Creating Engaging Video Content That Spurs an Emotional Connection

Wondering how to create engaging video for your business? Want to use video more creatively in your marketing?

To explore how to create engaging videos that work in organic social posts or paid ads, I interview Ezra Firestone on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Ezra is an eCommerce marketing expert and the founder of Smart Marketer, a site that helps marketers grow their businesses. He also co-founded BOOM!, the cosmetic company, and founded Zipify, a Shopify app development company.

Ezra explains where to use short-form and long-form video in your marketing strategy, and shares what types of videos you can adapt for your own marketing.

Ezra’s Backstory

Ezra’s marketing career had an interesting start. After growing up in a hippie commune, he moved to New York at age 18 to play poker for a living. Around 2004/2005, he met a life coach who was using search engine optimization to sell eBooks on how to start a coaching business. Ezra made a deal with the coach. He’d teach the coach how to play poker if the coach taught Ezra SEO.

Ezra ended up taking over the marketing for the coaching business, including writing landing pages and running webinars, and he learned all about information marketing. The company grew to a few million dollars a year before the coach burned out around 2008. The business had really been built on that coach’s own personal brand so it disappeared virtually overnight. Without the influencer, it was worthless. That taught Ezra that if he was going to start a brand or business, he didn’t want it to be built around a sole persona. He decided to focus on eCommerce.

In 2012, Ryan Deiss approached Ezra to teach a course on how to start an eCommerce business. While teaching hadn’t been part of Ezra’s plan, he found the experience of supporting people who were starting and growing businesses to be really fun and rewarding. Ezra decided to launch the Smart Marketer blog to document his journey as an entrepreneur and share what he found interesting.

Smart Marketer has traditionally focused on building eCommerce businesses, although recent collaborations with Molly Pittman have expanded that repertoire to include more marketers, publishers, coaches, speakers, and authors. Smart Marketer has also always featured a very strong lifestyle component for entrepreneurs, including content on team-building, communication, and relationships.

The Launch of BOOM! by Cindy Joseph

When Ezra first came to New York City at age 18, he lived with a 54-year-old family friend named Cindy Joseph who had been a makeup artist for 27 years. Brands at that time were starting to realize that Baby Boomers were the ones with spending power and should be better represented in ads. Cindy was approached on the street to be in a Dolce and Gabbana ad, and ultimately became what was known as a “silver class” supermodel, representing numerous brands on billboards, in ads and catalogs, and even appearing in movies.

Ezra had been learning about eCommerce, and he suggested to Cindy that the two of them create a product line geared toward Baby Boomers.

From the very beginning, BOOM! Cosmetics was a philosophy and ideology, a content play that had products to support that viewpoint. BOOM! embraced the angle that beauty is different at every age, that every age is beautiful, and that cosmetics can be used to celebrate rather than cover up. The product line was launched alongside a blog called Saturday With Cindy, which consisted of face-to-camera videos of Cindy discussing her experiences as an aging woman in our society.

Cindy unexpectedly passed away in 2019, but BOOM! is still going strong. Ezra expects the brand to do over $20 million in business this year.

Why Should Businesses Focus on Video for Marketing?

Everybody knows at this point that people are overwhelmingly consuming video content. Video—and audio, for that matter—creates stronger relationships than text and image ever could. There’s tone, there’s cadence, there’s expression. Ezra has built every one of his successful businesses on the backbone of a video strategy. He believes what a business does is to communicate with a group of people around a set of shared experiences, and there’s no better way to do that than with video.

Before the internet, brands used video to create television commercials or sponsored content. Soap operas, for instance, were sponsored content produced by Proctor & Gamble to target moms who were at home. The idea of video as a marketing vehicle has been around as long as television has been around. The advantage we have today is that we don’t have to pay a network. We have the opportunity to produce videos and publish them ourselves, anywhere we want. We’re also in the golden age of television—as of this recording, Disney+, Apple TV, and other networks are making multibillion-dollar investments in content creation because there’s an insatiable appetite for engaging video content.

Short-Form Video Versus Long-Form Video

Ezra defines short-form video as 2 minutes and shorter, and long-form video as longer than 2 minutes. He notes that much of his own long-form content runs as long as 40 minutes.

Ezra has very strong opinions about where those two types of content should be used in the sales cycle. Short-form content is really designed to attract people’s attention and get them to know you. Then, once they like you, you can show them longer content. Short-form content can even promote long-form content such as a 1-minute trailer for a 30-minute interview. People who are interested will then watch the longer content.

Ezra recommends using short-form to promote long-form once someone is a subscriber. Before they’re a subscriber, mostly put out 1- to 2-minute videos on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram to get people’s attention. Once someone knows and likes you, they’ll consume thematically relevant long-form content and they’ll enjoy it.

Ezra’s audience for BOOM! is primarily women older than 50 who are only on Facebook and YouTube. This means that his short-form videos may be longer than most people’s. Ezra likes to do interviews of women in the BOOM! community discussing their own experiences with aging. What does beauty mean to them? What is dating like after 50? How has menopause affected them? Ezra then produces short, punchy videos about his subject’s experience in a given field or on a given set of experiences like aging.

Using Video for Engagement and Selling

Montage videos are what Ezra would call engagement or consumption content. They’re designed to keep his audience engaged and entertain, educate, and keep the brand top of mind, not necessarily to sell. He uses that content to keep his community engaged on social media, runs ads to it, emails it, and puts it on his blog. It’s pure content marketing.

When he’s actually trying to sell, Ezra uses videos specifically designed to sell his products. Favorites include manufacturing process transparency videos and a video style that he calls “Love Demo Love,” also known as the “Testimonial Sandwich.”

When BOOM! implemented consistent, ongoing, entertaining, fun, engaging video content on top of the sale events they ran, those sale events (about six a year) doubled in effectiveness because the audience was more engaged. They remembered who BOOM! was. They were getting emails that weren’t just sales messages. They were seeing BOOM! in their social media feeds.

Ezra says engagement is probably not the priority for every business because the priority is to get customers. But in today’s environment, if a brand doesn’t generate repeat business from a group of people who are engaged with them over time, that brand is going to struggle.

How to Use Video for Engagement: Montage Interviews

One strategy Ezra likes for short interviews is a montage. Ezra will compile a list of 10-15 questions such as, “What did beauty mean to you at 20 versus 50? How has your hair growing out gray affected you? Do you dye it?” Then he asked 50 women those same 10-15 questions. He cuts up those responses into individual videos such as a video all about silver hair, with a 10- to 15-second answer from four different women.

Ezra feels these montage videos work so well because of what he calls our universal fascination with what other people think, and our desire to be “normal.” We want to be normal; we want to be like the rest of the group. So when you get a group of people with whom you identify and you get to hear their thoughts on the same experiences you’re having, it’s human nature to find that compelling. Ezra also tries to push on the subject to get them to emote, since witnessing other people’s emotions around an experience that we ourselves are having is also naturally compelling.

The first place Ezra goes to find interview subjects is to his customers. The second place is Instagram, where he finds people who look like his desired customers—whether they have big audiences or not—and reaches out to them. He goes to his employees, families, mothers, grandmothers, friends, friends of friends—anywhere to find the right people.

When Ezra asks people to submit their own videos, he often advises that they have someone film it for them on an iPhone outdoors so that they’ll get good natural light. The audio quality of a smartphone is often sufficient. When doing a Zoom interview, Ezra requests that his interview subject sit in a room with natural light facing them from a window. Regardless of production value, Ezra stresses that the content is always key. You’re talking to a specific group of people, you know who you’re talking to, and you’ve done some level of research to know what they’re interested in. If you’re doing your job, he says you’ve got a good shot at success.

Ezra advises doing a minimum of 10 interviews to ensure at least four really compelling responses that can be used for the final video. Half of what’s produced is likely going to be unusable. Some people aren’t compelling, don’t bring enthusiasm, or aren’t that excited about what they’re talking about. Generally, a solid 30%-50% isn’t necessarily very good. Some work will have to be thrown away but Ezra says that’s part of the game.

How to Use Video to Sell: Manufacturing Process Transparency

Montage videos are about content consumption and engagement. Manufacturing process transparency is about trying to sell something. The single greatest opportunity in business right now is, “Here is how we made this thing, and this is why.”

One of Ezra’s favorite brands right now is a clothing company called Everlane. The brand is built on the premise that there was a problem with denim. All of the world’s denim factories have been polluting the oceans. Everlane noticed this and decided to make denim that was amazing for a number of reasons and didn’t pollute the oceans. They then offered full transparency into the process of manufacturing their product.

For collaborations with Smart Marketer, Molly sometimes offers a behind-the-scenes look into how she ran a given product launch. That’s manufacturing process transparency. That’s her showing behind the scenes of what she did to produce the result that the audience is engaging with. That style of video is interesting, it’s compelling, and it sells.

Why does it sell? Because you’re sharing what goes into creating the sausage in the factory—whether you’re actually creating sausage or selling information. In Molly’s case, she’s talking about how she used marketing to launch this new product. Just talking about the procedure she went through to promote her product is, in fact, actually marketing her product.

People get a window into what you create, why you create it, and how you do it, which shows authority and authenticity. Throughout, you’re also talking about the benefits of the product. In Everlane’s case, it’s denim. In BOOM!’s case, it’s organic, handmade, small-batch skincare. You’re sprinkling in the benefits of the actual product itself while showing how and why you make it, and it’s a good recipe for selling something. It works in pretty much every case that Ezra has tried. It’s one of his favorite go-to models for how to make a sales video for a physical product in particular. “Hey, we made this for a reason. Here’s how we did it and here’s why this thing is good.”

Source: socialmediaexaminer