This month, we’ve covered how professional video announcements act as the ultimate church media services…but now we’re going to cover the psychology behind why videos work better to grab attention and aid memory better than other information delivery methods. Better still, you’ll learn how churches can use this to their advantage.
First of all, let’s take a look at the word “announcements”: Just about every church has them, but the way they are presented is normally different depending on the type of church, style of worship and/or kind of congregation. We have all seen them – sometimes the announcements are presented live on a stage by someone who ends up rambling and not making much sense telling yet another joke about their cat, ultimately allowing something that was meant to inform the congregation of the exciting upcoming events to fail at its job.
Green Screen Talent Now has made a pledge to change all that.
But how do simple, professional and affordable announcements – made quickly and easily – grab audiences’ attention…both visually and audibly?
Videos for Church Announcements: Can You Hear Us Now?
You represent a church that “has it going on” (well, with activities and events, that is) and you need to communicate the details about the happenings to the people you’d like to participate. But how can you be sure you’re getting the word out effectively? Churches need to develop a communication strategy to ensure direction and a method between how, why, where and when things are announced.
• By USING MULTIPLE VEHICLES, announcements don’t just live in the Sunday bulletin or merely come from the platform on Sunday mornings; modern announcements can be found in both of those places AND on Facebook, Twitter, your website or weekly eNews. For church announcement videos to grab attention, they can’t be relegated to just one of those elements – they must be in or on all of them.
• By KEEPING IT VISUAL, graphics and video of events can be added which helps catch and hold attention. On Facebook, you can post a picture relating to the event and tie it into the announcement…and trust us, the visual element will grab attention more than just the text will.
• By KEEPING IT BRIEF, the congregation members don’t have to add to the flood of information that most of them have coming at them in the course of a week; most of us don’t have the time to digest a whole dissertation on an announcement, so video announcements that are less than one minute in length per item is ideal.
• By ANNOUNCING EARLY AND OFTEN, you can communicate everything at least two weeks before the date of the actual event – more if it’s a big deal. How does this help? If you can lay out your event schedule so that you plan weeks ahead, it can save you from forgetting an important announcement.
• By TARGETING YOUR AUDIENCE when possible, you get your message to the right people – there are indeed some events and announcements that need to be targeted instead of broadcast to the entire population.
These are all important aspects of a communication strategy and things that you should consider when you’re deciding what to announce and where to announce it. Spending some time considering your current strategy is a good idea, even if you’ve never considered these points, and see if there’s a way to improve it.
Video is the Future: Facts & Stats About Video Content
If you’ve spent any time on Green Screen Talent Now’s blog pages, you’ll know how much we’ve stressed the importance of video in today’s “give it to me now” world. Here are some juicy facts and video stats to further convince you that the real money is in the video, for church announcements and more, and how video is what people lean towards.
• TWO MINUTES is the average attention span of the desktop computer user when watching a video on channels such as YouTube.
• TWO MINUTES increase in time is spent on the site by visitors who watched a video compared to visitors who didn’t.
• TWO TIMES more engagement is generated by Instagram videos than by Instagram photos.
• THREE TIMES more backlinks can be attracted by posts that incorporate videos.
• THREE MINUTES is how long an average Android user will stick to watching a video on YouTube.
• TEN SECONDS is how long you’re given to grab the attention of viewers.
Additionally:
• Using videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86-percent.
• Articles with images get 94-percent more views than those without.
• Publishers who use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12-percent more than those that don’t.
• According to the Online Publishers Association, 80-percent of Internet users recall watching a video on a website they visited in the past 30 days…and it gets even better: Of that 80-percent, some 46-percent took some sort of action after viewing the ad.
In fact:
– 26% looked for more information about the subject of the video.
– 22-% visited the website named in the ad.
– 15% visited the company represented in the video ad.
– 12% purchased the specific product featured in the ad.
While these aforementioned stats aren’t, of course, directly related to church announcement videos, we’re posting them to make a point: Videos work better to grab attention and aid memory better than other information delivery portals.