How can media companies increase content ROI with short clips & videos

The most limited resource in the universe isn't money or effort — It's time. Time is the one resource that absolutely, positively cannot be returned or refunded, and it can limit our ability to be productive, work hard, and accomplish as much as possible. This has massive business ramifications, and from a marketing perspective, you need to get the most out of your limited financial and time-oriented resources.

Consider how attention spans have shrunk over time: Research shows that the average attention span has shrunk from two and a half minutes to 47 seconds over the past two decades. This means that your challenge isn't just to capture someone's attention but to create content that meets their needs, regardless of whether that content is short-form or long-form. You'll also have to do so in a way that doesn't break the bank or place massive new demands on your creative team.

The research shows that more short forms of video are being watched. For example, Wyzowl's Research shows that "92% of marketers said that they get a good ROI on video content, up from 87% in 2022. As Seth Godin says, "Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make but about the stories you tell."

According to another survey conducted by Sprout Social some statistics tell the same story:

• 66% of consumers reported short-form videos to be the most engaging type of social media content.
• The average video consumption of an internet user is about 100 minutes per day.
• The number of daily YouTube shorts views in 2023 reached about a mark of 50 million.
• 0–5 mins is the maximum engagement rate, a rate which exponentially decays for longer videos.

This means you must make your content work harder. One successful strategy to maximize your use of video is to repurpose your existing content. For example, one video content can be repurposed in interesting ways to meet different objectives, including engagement, promotion, or monetization. You can also take longer forms of content and break them into smaller clips.

This strategy often results in increased creator and viewer participation, with viewers more likely to watch shorter content, particularly on social networks designed for such a format, like TikTok.

Less social, more media

Short-form trailers and media clips have become a great way to increase your organic reach in social media. These clips can enhance your media presence by creating more shareable content that will drive more users to watch your main content or the more extended clip. Remember, short-form video can promote longer-form content, including movies or TV shows.

These smaller clips - also known as scene lifts - can be effectively used for event-based marketing campaigns. When calibrated correctly, they can also be used for brand promotions. Keep in mind that short-form trailers and clips are the preferred way to increase organic reach through social media. Why? Doing so makes these clips likely to be shared, which drives more users to watch the main content or movie.

There are also very specific content methods that consumers are looking for. According to one study, 80% of consumers want brands to tell stories as part of their marketing. This reality poses a challenge to marketers. To be effective, you must produce compelling narratives that hit home, tell a story, and share your values.

Techniques for creating compelling storylines through social media

Creating solid short-form content is more than having savvy editing skills and the ability to tell compelling stories. There are many techniques you have to adhere to, including:

• Creating bite-sized content that tells a story that keeps your audience on the hook. For example, you can create a series of videos telling a small piece of your story, with one video leading directly into the next.
• Staying relevant and consistent, your content discusses recent events, trends, memes, and storytelling techniques. This means staying updated with trending topics, music, and filters on TikTok or Snapchat and then using those techniques to tell your story. Fortunately, most platforms have resources that enable you to track what is currently hot.
• Focusing on the audience by meeting your audience where they are. You must engage in creation methods and the specific platforms that your audience is using. To that end, you must use multiple platforms to extend reach, including Facebook, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok...and any other platforms that may arise in the future.
• Finding the right content and framing it correctly can help build excitement, create an emotional connection to your product, and create real hooks. For example, let's say you work in the news industry and are looking to promote products that serve people news that is relevant to them. . You'll have to create content that resonates with your target audience based on who they are, what they need, and how you can fulfill that need.
• Engaging in consistent content creation and posting multiple clips on a theme or around a content. Let's return to the above example: You can create a series of content based around a specific family, showing how the news you report on and create will enhance their life. You can do this by showing specific examples of your product helping someone improve their financial situation, prepare for the day, or even better protect their families.

Measuring the impact of content marketing through storytelling for media houses

Media houses face constant pressure to promote new movies, series, or sitcoms. Doing so can y increase the ROI of your content.

However, there can be significant challenges when appropriately measuring the impact of content marketing. These metrics are vital to your overall content marketing strategy, as it is impossible to tell what works and what doesn't without appropriate measurements. There are a few metrics you can use for these purposes:

• The overall increase in license use for brand promotions means that more companies are contacting you to license your content.
• Changes in OTT signups, social media page growth, and sharing statistics on social media. These metrics should be trackable within your social media platforms, allowing you to determine if your content is working.
• Increase in movie revenue. If your advertising campaigns are successful, they should drive more dollars to your movies.
• Increase in the monetization of clips and B-Rolls through stock video sites. You should also be able to track this additional revenue through your video sites. Furthermore, most sites will allow you to see sources of revenue, meaning you can tell if your social media campaigns are driving additional dollars.

Challenges media marketers face today

Anyone involved in media marketing unquestionably understands that they face major challenges in terms of time wasted in organizing and searching for content for clips, and difficulties coordinating overall strategy across teams . There is far too much uncategorized and scattered content located in old archives, resulting in time lost as you track down the right clips. It feels like finding a needle in a haystack. At the same time, the rise of remote work has meant that it is harder to collaborate with teams located across the world, resulting in less productive and less creative output. Lastly, the vast array of social media platforms demands different video sizes, resulting in the time- consuming process of re-editing different clips.

As marketers, your challenge is to keep brand elements easily accessible. You must also ensure that your teams have access to approved assets and that you have the right technology to overcome these issues. The technology to support content creation and re-creation should be able to inspire creativity by suggesting story ideas and discovering contextually accurate clips and compilations. It should enable creative teams to collaborate and weave new stories, thus creating content for trailers, brand associations and social posts. Fortunately, advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) coupled with a smart media asset management platform can help reimagine content to clip journeys and enable creators to find clips, repurpose existing content, and help remote teams collaborate more effectively.

Talk to us to automate your content to clip journey

If you have encountered these challenges, you need to know that solutions exist to help you better repurpose existing content, save money, and save time. CLEAR^® Clip.

automates your content-to-clip journey by automatically handling many of the technological challenges you face, allowing you to concentrate on the creative and financial side of your business.