A 30 seconds hook

Short-form video content has made his way towards the public’s heart, and… guess where advertising have their eye on! Their length perfectly fits in our fast lives. Long enough to entertain us, short enough to not distract us from the another thousand of fast online activities that require our immediate attention.

The amazing thing is that, for the first time, the use of video format for promotional aims, is not anymore the monopoly of big firms. What’s more, they have found fierce competitors in the so-called prosumers. The shift in audience’s preferences towards more casual, authentic and closer content have displaced bigger productions and its clear selling intentions.

This is the moment to admit it: I am not the owner of a big firm. I am just an audio producer about to be born. And when I think in the enormous popularity of short-form video content nowadays, the first word that cross my mind is “opportunities”. Mainly, opportunities of promoting myself as a professional in a medium where any fish could attract attention, not necessarily the biggest one.

The first important thing would be to decide exactly the target audience of the video along with the specific skills that I would like to highlight, in order to properly design the content and its form. But undoubtedly, the main emphasis would be put on creating some kind of real interest in the target audience.

According to the consumption patterns of short-form videos (pretty different of those related to traditional TV), there would be no point in creating a video just focused in selling myself at all cost. The audience would directly jump to the next video! The kind of promotion I am talking about would be based on establish a symbiotic relationship: My main effort would be focus on contribute creativity, entertainment, and maybe training (a video tutorial series focused in audio, for example). The audience, and social media environment closely related to short-form video content, would contribute in a massive spreading of my video, assuming that I finally achieved in creating meaningful content.

A really interesting thing about the sharing platforms where short-form video content is mostly distributed, is the possibility of monitoring and measuring the effectiveness of my modest marketing campaign, to find out as it goes along what factors are working and what are not.

Anyway, before I plan all the above, it could be worth to spend at least 5 minutes trying to discover the secret viral-video’s formula!