Video? Photos? What's better?
Video or photos?
What’s the best investment?
It’s hard work maintaining your audience’s attention in a noisy online world.
I was talking with a speaker colleague the other day about this and the topic of content creation popped up. She was debating whether video or photos was the best path for her to create relevant, valuable and clickable content to grow her audience.
My response?
It’s not one or the other - it’s both.
The reason is because they both serve different purposes.
As I explained to her, photos are a great way to introduce people into your world.
It’s a low investment of time for a potential client to consume the content. Their attention is captured by the image, they click on it, and they consume the story in the caption.
This type of content puts you squarely on their radars and informs them of how you can help solve their problems.
They also get a sense of your personality through the emotional sentiment of the photo and story, and this helps them determine whether or not you’d be the type of person with whom they’d want to spend time.
Photo-driven content, as a result, acts as a front door into your world.
Video, on the other hand, can help serve as the final step in inspiring someone to set up a call and talk directly to you.
While consuming a video clip - whether it’s 30 seconds, 4 minutes or 2 hours - requires more effort from the viewer, these clips offer a potentially bigger payoff.
When you leverage music, dialog and B-Roll, there are a lot more sensory elements added to the mix to create an emotional connection with the viewer, especially if the story shared in the clip relates directly to the person watching the video.
Because of these added emotional layers, video is an effective tool at nudging potential clients to get on your calendar and learn more about how you can help them.
But again, it’s a bigger time investment, and some people don’t like to sit and watch videos all day, so it has to be used in a strategic and not an overwhelming way.
When it comes to figuring out what the best approach to leveraging both photos and video in your online content strategy is, my advice is to mix it up.
Remember, people are consuming your content at different stages of interest. Some never heard of you until now, while others have been around for a bit.
Use your photos to inspire the newer folks to stick around and learn more, and the video to motivate the folks who like you already to take the next step and take action, whether it’s signing up for your course, buying your book, or to get on the phone with you and learn about the other ways you can help them.
When you take this approach with your online content, you’re creating a feed that exhibits visual variety and that will help create a clear signal to those you serve.
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