Online with Dock Line: The Power of Visual Storytelling and Video Content
Get ahead of the game with video marketing
Through our years of experience at The Dock Line, we’ve found the best way to grab someone’s attention online is through visual storytelling with professional video. The essence of marketing is to tell a story that is relatable to your audience, while providing a solution to the problem that is your product. The best way to tell a compelling story is through video, where the audience can be completely immersed and connect on an emotional level to your product.
As advertisements and access to information rises, most audiences are overloaded with content daily and have shorter attention spans. Studies show that we are more likely to watch video than read an article, and since our brains process visuals much faster, we retain 95% of a video message and 10% of text. As customers are coming to your website to learn more about you, they’ll be more likely to connect with your brand through a video, and are probably scanning through your content for a video.
Visual storytelling
Visual Storytelling is a marketing strategy that utilizes a narrative where your customer is the hero of the story. Your brand is the hero’s mentor, and what the hero needs to complete their mission successfully is your product. This kind of story can be long or short if the key points are highlighted. Visual storytelling is often most effective when using real stories from real people, like previous customers who enjoy your product. This develops trust and gives the customer something to relate to.
Another method that is often successful for video is simply recording yourself talking about your product. When customers see the “face” of the company, it breaks down walls and establishes trust and connection.
How to tell a visual story
So how do you go about telling a visual story for your company? This may seem like an overwhelming task if you’ve never thought about it before. But with a little brainstorming, you’ll find that you’ve had a story this whole time and didn’t know it!
Here are some questions to ask yourself about your company and services:
What kind of problems does your company solve?
Visual storytelling consists of a story that presents a problem and solution. For example, if you sell carpet cleaning products, you solve many problems, basic and complicated. The basic obviously being you help people clean stains off of carpet. But when you go deeper, you save people the cost of replacing carpets or having to move furniture to cover stains. It can also enable people to live the lives they want to with pets, kids and house parties.
What does your ideal customer look like?
This question will help you determine who the hero of your story is. For example, if you sell real-fruit daiquiris, your ideal customer won’t be the guy who drinks Bud Light while watching the game. Once you figure out who your niche is, you’ll be able to narrow it down from there to the gender, age group and sometimes even the occupation of your ideal customer.
What are the primary emotional benefits that resonate with your customers?
Let’s say you sell athletic shoes. When you think about Nike, people don’t just buy Nike because they’re good shoes. It’s an inspirational brand that is not only cool to wear, but makes you feel empowered to go outside and move your body. Sometimes the simple act of buying a nice pair of shoes is all you need to get off the couch and go for a run. Now think about your product—what kind of inspiration does it give people? How do they feel when they use it? Utilize this during your visual storytelling.
Build the story
Once you’ve answered these questions, you have a framework to build your story. Now you can think about how you want to utilize this story to sell your product while still engaging the customer in something interesting. If you really want to capture your audience’s attention, keep things simple by focusing on the main emotion you want them to experience. Then build the story around that emotion and what all would be involved. In the process, keep things real and relatable. Consumers are tired of cheesy commercials, and they’re hungry for the real thing.
With all of your components, you can create a story that goes like this: The hero (your ideal customer) faces a problem, until they meet or find the solution (your company or product) and now they can do what they couldn’t do before and feel empowered (or whatever key emotion you want to focus on). Visual storytelling can be done in a variety of ways, and doesn’t even have to be that detailed.
The Dock Line Video Team
We understand that this may be a big step for you as a business, which is why it’s our job to help you through every step of the process. You may be thinking, “but I’m a train wreck in front of the camera?” We have good news for you, our decades of experience in the broadcast industry have taught us how to train you and our interview-style approach helps get your best performance on tape. We also offer training workshops aimed to help you become a rock star in your own videos!
Video content is most effective if it is shareable on all online media platforms, which is why we deliver you finished products that are suitable for your website and as well as all social media platforms. We do this so that you can reach the largest audience online and give you a presence amongst businesses in your community.
Ready to get started? Take a look at our starting film packages at
www.video.thedockline.com
to see which fits your needs, and we can customize it for creating a video that tells your story best. Visit www.thedockline.com or email us at Sales@thedockline.com
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