The environment in which people now browse the web is fundamentally more competitive than any other media space in the history of advertising. Display ad designers have long had to cope with their work being one of multiple things in an environment competing for peoples’ attention, and TV advert producers know their audiences will channel hop if they don’t like what they see. But online video suffers from all these challenges and more.

Your online video is going to be competing with every single other piece of content on the web. Audiences who don’t like what they see will simply go and do something else – and that includes employees and business audiences too. Not only is your content competing for audiences, but the multiple devices that consumers use to access parts of the web simultaneously provide further opportunities for distraction and drop-out.

The best way to ensure your content gets seen and shared is to focus on producing content people actually want to watch. This is an incredibly difficult thing for many brands to do – even though they think they’re focusing on the customer, more often than not they’re thinking about themselves more. Ask a marketer why a customer really needs the content they’re planning and they’ll probably still say something like “because they need to understand the features and benefits of the product”. This is not what the customer needs, it’s what the brand wants, and it won’t work if it’s made the focus for your content.

Put your customer at the centre of your world and produce something that’s compellingly interesting, indispensably useful or unmissably entertaining. That way people might genuinely enjoy your content, and you‘ll find that it might even get shared around.

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