6 techniques to create more engaging Vine videos

Creative tips to plan Vine videos for marketing

If you’re a pro marketer, you must already know that the best advertisements are the shortest (usually 30 seconds long). For some reason, (and let’s not blame everything on technology yet) as time goes on and new generations are born, the attention spans seem to be reducing. So, if your customer loves smart phones, uses Netflix, and owns several different portable devices, his attention span may be shorter than you think.

Like any professional marketer, we could use these odd transformations in time to our advantage. How? Think: applications!

You’d want to market where the crowds are, and clearly that’s not the television anymore. Recently, many companies have been using Twitter’s video uploading application Vine to produce and share creative 6-second videos of their products. That’s right. You get only six seconds to make an impact. Used well, it could be the best shortest ad you’ve ever come up with – and it didn’t even take a full 30 seconds like they said it would!

In addition to Vine, there is Periscope as well which came out earlier on this year though in this post, I will be focusing on Vine.

A Couple of Tips and Tricks to create your own promotional video

1. Plan it out

Don’t just use the application for the heck of using it. Without proper planning and a sound idea in mind, you won’t come up with a compelling ad concept. It will just play out like any dud random video you can find on your phone. Avoid making duds! And to do that, you need to come up with sound concept before you start rolling the camera.

Here’s a great Vine micro-planning tool that you can watch to help you develop a clear purpose before you begin.

2. Giving a sneak peek

Sneak peeks are great ways to get your customers hooked. Again, save the best part for later. That’s the trick! This also works great with product launches or something “new” they haven’t seen yet.

RheinZhetung, a German newspaper company demonstrates the amount of planning, work, and effort put into a newspaper using Vine. It's received good engagement, shown by over 80,000 loops.

3. Introduce a new feature

Remember, you have only six-seconds. You can’t use them to demonstrate a complete new product in detail, but you might be able to demonstrate a new feature. This would work great with tech products.

eBay illustrates the new 'now' service and features a short 6-second video.

https://vine.co/v/hqxpgX9etWZ/embed/simple

Also check out Burberry’s new vibrant glasses Vine video.

https://vine.co/v/hB1BFW0LrAa/embed/simple

Burberry have been running strong video promotions across a range of campaigns, including London Fashion Week, gaining over 3,000 'Likes'. This high fashion brand also partners with well-known companies including Google, to send personalised messages. According to their Chief Creative Executive Christopher Bailey 'the experience is designed to give technology a bit of heart and soul.'

4. A Customer’s viewpoints

You can ask your customers to upload their own short clips of when and how they used your product. Not only will this engage your potential customers, but also let them know what experienced customer’s think about your company and products.

5. A Visual presentation of customization

You can present a visual video of how you developed a customized product. This could precede a testimonial or comment about the customer’s satisfaction with the product or maybe his own version of a short clip (like the fore-mentioned idea).

6. Backstage scenes

Another great way to promote your company is by allowing your audience to steal a quick glimpse of your company, backstage. You can show your customers the team or the office and what they do during their time. You could also show a short clip of an ongoing event at the workplace that they can attend or somehow relate to. Check out VW Sharkweek's video promotion on Vine.

Many manufacturing firms show short clips of their processes to let their customers know how it’s all done back at the factory. You won’t have enough time to show everything, but maybe the coolest processing steps in quick short video clips (like a summary) will do just fine!

3 Tips to improve your video

• 1. Educates: How-To’s and other methods that involve giving information are quite effective. Your video will have to be very quick and maybe running in fast forward to achieve this.
• 2. Entertains: Make sure your video is fun and quirky. Clearly, an ad has to be entertaining to be effective. A boring video won’t gain any followers, likes, shares, and other forms of online popularity. It will simply be a dud that no one cares about.
• 3. Promotes: Your video should be able to pick up leads. Don’t forget to include a link that leads to a landing page. If, for example, you are demonstrating a new product, the link should lead to the page where interested customers can buy that new product.