Content teaser videos are one of the best ways to drive an engaged audience to your blog posts. Here are tips to help you strike the right balance between promotion and creativity.
Content teaser videos are one of the best ways to drive an engaged audience to your blog posts. Without blog promotion, you’re relying on search traffic alone to ensure your message reaches your audience. So, while you could spend hours crafting your blog copy, you may lose out on readers because you didn’t put the same effort into distributing it.
But there’s a fine line between an informative and engaging teaser video and a promotional video that your viewers mistake for a sales pitch. This how-to includes tips to help you strike the right balance between promotion and creativity.
If you’re looking for advice on developing a video marketing strategy for your business, check out our Video Marketing Guide.
Choose the Right Channel for your Teaser Video
Before you start creating your teaser video, you need to think about which channels you’re going to use to promote it, and what your objective is for sharing your content.
For example, if you have a strong subscriber base for your newsletter, and your goal is to turn subscribers into customers, you may want to embed a teaser video into your newsletter to promote a piece of content, supporting referrals from newsletter to website.
Lululemon regularly embeds promotional video content into their newsletter to highlight new community events, products or brand initiatives.
Alternatively, social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram offer great opportunities to promote your blog content with teaser videos. They prefer video content that is uploaded natively and videos should include captions, along with a post description and a link to your blog.
If you promote a video on social media as a sponsored post, you’re able to fine-tune and handpick who you’d like to view it – it’s one of the best ways to ensure that your content is being seen by the right people, who, if you get your targeting right, are likely to share it too!
Create Video Trailers that Convert for your Audience
When it comes to creating a teaser video for your blog content, It needs to be captivating, engaging and give the audience a reason to click through to your site.
Before you sit down to create your video, spend some time thinking about what content has previously resonated with your audience. Take a look at best performing content across the channels that you plan to use, and pull out any shared attributes to inform your decisions.
Perhaps your audience prefers to see your products in action, or the behind-the-scenes of your brand, or maybe they’re more receptive to educational and informative how-to guides. Once you can hone in on what your audience reacts to best, you can use that as an anchor point and then begin to storyboard what content will be used to promote your blog post.
We love how Lifestyle bloggers A Beautiful Mess created a video teaser for their blog post on how to upcycle building blocks for a children’s play kitchen. The simple how-to video is light-hearted, playful and in line with their brand tone of voice. The strong call to action in their caption copy points audiences in the right direction to find more information:
Similarly, UK publication Stylist Magazine has created Instagram videos for their audience, dedicated to teasing a larger editorial piece on their website. This 60-second clip entices viewers, providing them with a good understanding of what the article is about, without giving away too much detail:
If you’re new to creating video content, teaser or otherwise, the easiest way to start is with a slideshow video template. This format is super simple to customize and tailor to your brand’s needs, while also delivering engaging content. Think of it as the framework for your promotional video that you can customize with your own images, video clips and text to bring it to life for your audience.
Just remember, when you’re creating your storyboard for your teaser video, to always include a strong call to action (CTA), either in the video itself or in your supporting copy, to drive your audience to watch or read more on your website. Without a strong CTA, your audience could easily skim past without realizing that there’s more to discover on your blog.
Creating a teaser video doesn’t have to be complicated or costly – all it takes is planning and a little bit of creativity. A slideshow video maker, like the one from Placeit, allows you to upload your own content, edit text, font, and colors, and add music before downloading for use.
