Video + emotion = killer content

Everyone understands the popularity of video. YouTube has incredible scale and viewership. And look at what Facebook did to make posting and watching video incredibly easy.

Video is poised to grow even more. According to a report from IAB, "Two-thirds of marketers and agency executives believe that original digital video will become as important as original TV programming within the next three to five years."

Additionally, Emarketer predicts that, “There will be 77 million millennial digital video viewers in 2015, representing more than 92% of all US millennial internet users. Additional growth in new millennial digital video viewers is expected to remain mostly flat for the foreseeable future, given that video viewing is already near ubiquitous for this age group."

We're going to see every marketer jump on the video bandwagon. And we'll most likely see a repeat of what happened with blogs and ebooks - an explosion of thinly-veiled sales pitches masquerading as useful content.

So how do you make sure your efforts don't become part of the huge pile of video crap that is about to be dumped on us?

Take a cue from the House of the Mouse

According to the Disney Institute, organizations that optimize the emotional connection with prospects outperform competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.

Quite simply, emotion is the key to creating video that people want to watch.

How to get emotional

What is "optimizing the emotional connection”? It’s storytelling. It’s finding something about your offering that is relevant and meaningful. And relating it in a way that connects with people on a very human level.

Want a great example? Watch how Google does a video about all it’s features, but tells it in a way that puts it in a different league from all the other explainer videos out there.

Here’s another. Check out how Purina plugs Puppy Chow and you don’t mind one bit. In fact, you can’t stop watching.

The coming tsunami

Anyone can turn on the camera, recite a litany of product features, and call it a video. Don’t fool yourself. Because it won’t fool your prospects.

There is a tsunami of bad video coming. We don’t have to be part of it. In fact, let’s be the other guys. The ones creating killer video content.