In today’s ever-online society, reaching your audience has never been easier. There are countless methods and channels for getting your brand and messaging out in front of your prospective customers, members, or clients. However, choosing the best strategy continues to be a challenge for businesses of all sizes that is not easily solved.

The landscape for reaching your prospects has never been broader, and in today’s fast-moving internet era, if you want someone to notice you, you’re going to have to adapt to their use cases—go where the people go—and today that likely means trying something new, because users are doing new things all the time.

I’m old enough, although not by a lot, to remember the pre-Internet world of advertising. I bought my first car from the want ads in the Sunday newspaper. But since then, I’ve lived through dial-up minutes, AOL, the dawn of search engines, the dot-com bubble, file sharing like Napster and Torrents, and more recently, early social media like Vine, Blogger, Tumblr, Myspace, early Facebook and YouTube, and even Musical.ly (the predecessor to TikTok).

One thing all these have in common is that they were trying to reach people with new, exciting, and enticing methods. Another thing they had in common: they made their money by selling advertising. Advertisers and marketers knew then, and they know now, that you have to go where the people are to reach them—and, as I stated at the beginning of this article, today, the people are going more places than ever.

Video dominates social media

For this article, I’m going to address a method I see more and more people using, and I’m going to share what I’ve learned from trying to help you decide if or how you should journey down this path.

What is this method? Video, and to be more specific, video on social media platforms.

If you are one of the few people who live mostly away from the internet, have the self-control to stay off social media, or maybe you somehow still don’t have a smartphone, then this article is not for you. Continue doing what you’re doing. For the rest of us, let’s establish a few parameters and then dive in by answering some important questions.

For this exercise, I’m going to assume a couple of things. First, your business is a credit union or small financial-based business with average member or customer metrics. I understand every business or financial institution is unique, but I could never address every possible variation for when to use video marketing.

Second, the thing you’re trying to market is a loan product—it will not be necessary to define whether it is a car loan, mortgage, personal, etc., type loan, but establishing you’re a midsized institution trying to connect with your audience to consider a loan is a simple baseline which we can build from. With those parameters set, let’s dive into the strategies and tactics.

Determining audience and format

One of the most important decisions you’ll need to make is who you are trying to reach. I am looking for answers involving demographics, like age, gender, occupation, family structure, etc. The combination of these factors will determine the type of video you should make.

Influencer videos

For a younger audience, you may want to employ a tactic of using a less formal format of video. A casual “influencer” type of video, which speaks in a more candid tone to the viewer, would likely be more effective in achieving your goal. The best part of this is that, assuming you have the staff and tools to accomplish this style of video, you likely will save a lot of time and money on production.

These types of influencer videos are frequently filmed in the “selfie” style on a smartphone and subsequently require much less production time and cost! Of course, all videos will necessitate creative energy regarding the content of your video—there is no avoiding spending time coming up with your message and call to action process. Lastly, for this type of casual influencer video, you will likely be sharing this in a format that lends itself to short-form style, such as Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, etc.

Formal content

LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms that cater to larger populations of older generations will likely benefit from longer, higher production video formats. If your message is intended for more established adults with higher incomes, I would suggest a more polished approach for your video message. This audience is much more likely to respond to a video that projects intentionality with lighting, quality, framing, etc.

Picture a tv commercial or infomercial—these established generations often respond better to the traditional formats of video they have been exposed to for years or decades. These videos often will require more thought surrounding the setup. You will need to be more deliberate with your setting, preserving a quiet, well-lit performance space that conveys an intentional message to the viewer that this video was produced seriously and should be taken seriously.

This type of video can also be considerably longer than the short-form videos written about previously. Along with the professional look of these videos, the audience will expect a thorough and well-thought-out message. They will expect details and calls-to-action that will help them make an informed decision.

Pitfalls to avoid

Neither of these two types of videos is better than the other—both are needed, and both will be effective to a portion of your audience, but there are a few things to avoid.

One of the worst offending pitfalls in a video is bad audio. This can come in several different forms. First, the microphone is not picking up the voices well enough. Second, you have too much background noise, making it difficult to discern the speaker.

Third, your microphone quality is simply not good enough, and the result is a poor-quality, possibly crackly, product. Or fourth, your presenter speaks too quickly, mumbles, or uses any other style that makes it difficult for your viewers to understand what is being said. There is no faster way to make viewers move on than posting something with audio that they cannot understand.

The other pitfall to avoid is to choose the right amount of content for your type of video—if you’re making a casual short-form video, do not overload the video with content. If you have too much content, this is not a problem.

More content is great, because now you have enough content for two short-form videos! You could even consider wrapping the first video with a stay-tuned-for-the-next-video type ending. Users on platforms like TikTok or Instagram expect quick and to-the-point clips—if you overload your video, you should not be surprised if viewers are not sticking around.

Varying difficulty levels

The more casual option will be much simpler to execute as a first-time video maker. Basically, anyone with some creative ideas and a smartphone can produce an influencer-style video. However, the longer-formatted professional-style videos could be very daunting when you first approach attempting to record one—and I would not be surprised if most readers would say to themselves, “This sounds like a lot of work, and I am not sure where to start.”

This is no different than many new challenges we face in the workplace—and often we need to ask for help. I have worked with many different firms within the marketing space that offer assistance in either getting you started or completely seeing your entire production through to the end. This will not be inexpensive, but I will encourage you by saying, although it may seem very costly at first, you will quickly gain knowledge, experience, and the wherewithal to begin creating future videos in-house.

Practice makes perfect!

In today’s social media landscape, your messages and communications need to be much more than a quickly written message or a photo or graphic—you’re going to need to add video to your repertoire. Dig in and don’t be afraid to try something new. I believe you will find it very rewarding to reach your audience with either a short-form or long-form video!