DMR #12: Hannah Brenzel – Should every business publish online video?

David: Should every business be publishing online video? What type of video works best and what are the biggest video marketing pitfalls? Those are just 3 of the questions that I intend to ask today's special guest, Hannah Brenzel. Hannah, welcome to DMR. Hannah: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. David: Hannah is the content marketing coordinator for ViralGains, a viral video marketing company based in Boston, Massachusetts. On a daily basis, she creates content designed to educate brands, agencies, individuals, and businesses of all sizes on importance of integrating online video into marketing campaigns. Hannah, integrating online video into marketing campaigns, do you mean paid video advertising campaigns or organic viral videos? Hannah: We generally focus on paid advertising campaigns, mostly because every piece of content really needs that boosts to get to the right audience so they can blow it up through organic sharing. There are sometimes those peak brands will create really awesome video content that people pick up and start spreading on their own and that’s where the organic comes in, but not every video is going to have that traction. That’s why we believe a paid spent in the beginning can get your video to the right audience so that they start sharing with their networks and then it just spreads from there. We believe that the paid boosts can really help a video go viral. David: Paid advertising in terms of videos. I'd like to dig in and really delve into the type of video, the length of video and what works best really. Starting with the length, would you say that it has to be short all the time or there any instances where you'd actually use quite a long video for paid advertising? Hannah: A lot of people watch long-form video content. I know Vine has picked up Instagram video with all this short consumable bits of content. People really enjoy that. It's very sharable but when a brand can really tell a story through 2 to 5 minutes of video, we find that very valuable because people are connecting with the brands through that storytelling. Just trying to fit all of your messaging in 30 seconds, you have a lot more creativity with long-form video content. Depending on what you're trying to get across there really isn't an if you should do shorter or if you should do long argument. Preferably you do a little bit of both but either way you're going to see success as long as you can tell that story.