers emotionally.
- Make video constantly: If you’re new to making video, or just shy on camera, it’ll take some time before you truly get comfortable with the process. The more comfortable you are, the easier it is for people to connect with your video.
- Give Soapbox a shot: This is a plug for our new product, but Soapbox is designed specifically to make it really easy to quickly make a video that looks good and allows you to feel a connection to the person who made it.
The people you work with are interesting and creative. They write haikus. They like to dance and come up with weird ideas. You’re lucky that you get to see them every day. Let the rest of us in on that.
