video marketing Archives - Page 15 of 16

Storytelling Beats Production Value, Plus My Acting Debut!

So ibis India asked us to make a video about their new hotel in Goa. The challenge was to figure out a way to celebrate an overly celebrated destination. For the video to be share-worthy, it had to be about the users, not about Goa, or the hotel or the brand or us. So we asked ourselves.. What’s the number one problem for youngsters when they plan for Goa? Take a guess.. Parents! After few hours of brainstorming of all the things they say, we flipped it and our idea was born :)

Making it Share-Worthy

Mobile Native: Square videos are mobile native, and don’t need tilting for the full experience. Videos have been rectangle for long, but now we consume them vertically. Vine and Instagram started the vertical ‘square’ video trend, but Facebook is what brought it front and centre (at least in India)

Make It Easy to Understand: After much discussion, we decided to meme-ify the video and add a black strip with title on top, so when Facebook auto-plays it you know the context till the end. Even though meme videos are like the graffiti of video world, but what the hell.. it’s about storytelling and share-worthiness :)

Make it Sound Proof: From our data, 75% of video views are without sound on Facebook, so the video had to be sound proof and since this was a first where we had actual dialogues, subtitles are super important. And subtitles not in a different language but the same as script, so it matches the visuals.

Move Fast: First 3-6 seconds is our target, to make it compelling enough to continue. As marketers our dream is for people to stop in news-feeds, hit play, watch the whole thing, share it and then give us their kidney! lol First 3-6 are most crucial.

Execute, Execute Execute: We were really skeptical of going all in with in-house capabilities. Heck, I played a role too (my first). The only thing I told myself: Let’s follow the plan, however it looks and execute.. if it doesn’t look good. we’ll figure something out. But wallah, team did a kick-ass job.. :)

Results: The video is off to a good start, got about 200k views on first day (On Facebook)

After our success in videos over the last few years, ixigo is taking on limited clients (Travel brands only) for videos, ibis being our first :) Do check out the other video we made for ibis Goa titled ‘How To Fake a Goa Vacation‘

Remember I was writing a book? Yes I’m still on it going strong. Sign-up to get it before anyone else when it comes out :)

7 Million in 7 Days!

7 days 7 million views, 150k shares, 25k comments and 270k likes!

gr-selfie

Here’s the video :)

Comparison with TVF and AIB – Humbled :)

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 11.42.59 am

Humbled :) Thanks for the mid week motivation :)

A Content Experiment Which Broke The Internet

This is the story of a content experiment which grew so big, it smashed our benchmarks and created a whole new level of ‘Crazy’. It was early January and from the trends predicted for 2016, we knew this year belonged to videos. Videos are raining everywhere, from Facebook news-feeds to family groups on WhatsApp. More than 50% of mobile traffic is already dominated by videos, coupled with sky-rocketing mobile users in the country, it’s not just about videos but videos made for mobile. This is the story of how we took an innocent little content post and packaged it into a short and crisp video which hit 50 million views in under 3 weeks! (Learnings from experiment below)

Are You Kidding Me?

The challenge was to take a listicle with interesting content and fascinating pictures and convert it into a video. It had to move fast and engage and not look like a slide show (hate those lousy slideshows with cheesy animations). The strategy for a video listicle was born. Little did we know that this little experiment done on near zero budget, will catapult our reach, engagement and conversions to mount everest.

The Results – Beach Please!

We know from experience if something has viral potential, the numbers snow-ball, shares and views accelerate by the hour. The video hit a million views in ten hours, and on Day 3 the views were accelerating at a staggering 11,000 views per minute! Here’s the video

In One Week:

The video hit 40 million views
Shared by a million users
Received 300,000 comments
Reached 150 million news-feeds on Facebook
Added 200,000 new fans to our Facebook page
Made ixigo Facebook page the fastest growing in the country on that day
Got 20,000+ additional app installs for ixigo apps

“A travel video that broke the internet”
– Gizmodo

“ixigo proves Facebook (not YouTube) is the place for video marketing”
– Tnooz

“ixigo lists world’s most unusual beaches”
– Inshorts

All In One Week – Look Closely!

“The power of content marketing is the fact that a near zero budget video can compete with a TV Ad and beat it with numbers!”

Learnings – From The Trenches

First 3-6 seconds are the most crucial: News-feeds are getting chaotic, human attention spans are dropping. First impression is crucial (thumbnail image), but the ‘second first impression’ is the first 3-6 seconds, we need to move fast, engage and get them to hit ‘share’, the magical metric for viral content.
Sound elevates: Even though Facebook auto-plays the video, music/sound plays a big role. Bad quality video I’ll watch but bad sound is a deal breaker. The sound / music must elevate the visuals.
Move fast: Nothing must be static even for one frame: we panned pictures, added fast moving globe transitions. Videos are called moving pictures for a reason ;)
Square videos: The vertical/square videos which vine/instagram started work well for mobile audiences, since the format is native to mobiles. You don’t have to tilt the screen and they take up more real estate on the phone. And it’s no rocket science to know that mobile traffic is killing desktop in India!
Facebook video: Facebook has sharing in it’s DNA, not so much on YouTube. Facebook videos work when they are short, fast moving and tell the story in moving picture more than dialogues. You can use call to action buttons on videos and most importantly Facebook provides kick-ass distribution for video content compared to YouTube.
Keep Experimenting: We replicated the practices into a Republic Day video, which hit a decent million in 3 days. Operate like a movie studio, do ten experiment, two will work :)

One More Thing, Seriously!

In the last two years it has been a roller coaster ride in producing, distributing and decoding viral content. I’m compiling it all into a non-nonsense book. It has the stories of learnings from the content marketing trenches, of how experiments became best practices for multi million views viral videos. About creating viral-worthy content, the art of news-jacking, earning users’ trust and coming up with topics for the next game changer. Join the mailing list and I will update you when it comes out :)

Oh BTW Here’s The Video

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/ixigo/videos/10153882474313270/” width=”500″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”0″]

And This One Hit a Million in 3 Days, Same Learnings, On India’s Republic Day (News-Jack)

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/ixigo/videos/10153904020683270/” width=”500″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”0″]