Miranda recently joined with other business leaders to highlight 3 mistakes brands and businesses often make when planning, creating and sharing their video productions. We encourage you to watch her contribution and schedule a free consultation to explore your storytelling options.
Full video transcript:
I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 15 years with international experience in media marketing communications. I have expertise in storytelling for B2B, CSR and sustainability. I’m the co-founder of The Art of Storytelling, where I consult and provide storytelling strategy and content to clients in Ontario. My company has won several awards for video production in advertising, laurels for some documentaries and business innovation awards. Something personal about me: I live in the GTA area of Ontario right now, but I grew up and spent many years in Trinidad, where I started my entrepreneurship journey from running a graphic design and ad agency, a website development company, a stock photography company, and currently corporate and brand video storytelling.
Today I’m going to talk about the three stages of a storytelling video production and the mistakes that I frequently see in each phase. Some of them are strategic and some are tactical.
The first phase of video production is pre-production: of the pre-production stage, we often start with a question Who do we want to tell this story? Who can be included in this video? And more importantly, how many people can we actually include in this video? One mistake I see is trying to fit too many people into one short video. This makes it really hard for the creative team to include enough soundbites and content from each person to allow the story to make sense for the audience to connect with each person. And it comes down to just seconds in a short video. It’s how many seconds does each person get. So for a 1 minute video, I think it’s ideal to have one person talking. You can maybe squeeze two depending on the content and the story. A two minute video, you can have 2 to 3 people, a three minute video, 3 to 4 people. That all works pretty well. Asking for five people to be interviewed and you only want a two minute video, it starts to become unrealistic and unreasonable. But three people in a three minute video, works really well. And that’s like the typical storytelling video that we create for websites. A similar problem that I encounter is in scripted videos where the script is too long and it’s really just because people are not aware of how many words per minute. So make a note of these numbers. The appropriate word count for a three minute video. It can vary depending on the pace of the speech, the complexity of the content and the desired delivery style. On average, a person speaks at a rate of about 125 to 150, maybe 160 words per minute. So make notes. A 30 second video ideally would be 60 to 80 words. A one minute video would be 120 to 150 words, and a two minute video would be 240 to 300 words. So a three minute video, which again, is a typical video that lives on a website, it’s kind of like the “About us” video or introduction to our company video. You should aim for a script that has about 360 to 450 words.
The next mistakes I’m going to talk about are mistakes found in production. In production, there can be lots of mistakes. I’m just going to mention a few that I see happening often. The first mistake is not having a hook in the first 7 seconds. You only have 7 seconds to engage with your audience or you miss it. So in the first 7 seconds, you don’t want to have a long animation brand intro with logos and you don’t want to have the person saying, Hi, my name is and I am a whatever, and I work at this company. So you kind of have to skip all of that because if you have nothing intriguing in the first 7 seconds, you will lose your viewer. Viewers really want to have valuable content. And if you put all of your logos at the beginning, it starts to look more like an ad instead of a story. And it’s not going to get shared. So if you don’t get to the “why” of the story or “how is this relevant to me” within the first 7 seconds, you lose those viewers. So get straight into the emotion of the story or the value that the story brings and leave the logos for last. So you got to find that hook and you got to put the hook at the very beginning.
Another mistake that we see in production, and it’s not necessarily a mistake. It’s just if you chose the wrong approach because there’s different approaches and one is the decision on the eyeline. And by eyeline I mean looking at camera or looking off camera. And you can see from the slide here that the lady is looking off camera. So she is doing an interview based story. And the second person, he’s a mayor and he is actually giving a public service announcement to his community. So it really depends on what are you trying to achieve with your video will determine the correct decision on eyeline. Some people don’t understand this and they go with the same approach regardless of what what the point of the message is. So having the subject look directly at the camera like the mayor is, it can create a more personal connection. And this approach is commonly used when delivering a message direct to audience. So it could be a CEO giving a message to a stakeholder or the government or a city council making a public service announcement, or it could be used in training videos. So when you have to communicate something that’s important for the viewer to know, use direct to camera. So just think this is like TV news. But if you’re trying to build trust, reputation and authenticity, use the off-camera approach. This is the preferred approach for storytelling, like a documentary. If you’re aiming for a more conversational or natural feel, having the subject look off camera as if speaking to someone nearby can create a sense of importance. The viewer is now listening in on someone else’s conversation or interview. The approach is suitable for situations where you want the subject to come across as interesting, approachable, believable and relatable. And that’s the whole point of storytelling.
Another problem that I see is when you try to be too literal. So I like to explain to my clients that there are three layers of storytelling. There’s an audio layer, a visual layer and a graphic layer, and there’s a balance between these three layers. Not everything has to be said in the words, if it can be shown in the footage. So you have two opportunities there, the words and footage. Similarly, not everything needs to be said. Clients make this mistake all the time and they think that they have to say everything when they can just show it. And then that’s going to make the video too long with the words. So you need to keep the spoken words really short and simple and to the point in telling a story. You don’t need to do things like list off all of the locations or all of the services or activities. So some of that starts to become it’s just too much in words. You can show those in B-roll. You can also show it as some kind of visual like graphic text or text overlay. But one thing I wanted to say is don’t forget that video is not a standalone item. Seldom is it standalone. It usually lives on a web page. And the web page has all of that additional information. Or you might put it on social media in a post. And in a post, the text to the post can have all of that additional information. So things like lists of dates or website URLs, it’s not necessarily something that has to be in the spoken words, it can be in the text that goes along with the video.
And lastly, I want to talk about post-production and distribution mistakes. So you might make a great video and then it just does not get the views that you wanted and you might have made mistakes in your distribution. So the first mistake is not posting natively to each platform. So this means do not post your YouTube links, do not put them on LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or anywhere else like that. Use the actual file and post that file natively. So uploading that video directly to social media ensures that the video is optimized for the platform. Native videos tend to receive higher visibility and engagement compared to external links, because the platform’s algorithm favors the natively posted videos. It doesn’t want your viewers going from LinkedIn to YouTube, so try and keep people on the platform for more engagement. So sharing the actual video file provides the seamless viewing experience for your audience and encourages engagement. And on most platforms, the video will auto play, which will increase the chance of someone viewing the video. Again, you don’t want to lose them in the 7 seconds as you transfer from LinkedIn to YouTube, then you have to watch a YouTube ad. Then you get to a video. You’ve lost too many people. The platforms also will be able to you the analytics if you post your video natively. And that data is really valuable for knowing how many views, how much engagement and what your demographics are, and using the data will help you to make better decisions for your content strategy in the future.
So something really interesting that I see happening often here, and you can see this in this photo that I found on I think LinkedIn. A company has posted a video where they did not do their subtitles properly. You can see the sentences are broken and they don’t really flow well. There’s no punctuation, but the biggest problem here is that the company’s name is also not spelled correctly. Because they did not make actual SRT files, which are the subtitle files, and they did not upload that. They let YouTube or maybe the platform auto create, auto generate the subtitles and it just comes out wrong. It comes out really badly. It’s absolutely not accessible in any way. So if you think you’re going to get around accessibility by allowing captions to auto generate, those are not accessible. Uploading the SRT file with the actual video file onto every platform is really key for getting your words to look and read properly and also for getting more engagement. Most people are watching videos on social media with no volume on. So if your subtitles are wrong, again, you’ve lost your audience there.
And I wish I had more time because I have so many other tips and mistakes to share, but I’m out of time for today. So if you have any video ideas or you want to book a complimentary call with me, I’ll put my contacts in the chat. I’m also happy to audit any past videos. So if you’ve made a video and you’re not really sure why it didn’t work, it could be the actual approach that you took to the video, or it could be how you actually shared and distributed it.