We get it – shrinking attention spans and the growing consumption of short-form video have conditioned many marketers to keep their storytelling short, sweet, and pithy. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube (Shorts) thrive on short-form content, and while they are an important tool in the marketing arsenal, leveraging only short-form content may be short-sighted for your brand.
Video content marketing remains a safe and successful place for the art of long-form. Whether telling your brand story through a mini-documentary, educating the public through an explainer video, or converting customers with the help of a testimonial video, long-form video can contribute to every stage of your marketing funnel.
Its versatility and creativity as a medium make it an ideal canvas for a brand storyteller and a valuable investment worth adding to your brand video strategy. Before taking on a long-form endeavor, though, it’s important to clearly define the goals and use cases for the video to guide the production and maximize its lifespan as a useful piece of content.
The Long and Short of It
Perhaps the defining characteristic of a long-form video is more its role than its runtime. Through our work with clients, we’ve found that long-form helps build brand trust, identity, and authority through education, insight, and connection.
The nature of long-form lends itself to mini-documentaries or brand films that tell the story of a brand through an artistic lens that conveys the purpose, mission, and values of an organization to establish an emotional connection with the audience. But there are a variety of useful videos that can provide insight into a brand or educate and engage its audiences. Evaluating the goals of your brand video strategy can help you choose the approach that will resonate with viewers wherever they may be in your marketing funnel. Keep this tips in mind:
- Tutorials and Testimonials:
These are built to teach viewers something practical by providing clear step-by-step guidance or demonstrating how real customers applied your products or services in their own lives. This type of video is a great way to increase engagement with your audience and establish your brand as a trusted resource for them. - Webinars and Presentations:
Designed to inform and deepen your audience’s knowledge on a given topic, webinars help highlight the people behind your brand. They also provide an opportunity to gather first-party data from attendees to grow your email distribution list and open the door for follow-ups. - Product Demos and Explainers:
Showcasing features and benefits in a detailed way can help potential customers understand the value of your product and how to use it in their everyday lives. An informed consumer is an empowered consumer, and one who might click to purchase.
- Interviews and Panel Discussions:
These formats can help establish your brand positioning by delivering expert opinions, new perspectives, and industry trends – less about how to engage with your brand, more about how your brand engages with the industries and world around it. - Documentaries and Brand Films:
These more traditional long-form videos extend the value of your brand and demonstrate the ethos behind it. Although they also spark connection, they offer insight through powerful storytelling that captures your company’s mission, vision, and emotional promise.
- Behind-the-Scenes Content:
Younger audiences continue to seek out humans over institutions. With a look inside your company, audiences not only get to see the real experts at work, but also the authentic culture and atmosphere behind the brand, which builds emotional connection and relatability. - Live Video:
Though it can present unique challenges for brands, the real-time engagement of live fosters a strong sense of immediacy and authenticity. It invites direct interaction with your audience, strengthening community and trust.
When audiences get a clearer sense of your personality and purpose, your brand becomes more memorable and meaningful as an organization they feel they know and trust. With such a wide variety of executions, long-form videos can support every stage of your marketing funnel, guiding your audiences from curiosity to conversion.
Playing the Long Game
While long-form video can seem like a greater investment up front, it can create efficiency for your brand in the long run. One major shoot can help fill your content calendar across platforms and across the funnel by repurposing short clips from the full-length piece.
For example, the content of a single long-form video could provide teasers for social platforms, GIFs for email marketing, background for graphics and pull-out quotes, short clips for your website, or assets for pitch decks and presentations.
Repurposing video not only extends the life span and increases the ROI of the original project, but it also helps reinforce your brand through a consistent narrative and experience across all your channels.
A (spark) of Inspiration
As a full-service production agency, we love helping brands find creative ways to tell their story through video, and we’ve had the opportunity to use many of the formats above to help our clients educate, inspire, and connect with their audiences.
In a 2024 conversation about future video trends, (spark) co-owner and president, Ember Marr, said, “I think it’s really easy to tell a story. I think it’s really hard to tell a story well. I think anyone with a camera could have gone up to Gilda [Wabbit, the subject of an award-winning (spark) documentary) and said, ‘tell me about your life.’ But being able to have a creative direction and execute on it — that’s something that’s much harder to teach, and it’s much harder to pull off in a way that’s visually exciting.”
If you’re looking for a bit of inspiration and direction for your brand story, here are some of the videos we helped bring to life for our clients:
When viewers experience Naomi’s story, she invites them to open their hearts and minds to how their own actions impact others and how they have the power to choose what kind of impact that will be.
As longer-form storytelling content continued to rise in popularity, we looked to our neighborhoods for mini-doc opportunities and settled into the Butchertown neighborhood in Louisville for our first City Spotlight: Decade.
When the Linder College of Business at the University of Cincinnati was celebrating 25 years of fueling young entrepreneurs, their eyes were set on the future. Our video highlighted the hard work that led to this point and their path forward for the audience at their celebratory gala.
As a regional production company, our team finds value in staying connected to our various localities. In 2020, we were proud to collaborate with Chef Ryan Santos, fresh off his James Beard Award nomination, to highlight his boutique Over-the-Rhine eatery, Please.
Invest in Long-Form Video With (spark) by Your Side
Through the success of these productions and others, we’ve found that long-form video doesn’t have to compete with short-form. It can complement and fuel it by building emotional connections, strengthening your brand identity, and feeding your marketing channels with rich, reusable content.vYour brand story is worth telling, no matter how long it takes, and our team of experts here at (spark) is ready to help you do just that. Contact us today to learn more about our past and current work or to see how we could give your brand a long-form video boost.
