Content has become a priority for many companies, so the quantity of content produced is increasing. About 70 percent of all brands publish more this year than in 2016 at the expense of over a quarter of the marketing budget1.

A big share of the content is video for inbound marketing. Part of it has effect but a larger portion doesn’t. What works are product videos on product pages and how-tos, because the conversion increases. What works is the translation of static web pages with lots of text in videos because it leads to a better Google ranking, more traffic and accessibility with a smartphone. What makes no sense is a lot of the online content aimed at influencing the perception of a brand.

This is because the role a brand can play in the life of a customer is often overestimated. Many marketers believe brands can build relationships with buyers of the products and that customers with whom these relationships exist are receptive to stories about the brand. That assumption is unwarranted. The reality is that people have relationships with each other, seldom with brands and are not interested in information about the manufacturer of a product.

Nevertheless it’s possible to create videos which are beneficial to a brand as long as you realize that you need to attract viewers who find other things far more important. These alternatives are often online so they compete directly with videos released by your brand. This means you're only successful if the videos meet high standards.

If quantity is the priority these standards are usually not met. Some experts believe that brands should behave like publishers to be able to offer their target audiences new content continuously. We strongly disagree. It only leads to more information no one watches.

Successful videos about brands are based on strong concepts and add something interesting to what is already available. And very important: although the video is published by the brand, the brand is not the main subject, because nobody really cares about it.

Marco Klein + Partners can develop successful video content for you. We analyze whether video can add value. If so, we develop strategies for how this can be done. We create concepts and write scripts paying a lot of attention to the structure of the information transfer, the tone of voice and the probability of engagement and sharing. This leads to videos that are interesting for the visitors of a site, which they watch and keep watching, because the content is relevant.