Facebook Discloses New Insights into the Essential Elements of Effective Video Content

In modern digital marketing, video is an essential component, as you've probably read in many reports and from many experts. People are increasingly engaging with video content, and searching for it for entertainment and product research purposes.

It's not enough to merely create and upload videos; you also need to make sure that your videos are interactive, creative, and engaging enough to keep people watching to achieve optimal response.

And that's a much more difficult issue to deal with, as well. When it comes to video production, what are the essential components you need to keep in mind to produce a more persuasive video clip?

To shed more light on this, Facebook recently collaborated with marketing measurement firm Analytic Partners and insights agency The Lab to undertake a new research into effective video approaches, as well as how marketers can produce video content that creates substantial impact and significantly increases audience response.

The report highlights the increasing ROI capability of video content, which is already generating considerably greater response than static image posts.

According to the report:

"For some time now, Analytic Partners research has demonstrated the very high short-term return on investment (ROI) of most digital activity. Similarly, we have observed the very high long-term ROI of video - regardless of the screen it is on. Historically, social media rates highly for driving short term ROI, however the environment is changing fast. For a long time, social media feeds were largely populated with static images. Today, however, video activity across Facebook, for example, is in the ascendance."

Even though video contents has become more popular and now has a relatively high value, not all videos are created equal; some generate a lot of interest while others fail to do so.

As such, what are the most important factors that influence video marketing performance?

In general, the report states that creative is the primary motivator, with executional elements (ad scheduling, targeting, etc.) playing a much smaller role.

However, it's a rather broad component. The question is, how do you interpret best practice creative in this context?

With this purpose in mind, The Lab developed a new measurement scorecard to rate various in-video components based on their corresponding performance.

"The effectiveness scorecard can help advertisers optimize the most fundamental components of online video in order to get results. The framework has been used both to build creative from the ground up, and to tweak existing creative for success in an online format. There are 11 best practice principles in the framework."

The framework's first seven core elements are the key components that should be covered in all video creative.

Whereas the other four are also highly recommended and can aid in boosting performance.

The full guide provides more detailed notes and explanations on each factor, and also case studies that indicate how these elements have been implemented and managed to help brands achieve significant results.

Since unraveling creativity into a prescriptive framework is complicated, the measures outlined here offer a few important planning points for your video strategy that are research-backed and will help your content perform better.

In a sense, they're worth considering, if nothing else. You can get the full report of "Creating Online Video That Cuts Through" here.