4 Ways to Grab Attention with Social Video
Social media is an extremely saturated space which makes it difficult for a marketer to grab people’s most valuable commodity: their attention. Here is our (not so) secret recipe that we use as a starting point for all of our video concepts. For real-world context, I’ll be referring to a recent social video ad campaign that we produced for dog food brand Pets Love Fresh.
Surprising 🎉
People stop scrolling when they are surprised by what’s in front of their eyes. It could be Donald Trump asking people to inject disinfectant into their bodies or simply a monkey riding a deer. The key here is creating visuals that people have never seen before. When ideating for Pets Love Fresh, we asked “have you ever seen your dog swiping through Tinder?”.
Emotional 😏
We are very social creatures which gives us a very keen eye for recognising strong emotions such as anger, love, fear, happiness etc. We focused on showing a loving relationship between a mother and her dog - brownie points if you notice the heart sticker on the MacBook (also part of the Pets Love Fresh logo).
Personal 👤
Social platforms do a fairly good job at targeting ads based on your personal interests. Coca Cola nailed personalisation when they put people’s names on bottles. You can easily apply this to your videos too, when casting for Pets Love Fresh we simply matched the actress as closely as possible to the brand’s target market.
Primal 🕷️
The human brain is designed to notice evolutionary things such as faces, sex, food, spiders, babies and dogs. Lucky for us, we were making a dog related advert but these are often simple visuals that you can use eg. emojis.
If you can tick off all or as a many of these items as possible with your video marketing campaign then there’s a good chance that you’ll get some eyeballs. Of course if you can’t be bothered to do all of this yourself then you could just hire us to do it.
This blog was inspired by Turning Mind Into Money with Patrick Fagan on Cubaka’s ‘Winning Time’ Podcast (give it a listen is you want more in-depth). Check out this article too for more insight from Patrick Fagan on grabbing attention online.
