Video is quickly becoming the most popular content medium, with over 500 million Facebook users viewing video every day. With more room for expression, content sharing, and often better promotion through social media, it’s the ideal medium for everything from how-to videos to direct advertising, giving banks and financial institutions a way to connect with consumers, inform, engage, and entertain their audiences.
However, launching a financial video marketing campaign means taking your audience, demographic, and video production capabilities into account. You’ll also have to craft a campaign around an end goal, get creative with visual storytelling, and give over a message that really matters.
These 4 bank video marketing necessities will help you get on the right track before you start filming or producing video content.
Great Storytelling
Most forms of media allow you to get away with offering relatively mundane information without boring or annoying consumers. With over 60 hours of video uploaded every minute to popular sites like YouTube, video doesn’t have that same luxury. Users have to stop what they’re doing, often listen to the video, and pay attention. If they don’t like what they see, they will leave. That means every video you produce has to showcase good storytelling. It has to be interesting, have an emotional connection with the audience, and use visual storytelling to showcase something that is interesting and engaging to the viewer.
- Appeal to emotions (if you’re introducing a new service, figure out why the new service was provided, what emotional value does it offer?)
- Use actors from the demographic you’re aiming for (Millennials? Generation Z? Baby Boomers?
- Tie a story or a real person into everything. Stories can be as simple as “This new service makes your life easier” and as complex as a real-world case-study. Real stories and points add value and keep people engaged because you have something to tell them.
How much can storytelling add to your videos? FNBC’s personal story about Boyd Jackson and his story with their bank is a great example of how tying in a real story adds a great deal to a marketing campaign, even when the story is just about your values and brand.
Video Marketing Strategy
Financial video marketing is the same as any other form of bank marketing in that you need a strategy, every video has to have a point, and it should ideally tie into your other marketing efforts. This means that you need a good video strategy outlining not just what you are going to film, but how it provides value to you and to the viewer.
For example, if you’re creating help videos, you can create a single video concept around the audience and demographic most likely to need them, create a character or characters from the demographic, and build an interesting or funny campaign aimed at helping people to use your products or services. Similarly, if you’re creating ads, you should tie them into existing campaigns such as outreach programs or relevant yearly demand (loans, mortgages, etc.) to drive the most value.
Your video marketing strategy should also define specific goals for your videos, how much attention should be dedicated to each goal, how many videos you want to make in each series, and so on. You should know the answers to the following questions for every video:
- What’s the goal of the video? (To create buzz? Promote a product? Share values? Build trust?)
- Who does this video benefit? (Existing customers? The bank? New users?)
- How does this video tie into existing strategies? Can it be used to cross-promote other efforts?
- How does the visual content tie into the audience?
Clearly Defined Brand Values
Any video marketing campaign will naturally focus on values, building brand trust, and connecting with consumers. Clearly defining what should be touched on and what shouldn’t be, as well as what brings value other than directly promoting products.
While there are numerous bank video marketing campaigns you can use as an example (TD Bank’s Thank You video series, Bank of America’s Happy Birthday Eunice Kennedy Schriver), it’s important that you define your own values and how sharing them drives real value for your brand. For example, do your values help you to connect with consumers? Do they create a more concrete brand identity? Do they build trust? If not, you probably shouldn’t share them.
In some cases, values can help you to make a statement or to support a cause, which can be good as well. Sharing brand values always ties into storytelling, because, whether you’re creating videos about success cases, sharing unrelated content, or sharing personal user-generated content, you still need great storytelling to make it work.
Personalization
Most banks struggle to show consumers that they recognize them as individuals. Video marketing is an easy way to bridge that gap because it allows you to showcase stories, create personalization, and create two-way dialogue well beyond the standard, static marketing. The easiest way to tie personalization into video marketing is to share real, personal stories and good ones. This can involve a significant amount of brand research and marketing – as well as connecting directly with consumers to get their stories, but it will pay off. Most importantly, social media is an excellent platform for sharing this kind of marketing, providing you have good storytelling behind the videos.
Personalization also doesn’t have to stop there. If you’re sharing video campaigns on your website, app, or social media, you can relatively easily tailor the audience to match that of the specific video so that your campaigns are relevant and interesting.
Any bank video marketing campaign will naturally have to include all of the elements of great videography. You can’t approach videos like standard ads unless you’re trying to use them as ads, but you can’t share flat and boring information either. Instead, you have to use emotion, talk about your brand and values, and use great storytelling to present even the most mundane information (like opening a bank account) in a way that is engaging enough to take up 10, 20, 30, or many more seconds of someone’s time.