How do you make better social media videos?

A question that’s in the minds of every marketer on the planet, and in this month’s newsletter we’re going to give you everything you could ever need to know about creating bigger and better content.

Welcome to the fifth instalment of The Odyssey Newsletter - now let’s dive in.

Everything you need to know 🎥

Jack, our Founder, recently started creating YouTube videos, and his first video was all about creating better social media videos. So, feel free to give it a watch here if you haven’t already.

Working with over 300 businesses, and creating over 2,000 videos gives us a bit of an edge when it comes to creating videos for social media.

During a recent production with our new client, Selmach Machinery, we went all out to make some incredible evergreen content. Here’s a list of the 10 most important aspects to focus on if you want to create better videos:

1) Know your audience

The foundation of every great video. Knowing your audience is fundamental before you begin to script, film, and edit your work. We put extensive research into understanding a target market before we even begin the ideas of a project, and you should too.

2) Set clear objectives

Without objectives, you can’t gauge what success looks like. Likes, views, and comments are a tactic and not a goal. We tend to look to increase community growth, video retention, or increase website traffic as these are much more tangible results.

3) Invest in quality equipment

Whilst equipment isn’t important, creating your own style is. With any client, we pull out all of the stops and film with the latest and greatest cameras, lenses, and gadgets to develop an easily identifiable style that aligns with the style of any client.

4) Focus on your hook

Getting viewers to click and stay on your video means you need to create an incredible hook for your video. You can do that in two ways. The first is to ask a question, and the second is to engage through engaging visuals - which is exactly what we did with Selmach’s brand video (coming soon!).

5) Include a strong Call To Action

Calls To Action are vital if you want to have your viewers take action, otherwise, they endlessly scroll. The best CTA’s from our experience are at the start, or halfway through a video where engagement is high. Tell them what to do next when they’re engaged, and you’ll be getting better results in no time!

6) Improve your video retention

Video retention is a hugely important aspect of creating better social media videos. If people aren’t watching, all platforms class that video as ineffective, and they don’t promote it. So, tell stories that captivate your audience, get personal, and take your viewers on a journey.

7) Make it visually appealing

Video footage on its own simply isn’t enough anymore. The best practice to get into in 2024 is to include motion design, animation, sound design, and text to further engage your audience and keep their attention for longer.

8) Add personality

Most videos don’t work not because they’re bad videos, but because the host of the video isn’t engaging enough. You would have experienced this many times! So, focus on being personable, lighten up a little, and have fun with the experience of content creation.

9) Test different styles

Nobody has become successful from one video. But after months of testing different styles, you’ll better understand what works and what doesn’t. For any project, we always aim to create different styles of work that our clients can test the performance of, and we’d recommend making it standard practice for your video marketing.

10) Keep it simple

The biggest piece of advice we can give is to keep the process of making social media videos as simple as possible. Overcomplicating the process will only lead to your videos being confusing to consume and overwhelming for your viewers. Focus on planning, filming, and editing a great video - that’s it.

Lesson Learned: Creating high-quality videos that actually get results is seriously hard work, and there’s a lot more to know than just pressing the record button.

Odyssey: Month Five

It’s only getting busier and busier here at Odyssey - which isn’t a bad thing.

This month, we’ve created over 15+ new videos for lots of different B2B and B2C businesses, including Selmach, Medway Development, and Redbrick, to name a few.

We’re currently working our way through planning an advert for ourselves, and it’s going to look and feel like something else. Keep your eyes open for July/August!👀

Our editing team are all hands on deck working on back-to-back projects for a few of our subscription clients. Find more about The Odyssey Subscription here. We’re also in discussions with three potential clients looking to join in June!

You Ask, We Answer 🙋🏼‍♀️

Every month, we give you a breakdown of a handful of questions we’ve been sent over the month. Here are the top three questions and answers:

• Amelia Franches: “What do you use to caption your videos?”

  • A: We tend to do this manually, but if you’re looking for something that’s more ‘drag and drop’, we’d recommend looking at a company called Veed.io.

• Jack Nelson: “How many videos should I post every week?”

  • A: As many as possible without damaging the quality of your videos, or running the risk of overwhelming your audience. Once per day is often good for a B2B business, whereas D2C can get away with 3-4 posts per day for maximum reach.

• Marlowe Palmer: “How do I increase my company page followers?”

  • A: The question you need to ask is ‘Why do I want more followers’. Getting more followers is a tactic to achieve a bigger goal. But, it will grow if you create a space that adds huge amounts of value to the consumer.

If you would like to have your question answered, send your email alongside the title ‘My Question For Odyssey’ to [email protected] and we may include it in our next edition.

Start your video journey 🚀

If you want to improve your brand presence and generate impactful results from your marketing efforts, here’s how we can help:

1) Get 5 Custom Video Ideas for your business (as long as it has more than 11 employees) and Jack will send you a tailored list of ideas to skyrocket your social media presence.

2) Work with our creative team to plan, film, and edit fresh content for your marketing every month by joining up to The Odyssey Subscription.

Until then, we’ll see you in next month’s newsletter!