Techniques for Crafting Encouraging Personal Growth Vids

How to Create a Lifestyle Video to Inspire Your Audience

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Do you wish to show your brand or product to inspire your audience with the lifestyle that they aspire to have? Are you on the lookout for innovative ways to earn intensely loyal and interactive followers for your business? Creating a lifestyle video that appeals to a niche demographic and helps your audience visualize how your products fit into their way of life is the ideal way to motivate them to take action and become your customer.

Whether you are a lifestyle brand or not, you need to offer content that educates and informs your audience and stands out amongst the best in the industry. Videos are an excellent way to connect with the audience, especially for brands that wish to engage their customers with meaningful content.

Today, businesses of every size tend to favor lifestyle videos that better appeal to the audience and communicate the brand’s values. Creating an attractive lifestyle video can thus be the ticket to reach a wider audience and upgrade the digital presence of every business.

• Part 1: What is Lifestyle Video?
• Part 2: 6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video
• Part 3: How to Create a Lifestyle Video?
• Part 4: How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

What is Lifestyle Video?

Lifestyle content exemplifies the ‘lifestyle’ behind a product or service and appeals to the demographic that you are trying to reach. It is a form of video marketing that pushes products and services to customers by showing the quality of life associated with a particular brand.

The principal objective of lifestyle content is appealing to a specific demographic, culture, or subculture. With these videos, you can focus on your products and services, using stunning visuals and action shots to portray a beautiful picture of what your brand’s potential customers’ lives will be like if they become the consumer of your product and services.

6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video

1. Informing & Educating

One of the most significant benefits of lifestyle content is that it helps customers understand products. With a plethora of choices out there, marketers today are no longer taking the pitching kind of approach. They want to approach their audience with a value-based offer instead of sales. And with lifestyle videos, you can excel at giving customers a close-up look at your products and services.

2. Caters to Your Audience’s Interests

Lifestyle content caters to the target audience. Since these videos define your market and your brand, it carries a specific style that’s based on your aesthetics or looks. What makes video marketing so effective is that they can introduce your story and brand in an interesting way to potential customers.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love high-quality content like videos. Using lifestyle videos in your web pages and other types of content can thus work wonders for search engine optimization. As long as your lifestyle video is well-optimized with the right keywords, a solid title, and a good meta description, your video content can increase your web traffic.

4. Great Promotional Tool

Brands can distribute lifestyle content on different channels for reaching your target audience right away. Once you post the video on your website, you can share it on your social networking platforms or promote it with paid ads. This way, you can get customers excited about what you are offering them.

5. Taps into Emotions

Emotions are a significant component of the purchasing decision of consumers. Studies have found that ad campaigns with only emotional content perform about twice as well compared to those with only rational content. So, creating lifestyle video content that makes your audience feel good can put your business in a positive light.

6. Boosts Conversions

Lifestyle videos are excellent for conversions on websites as they influence visitors by promoting the lifestyle a customer can achieve if they patronize the product or service. What makes such content more compelling is that they excite customers about what you offer them.

How to Create a Lifestyle Video?

The most stunning lifestyle videos are polished, sleek, and visually appealing. Developing a lifestyle video content that exceeds your target audience’s expectations is vital to appeal to your customer’s perfect lifestyle. Creating these videos is easy if you follow the step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Pre-Production

The pre-production stage is when the planning happens for a video. From creative brainstorming to innovative storyboarding, everything happens here. Pre-production begins with experts getting a feel of your product, who it appeals to, and how it works. Next, is the stage of scripting out your video, writing down the visual ideas, and the product features and dialogue that go alongside it. Finally, you need to round up talents like actors, voice-actors, locations, and extras needed to film.

Step 2: Production

Once your lifestyle video is meticulously planned out, your next step is to film it. While shooting an average video takes eight hours, some videos with several locations can require two full shooting days or more. The exact shooting schedule depends on what the script demands.

Since these videos are meant to capture a particular way of life for appealing to a specific kind of person, you should not cut corners in terms of quality. Remember, the better the quality of the footage, the more appealing the end product will be.

Step 3: Post-Production

It is the stage where you need to gather the footage you have shot so far and put them along with voice-over or music depending on your script demands. The main goal in this stage is to put the visuals together in a captivating way to promote your service and product. Here, using a powerful video editing tool seems necessary because you need to make your lifestyle video stand out from the crowd.

How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

A lifestyle video is one of the popular marketing tools for businesses of every size today. These videos are more memorable, more engaging, and much more popular than any other kinds of content among consumers. But, are you curious as to how to promote your lifestyle content to gain maximum exposure? All you need to do is distribute your lifestyle content on the proper channels to grab your audience’s attention and engage with new consumers.

Social Media

Lifestyle videos are aspirational, enlightening in nature, and made to appeal to specific demographics. It makes them great content for sharing on social networking platforms – an active digital marketing channel. Share your lifestyle content across various social media accounts. Ensure you attach a call-to-action for your friends and followers to share.

Your Company’s Website

Hosting your promotional videos on your website, particularly your homepage is an excellent way to immediately introduce incoming web traffic to your products and services, thus increasing your site’s SEO ranking. Besides the homepage, sharing the video content on your blogs is another unique way of re-purposing your content.

Media Outlets

Find out related media outlets that your potential customers read and follow daily. It would help if you also pitched journalists who take an interest in your brand or consider purchasing advertising space on their website. Since there are both correct and incorrect ways to do so, ensure you conduct thorough research on how to pitch media outlets beforehand.

Paid Advertising

You can also pay for featuring your lifestyle video on popular blogs and social networking sites. This way, you can take advantage of hyper-specific tools for reaching your target audience. Advertising on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is an excellent way to reach the right demographic.

Niche Groups & Forums

When targeting a particular demographic, you will want to reach out to where your audience hangs out online. Do research on the industry chat rooms your target demographic frequently uses. While sharing your video content on these channels, just ensure that they are relevant to your potential customer-base, regularly updated, and also includes active users.

Conclusion

Lifestyle videos allow brands to connect with their consumers better. Whether you are a start-up, an SME, or an established company, lifestyle videos may be just what you need to create a unique brand statement or get people excited about your product or service. So what are you still waiting for? It’s time to create content that resonates with your target market and establish your business as a top choice!

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Do you wish to show your brand or product to inspire your audience with the lifestyle that they aspire to have? Are you on the lookout for innovative ways to earn intensely loyal and interactive followers for your business? Creating a lifestyle video that appeals to a niche demographic and helps your audience visualize how your products fit into their way of life is the ideal way to motivate them to take action and become your customer.

Whether you are a lifestyle brand or not, you need to offer content that educates and informs your audience and stands out amongst the best in the industry. Videos are an excellent way to connect with the audience, especially for brands that wish to engage their customers with meaningful content.

Today, businesses of every size tend to favor lifestyle videos that better appeal to the audience and communicate the brand’s values. Creating an attractive lifestyle video can thus be the ticket to reach a wider audience and upgrade the digital presence of every business.

• Part 1: What is Lifestyle Video?
• Part 2: 6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video
• Part 3: How to Create a Lifestyle Video?
• Part 4: How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

What is Lifestyle Video?

Lifestyle content exemplifies the ‘lifestyle’ behind a product or service and appeals to the demographic that you are trying to reach. It is a form of video marketing that pushes products and services to customers by showing the quality of life associated with a particular brand.

The principal objective of lifestyle content is appealing to a specific demographic, culture, or subculture. With these videos, you can focus on your products and services, using stunning visuals and action shots to portray a beautiful picture of what your brand’s potential customers’ lives will be like if they become the consumer of your product and services.

6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video

1. Informing & Educating

One of the most significant benefits of lifestyle content is that it helps customers understand products. With a plethora of choices out there, marketers today are no longer taking the pitching kind of approach. They want to approach their audience with a value-based offer instead of sales. And with lifestyle videos, you can excel at giving customers a close-up look at your products and services.

2. Caters to Your Audience’s Interests

Lifestyle content caters to the target audience. Since these videos define your market and your brand, it carries a specific style that’s based on your aesthetics or looks. What makes video marketing so effective is that they can introduce your story and brand in an interesting way to potential customers.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love high-quality content like videos. Using lifestyle videos in your web pages and other types of content can thus work wonders for search engine optimization. As long as your lifestyle video is well-optimized with the right keywords, a solid title, and a good meta description, your video content can increase your web traffic.

4. Great Promotional Tool

Brands can distribute lifestyle content on different channels for reaching your target audience right away. Once you post the video on your website, you can share it on your social networking platforms or promote it with paid ads. This way, you can get customers excited about what you are offering them.

5. Taps into Emotions

Emotions are a significant component of the purchasing decision of consumers. Studies have found that ad campaigns with only emotional content perform about twice as well compared to those with only rational content. So, creating lifestyle video content that makes your audience feel good can put your business in a positive light.

6. Boosts Conversions

Lifestyle videos are excellent for conversions on websites as they influence visitors by promoting the lifestyle a customer can achieve if they patronize the product or service. What makes such content more compelling is that they excite customers about what you offer them.

How to Create a Lifestyle Video?

The most stunning lifestyle videos are polished, sleek, and visually appealing. Developing a lifestyle video content that exceeds your target audience’s expectations is vital to appeal to your customer’s perfect lifestyle. Creating these videos is easy if you follow the step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Pre-Production

The pre-production stage is when the planning happens for a video. From creative brainstorming to innovative storyboarding, everything happens here. Pre-production begins with experts getting a feel of your product, who it appeals to, and how it works. Next, is the stage of scripting out your video, writing down the visual ideas, and the product features and dialogue that go alongside it. Finally, you need to round up talents like actors, voice-actors, locations, and extras needed to film.

Step 2: Production

Once your lifestyle video is meticulously planned out, your next step is to film it. While shooting an average video takes eight hours, some videos with several locations can require two full shooting days or more. The exact shooting schedule depends on what the script demands.

Since these videos are meant to capture a particular way of life for appealing to a specific kind of person, you should not cut corners in terms of quality. Remember, the better the quality of the footage, the more appealing the end product will be.

Step 3: Post-Production

It is the stage where you need to gather the footage you have shot so far and put them along with voice-over or music depending on your script demands. The main goal in this stage is to put the visuals together in a captivating way to promote your service and product. Here, using a powerful video editing tool seems necessary because you need to make your lifestyle video stand out from the crowd.

How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

A lifestyle video is one of the popular marketing tools for businesses of every size today. These videos are more memorable, more engaging, and much more popular than any other kinds of content among consumers. But, are you curious as to how to promote your lifestyle content to gain maximum exposure? All you need to do is distribute your lifestyle content on the proper channels to grab your audience’s attention and engage with new consumers.

Social Media

Lifestyle videos are aspirational, enlightening in nature, and made to appeal to specific demographics. It makes them great content for sharing on social networking platforms – an active digital marketing channel. Share your lifestyle content across various social media accounts. Ensure you attach a call-to-action for your friends and followers to share.

Your Company’s Website

Hosting your promotional videos on your website, particularly your homepage is an excellent way to immediately introduce incoming web traffic to your products and services, thus increasing your site’s SEO ranking. Besides the homepage, sharing the video content on your blogs is another unique way of re-purposing your content.

Media Outlets

Find out related media outlets that your potential customers read and follow daily. It would help if you also pitched journalists who take an interest in your brand or consider purchasing advertising space on their website. Since there are both correct and incorrect ways to do so, ensure you conduct thorough research on how to pitch media outlets beforehand.

Paid Advertising

You can also pay for featuring your lifestyle video on popular blogs and social networking sites. This way, you can take advantage of hyper-specific tools for reaching your target audience. Advertising on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is an excellent way to reach the right demographic.

Niche Groups & Forums

When targeting a particular demographic, you will want to reach out to where your audience hangs out online. Do research on the industry chat rooms your target demographic frequently uses. While sharing your video content on these channels, just ensure that they are relevant to your potential customer-base, regularly updated, and also includes active users.

Conclusion

Lifestyle videos allow brands to connect with their consumers better. Whether you are a start-up, an SME, or an established company, lifestyle videos may be just what you need to create a unique brand statement or get people excited about your product or service. So what are you still waiting for? It’s time to create content that resonates with your target market and establish your business as a top choice!

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Do you wish to show your brand or product to inspire your audience with the lifestyle that they aspire to have? Are you on the lookout for innovative ways to earn intensely loyal and interactive followers for your business? Creating a lifestyle video that appeals to a niche demographic and helps your audience visualize how your products fit into their way of life is the ideal way to motivate them to take action and become your customer.

Whether you are a lifestyle brand or not, you need to offer content that educates and informs your audience and stands out amongst the best in the industry. Videos are an excellent way to connect with the audience, especially for brands that wish to engage their customers with meaningful content.

Today, businesses of every size tend to favor lifestyle videos that better appeal to the audience and communicate the brand’s values. Creating an attractive lifestyle video can thus be the ticket to reach a wider audience and upgrade the digital presence of every business.

• Part 1: What is Lifestyle Video?
• Part 2: 6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video
• Part 3: How to Create a Lifestyle Video?
• Part 4: How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

What is Lifestyle Video?

Lifestyle content exemplifies the ‘lifestyle’ behind a product or service and appeals to the demographic that you are trying to reach. It is a form of video marketing that pushes products and services to customers by showing the quality of life associated with a particular brand.

The principal objective of lifestyle content is appealing to a specific demographic, culture, or subculture. With these videos, you can focus on your products and services, using stunning visuals and action shots to portray a beautiful picture of what your brand’s potential customers’ lives will be like if they become the consumer of your product and services.

6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video

1. Informing & Educating

One of the most significant benefits of lifestyle content is that it helps customers understand products. With a plethora of choices out there, marketers today are no longer taking the pitching kind of approach. They want to approach their audience with a value-based offer instead of sales. And with lifestyle videos, you can excel at giving customers a close-up look at your products and services.

2. Caters to Your Audience’s Interests

Lifestyle content caters to the target audience. Since these videos define your market and your brand, it carries a specific style that’s based on your aesthetics or looks. What makes video marketing so effective is that they can introduce your story and brand in an interesting way to potential customers.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love high-quality content like videos. Using lifestyle videos in your web pages and other types of content can thus work wonders for search engine optimization. As long as your lifestyle video is well-optimized with the right keywords, a solid title, and a good meta description, your video content can increase your web traffic.

4. Great Promotional Tool

Brands can distribute lifestyle content on different channels for reaching your target audience right away. Once you post the video on your website, you can share it on your social networking platforms or promote it with paid ads. This way, you can get customers excited about what you are offering them.

5. Taps into Emotions

Emotions are a significant component of the purchasing decision of consumers. Studies have found that ad campaigns with only emotional content perform about twice as well compared to those with only rational content. So, creating lifestyle video content that makes your audience feel good can put your business in a positive light.

6. Boosts Conversions

Lifestyle videos are excellent for conversions on websites as they influence visitors by promoting the lifestyle a customer can achieve if they patronize the product or service. What makes such content more compelling is that they excite customers about what you offer them.

How to Create a Lifestyle Video?

The most stunning lifestyle videos are polished, sleek, and visually appealing. Developing a lifestyle video content that exceeds your target audience’s expectations is vital to appeal to your customer’s perfect lifestyle. Creating these videos is easy if you follow the step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Pre-Production

The pre-production stage is when the planning happens for a video. From creative brainstorming to innovative storyboarding, everything happens here. Pre-production begins with experts getting a feel of your product, who it appeals to, and how it works. Next, is the stage of scripting out your video, writing down the visual ideas, and the product features and dialogue that go alongside it. Finally, you need to round up talents like actors, voice-actors, locations, and extras needed to film.

Step 2: Production

Once your lifestyle video is meticulously planned out, your next step is to film it. While shooting an average video takes eight hours, some videos with several locations can require two full shooting days or more. The exact shooting schedule depends on what the script demands.

Since these videos are meant to capture a particular way of life for appealing to a specific kind of person, you should not cut corners in terms of quality. Remember, the better the quality of the footage, the more appealing the end product will be.

Step 3: Post-Production

It is the stage where you need to gather the footage you have shot so far and put them along with voice-over or music depending on your script demands. The main goal in this stage is to put the visuals together in a captivating way to promote your service and product. Here, using a powerful video editing tool seems necessary because you need to make your lifestyle video stand out from the crowd.

How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

A lifestyle video is one of the popular marketing tools for businesses of every size today. These videos are more memorable, more engaging, and much more popular than any other kinds of content among consumers. But, are you curious as to how to promote your lifestyle content to gain maximum exposure? All you need to do is distribute your lifestyle content on the proper channels to grab your audience’s attention and engage with new consumers.

Social Media

Lifestyle videos are aspirational, enlightening in nature, and made to appeal to specific demographics. It makes them great content for sharing on social networking platforms – an active digital marketing channel. Share your lifestyle content across various social media accounts. Ensure you attach a call-to-action for your friends and followers to share.

Your Company’s Website

Hosting your promotional videos on your website, particularly your homepage is an excellent way to immediately introduce incoming web traffic to your products and services, thus increasing your site’s SEO ranking. Besides the homepage, sharing the video content on your blogs is another unique way of re-purposing your content.

Media Outlets

Find out related media outlets that your potential customers read and follow daily. It would help if you also pitched journalists who take an interest in your brand or consider purchasing advertising space on their website. Since there are both correct and incorrect ways to do so, ensure you conduct thorough research on how to pitch media outlets beforehand.

Paid Advertising

You can also pay for featuring your lifestyle video on popular blogs and social networking sites. This way, you can take advantage of hyper-specific tools for reaching your target audience. Advertising on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is an excellent way to reach the right demographic.

Niche Groups & Forums

When targeting a particular demographic, you will want to reach out to where your audience hangs out online. Do research on the industry chat rooms your target demographic frequently uses. While sharing your video content on these channels, just ensure that they are relevant to your potential customer-base, regularly updated, and also includes active users.

Conclusion

Lifestyle videos allow brands to connect with their consumers better. Whether you are a start-up, an SME, or an established company, lifestyle videos may be just what you need to create a unique brand statement or get people excited about your product or service. So what are you still waiting for? It’s time to create content that resonates with your target market and establish your business as a top choice!

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Do you wish to show your brand or product to inspire your audience with the lifestyle that they aspire to have? Are you on the lookout for innovative ways to earn intensely loyal and interactive followers for your business? Creating a lifestyle video that appeals to a niche demographic and helps your audience visualize how your products fit into their way of life is the ideal way to motivate them to take action and become your customer.

Whether you are a lifestyle brand or not, you need to offer content that educates and informs your audience and stands out amongst the best in the industry. Videos are an excellent way to connect with the audience, especially for brands that wish to engage their customers with meaningful content.

Today, businesses of every size tend to favor lifestyle videos that better appeal to the audience and communicate the brand’s values. Creating an attractive lifestyle video can thus be the ticket to reach a wider audience and upgrade the digital presence of every business.

• Part 1: What is Lifestyle Video?
• Part 2: 6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video
• Part 3: How to Create a Lifestyle Video?
• Part 4: How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

What is Lifestyle Video?

Lifestyle content exemplifies the ‘lifestyle’ behind a product or service and appeals to the demographic that you are trying to reach. It is a form of video marketing that pushes products and services to customers by showing the quality of life associated with a particular brand.

The principal objective of lifestyle content is appealing to a specific demographic, culture, or subculture. With these videos, you can focus on your products and services, using stunning visuals and action shots to portray a beautiful picture of what your brand’s potential customers’ lives will be like if they become the consumer of your product and services.

6 Key Benefits of Creating a Lifestyle Video

1. Informing & Educating

One of the most significant benefits of lifestyle content is that it helps customers understand products. With a plethora of choices out there, marketers today are no longer taking the pitching kind of approach. They want to approach their audience with a value-based offer instead of sales. And with lifestyle videos, you can excel at giving customers a close-up look at your products and services.

2. Caters to Your Audience’s Interests

Lifestyle content caters to the target audience. Since these videos define your market and your brand, it carries a specific style that’s based on your aesthetics or looks. What makes video marketing so effective is that they can introduce your story and brand in an interesting way to potential customers.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love high-quality content like videos. Using lifestyle videos in your web pages and other types of content can thus work wonders for search engine optimization. As long as your lifestyle video is well-optimized with the right keywords, a solid title, and a good meta description, your video content can increase your web traffic.

4. Great Promotional Tool

Brands can distribute lifestyle content on different channels for reaching your target audience right away. Once you post the video on your website, you can share it on your social networking platforms or promote it with paid ads. This way, you can get customers excited about what you are offering them.

5. Taps into Emotions

Emotions are a significant component of the purchasing decision of consumers. Studies have found that ad campaigns with only emotional content perform about twice as well compared to those with only rational content. So, creating lifestyle video content that makes your audience feel good can put your business in a positive light.

6. Boosts Conversions

Lifestyle videos are excellent for conversions on websites as they influence visitors by promoting the lifestyle a customer can achieve if they patronize the product or service. What makes such content more compelling is that they excite customers about what you offer them.

How to Create a Lifestyle Video?

The most stunning lifestyle videos are polished, sleek, and visually appealing. Developing a lifestyle video content that exceeds your target audience’s expectations is vital to appeal to your customer’s perfect lifestyle. Creating these videos is easy if you follow the step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Pre-Production

The pre-production stage is when the planning happens for a video. From creative brainstorming to innovative storyboarding, everything happens here. Pre-production begins with experts getting a feel of your product, who it appeals to, and how it works. Next, is the stage of scripting out your video, writing down the visual ideas, and the product features and dialogue that go alongside it. Finally, you need to round up talents like actors, voice-actors, locations, and extras needed to film.

Step 2: Production

Once your lifestyle video is meticulously planned out, your next step is to film it. While shooting an average video takes eight hours, some videos with several locations can require two full shooting days or more. The exact shooting schedule depends on what the script demands.

Since these videos are meant to capture a particular way of life for appealing to a specific kind of person, you should not cut corners in terms of quality. Remember, the better the quality of the footage, the more appealing the end product will be.

Step 3: Post-Production

It is the stage where you need to gather the footage you have shot so far and put them along with voice-over or music depending on your script demands. The main goal in this stage is to put the visuals together in a captivating way to promote your service and product. Here, using a powerful video editing tool seems necessary because you need to make your lifestyle video stand out from the crowd.

How to Promote Your Lifestyle Video?

A lifestyle video is one of the popular marketing tools for businesses of every size today. These videos are more memorable, more engaging, and much more popular than any other kinds of content among consumers. But, are you curious as to how to promote your lifestyle content to gain maximum exposure? All you need to do is distribute your lifestyle content on the proper channels to grab your audience’s attention and engage with new consumers.

Social Media

Lifestyle videos are aspirational, enlightening in nature, and made to appeal to specific demographics. It makes them great content for sharing on social networking platforms – an active digital marketing channel. Share your lifestyle content across various social media accounts. Ensure you attach a call-to-action for your friends and followers to share.

Your Company’s Website

Hosting your promotional videos on your website, particularly your homepage is an excellent way to immediately introduce incoming web traffic to your products and services, thus increasing your site’s SEO ranking. Besides the homepage, sharing the video content on your blogs is another unique way of re-purposing your content.

Media Outlets

Find out related media outlets that your potential customers read and follow daily. It would help if you also pitched journalists who take an interest in your brand or consider purchasing advertising space on their website. Since there are both correct and incorrect ways to do so, ensure you conduct thorough research on how to pitch media outlets beforehand.

Paid Advertising

You can also pay for featuring your lifestyle video on popular blogs and social networking sites. This way, you can take advantage of hyper-specific tools for reaching your target audience. Advertising on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is an excellent way to reach the right demographic.

Niche Groups & Forums

When targeting a particular demographic, you will want to reach out to where your audience hangs out online. Do research on the industry chat rooms your target demographic frequently uses. While sharing your video content on these channels, just ensure that they are relevant to your potential customer-base, regularly updated, and also includes active users.

Conclusion

Lifestyle videos allow brands to connect with their consumers better. Whether you are a start-up, an SME, or an established company, lifestyle videos may be just what you need to create a unique brand statement or get people excited about your product or service. So what are you still waiting for? It’s time to create content that resonates with your target market and establish your business as a top choice!

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Audience Allure: 3 Ultimate Video Growth Methods

The Best Storytelling Techniques to Grow Your YouTube Channel

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

0

In the distracting world, we live in, you need to be a good storyteller to grow your YouTube channel. Your audience is not going to stick around to watch your whole video if your content isn’t enticing or relatable. If you want to get people to watch all your videos, you need to get them emotionally invested with your stories.

Here are 3 methods for creating an awesome story:

• Method 1: CREATE SUSPENSE
• Method 2: USE EMPATHY
• Method 3: TAKE THE AUDIENCE ON A MEANINGFUL JOURNEY

1. Create Suspense

The hero has an objective, but the plan might fail.

The likelihood of something going wrong is what makes a story suspenseful. When you tell a suspenseful story, your audience will have a heightened focus and a strong motivation to continue listening. They want to know if the hero succeeds. Keep the audience waiting and expecting. Don’t give away the ending right away.

What Does a Suspenseful Story Sound Like?

When we talk about a story that is dragging on, it is because there is no suspense. There is nothing at stake, there are no obstacles, there is no problem and, with no problem, there is no promise of resolution.

Here are a few examples you can use to pump more suspense into your story:

- Address a fear (example: being alone for the prom)

- An objective (example: asking the crush out to the dance)

- Consequences of failing (example: being embarrassed in front of the whole school)

- Limited time (example: prom is next week)

- Obstacles (example: the crush has an aggressive ex.)

You can feel your heart rate speeding up simply thinking about the character’s story in the example. Does it have a happy ending or not? We want to know!

Raise Questions After Questions

A good storyteller knows that as soon as they answer a question for their audience, they need to present another one. The audience will always need to have a puzzle in their mind, one that needs to be solved. That is what will keep their interest.

For example: If the hero ends up going to the prom with his crush, the next big question can be: Will they kiss at the last dance?

This continues building on the tension and increasing the stakes evermore.

Check out the suspenseful story from YouTuber, MissRemiAshten . The way she tells the story, we discover more and about her psycho neighbor and the incident gradually. A little bit of information about the neighbor is revealed at a time… not all at once.

Include a Cliffhanger

We’ve all had those moments at the end of an intense television show where we are shouting at the screen because it suddenly cut to black as the main characters were left in a precarious position. That emotional outburst is brought to us by a good cliffhanger, and a good cliffhanger can assure us that the audience will return for more.

But there needs to be more! A cliffhanger is a promise to the viewer that eventually they will be rewarded for their patience and it will be satisfying.

In this cliffhanger from Casey Neistat, he simply asks us a question, “Was that good?” This calls upon us to recall all the awesome YouTube videos we have seen created by filmmakers that aren’t considered “prestigious.” A cliffhanger does not have to end with an epic reveal; it can wrap up with loose ends and allow the audience to tie it up themselves.

How to Deliver a Good Cliffhanger

Applying good cliffhangers to your YouTube videos is a balancing act. You want to draw your audience in, but you also need to have a payoff that is worth the wait.

Done well, a cliffhanger will leave your audience wanting more. Done poorly, a cliffhanger will leave your audience feeling to mislead and a little ripped off, hesitant to listen to more stories from you.

A good cliffhanger does not have to be life or death, but it does have to be the moment the story has been leading up to.

Before you start telling your story, consider the key details that are most impactful.

Once you have the points you want to hit, plan out the reveal. Weave the story together, but withhold the pivotal details until the cliffhanger. Thendeliver it on camera confidently .

Here are two ways you can present your cliffhanger for amplified effect:

1. Slow Down and Have Pauses

As your story intensifies, bring the pace down — or stop completely. The silence becomes the cliffhanger. It can last a second or more, depending on how confident you are in the tension you have built.

Your next words or shots can be the reveal. If you are skilled enough, you can lead into another story one that connects to the previous. If you are trying this, make sure that in the end, the payoff has double the impact. The reveal needs to be twice as powerful if you are going to take the audience on another journey before wrapping up and answering the long-awaited questions.

2. Use Repetition

Whether you want to misdirect your audience or hammer home a point, using repetition throughout your story will help you build the tension you need to establish the cliffhanger.

In this example, we see YouTuber, A little bit of Monika uses both pace and repetition in her storytelling method.

The video starts off at a speedy pace, all the way until the last scene where the confrontation occurs. That’s her slowing down the story so that we are all anticipating the reveal. Is she or is she not actor, Saoirse Ronan?

Through this short video, the repetition of the name is used to show her confidence that her roommate is not who she said it is. The more affirming she becomes, the more likely we as the viewers are going to side with her. This is a simple example of misdirection.

The more you say something or show something, the more important it becomes for the audience — at least, you want it to appear important.

2. Use Empathy

A storyteller must be empathetic.

If your audience cannot empathize with what you are communicating, it would not have the intended effect. Storytelling is all about taking people out of their bodies and putting them in someone else’s.

If you are telling a story about the time your car broke down, you want people to empathize and feel the helplessness of being stuck on a highway, waving cars down to help.

Empathy makes people feel more human. Telling a story people can relate to, even if it didn’t happen to them, is a sign of a quality storyteller.

Don’t Use Too Many Facts and Figures

If you began your story by saying that 1/1,000 cars on the highway break down, that doesn’t evoke any major emotion. There is nothing human about it.

It’s an interesting stat, sure, but the audience is unsure how they should respond. Is that a lot? Is that because of the highway? Is it because of the drivers? Nobody knows… it’s numbered with no context.

However, if you told the story about that time you had to abandon your vehicle and walk down the highway in order to make your important appointment. Suddenly, the audience can empathize with the tribulations you have gone through.

Facts and figures are useful in reports, but not as much in compelling stories.

Evoke the Senses

If I talk about hot melting chocolate, standing in the rain, or the smell of your grandmother’s bedroom, your senses are activated. From all your life experiences, your brain is able to form familiar sensations without any physical changes to your surrounding. That’s the power of storytelling.

Good storytellers use these sensory details and descriptive imagery to spice up a story. This draws the audience in and gives them a more immersive experience when listening to your stories.

Ask yourself these questions:

- What does it smell like?

- What can you hear?

- What do you see?

- What can you physically feel?

This example from YouTuber, Kiril Dobrev perfectly exemplifies what sensory igniting storytelling can do. He illustrates the sensation of being in Hong Kong, not simply through visuals but physical motions and audio effects.

Use Metaphors

As a YouTube storyteller, sometimes you will have to communicate complex ideas. When that happens, use a metaphor to increase the impact.

If you are telling a story about how much you dislike your teacher, you can list off all the ways she is unlikable or you can sum it up with a line like this: “My teacher makes the school a prison.”

That is a metaphor comparing school to prison. Most people haven’t been to prison, but understand what the metaphor is insinuating. School is not a fun place to be because of that teacher.

By connecting two different things, you allow the audience to paint the image in their mind quickly. It doesn’t take a lot of words to create a memorable metaphor. I encourage you to use metaphors anytime you need to address something complicated.

3. Take the Audience on a Meaningful Journey

Perhaps the most important element of a good story is that the journey is meaningful.

- Is it educational?

- Is it entertaining?

- Is it motivational or inspiring?

Knowing how you want to leave your audience feeling is foresight that will improve your YouTube storytelling abilities. Before you start telling your tale, ask: How do I want to change my audience?

YouTuber, Jamie Windsor tells a few stories connected to creativity and plagiarism. Anyone who has ever created anything can relate to his story and thus his audience can empathize.

It is also clear as a viewer that at the end of this 15-minute long video, his audience will have gone on a meaningful journey with him.

His story is a cautionary tale. He wants to educate us so that we can avoid making the same mistakes he did. He used his real-life experience to teach us and that makes it a meaningful video to watch. That was a good story.

Are there any YouTubers that you consider to be fantastic storytellers? Please share it in the comments box below.

Select a Versatile Video Editing Software to Stand Up from Numerous YouTubers

Users worldwide highly recommend Filmora because it comes loaded with various features, which helps to discover the editing skills, add an image to the imagination, and empower creativity.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

0

In the distracting world, we live in, you need to be a good storyteller to grow your YouTube channel. Your audience is not going to stick around to watch your whole video if your content isn’t enticing or relatable. If you want to get people to watch all your videos, you need to get them emotionally invested with your stories.

Here are 3 methods for creating an awesome story:

• Method 1: CREATE SUSPENSE
• Method 2: USE EMPATHY
• Method 3: TAKE THE AUDIENCE ON A MEANINGFUL JOURNEY

1. Create Suspense

The hero has an objective, but the plan might fail.

The likelihood of something going wrong is what makes a story suspenseful. When you tell a suspenseful story, your audience will have a heightened focus and a strong motivation to continue listening. They want to know if the hero succeeds. Keep the audience waiting and expecting. Don’t give away the ending right away.

What Does a Suspenseful Story Sound Like?

When we talk about a story that is dragging on, it is because there is no suspense. There is nothing at stake, there are no obstacles, there is no problem and, with no problem, there is no promise of resolution.

Here are a few examples you can use to pump more suspense into your story:

- Address a fear (example: being alone for the prom)

- An objective (example: asking the crush out to the dance)

- Consequences of failing (example: being embarrassed in front of the whole school)

- Limited time (example: prom is next week)

- Obstacles (example: the crush has an aggressive ex.)

You can feel your heart rate speeding up simply thinking about the character’s story in the example. Does it have a happy ending or not? We want to know!

Raise Questions After Questions

A good storyteller knows that as soon as they answer a question for their audience, they need to present another one. The audience will always need to have a puzzle in their mind, one that needs to be solved. That is what will keep their interest.

For example: If the hero ends up going to the prom with his crush, the next big question can be: Will they kiss at the last dance?

This continues building on the tension and increasing the stakes evermore.

Check out the suspenseful story from YouTuber, MissRemiAshten . The way she tells the story, we discover more and about her psycho neighbor and the incident gradually. A little bit of information about the neighbor is revealed at a time… not all at once.

Include a Cliffhanger

We’ve all had those moments at the end of an intense television show where we are shouting at the screen because it suddenly cut to black as the main characters were left in a precarious position. That emotional outburst is brought to us by a good cliffhanger, and a good cliffhanger can assure us that the audience will return for more.

But there needs to be more! A cliffhanger is a promise to the viewer that eventually they will be rewarded for their patience and it will be satisfying.

In this cliffhanger from Casey Neistat, he simply asks us a question, “Was that good?” This calls upon us to recall all the awesome YouTube videos we have seen created by filmmakers that aren’t considered “prestigious.” A cliffhanger does not have to end with an epic reveal; it can wrap up with loose ends and allow the audience to tie it up themselves.

How to Deliver a Good Cliffhanger

Applying good cliffhangers to your YouTube videos is a balancing act. You want to draw your audience in, but you also need to have a payoff that is worth the wait.

Done well, a cliffhanger will leave your audience wanting more. Done poorly, a cliffhanger will leave your audience feeling to mislead and a little ripped off, hesitant to listen to more stories from you.

A good cliffhanger does not have to be life or death, but it does have to be the moment the story has been leading up to.

Before you start telling your story, consider the key details that are most impactful.

Once you have the points you want to hit, plan out the reveal. Weave the story together, but withhold the pivotal details until the cliffhanger. Thendeliver it on camera confidently .

Here are two ways you can present your cliffhanger for amplified effect:

1. Slow Down and Have Pauses

As your story intensifies, bring the pace down — or stop completely. The silence becomes the cliffhanger. It can last a second or more, depending on how confident you are in the tension you have built.

Your next words or shots can be the reveal. If you are skilled enough, you can lead into another story one that connects to the previous. If you are trying this, make sure that in the end, the payoff has double the impact. The reveal needs to be twice as powerful if you are going to take the audience on another journey before wrapping up and answering the long-awaited questions.

2. Use Repetition

Whether you want to misdirect your audience or hammer home a point, using repetition throughout your story will help you build the tension you need to establish the cliffhanger.

In this example, we see YouTuber, A little bit of Monika uses both pace and repetition in her storytelling method.

The video starts off at a speedy pace, all the way until the last scene where the confrontation occurs. That’s her slowing down the story so that we are all anticipating the reveal. Is she or is she not actor, Saoirse Ronan?

Through this short video, the repetition of the name is used to show her confidence that her roommate is not who she said it is. The more affirming she becomes, the more likely we as the viewers are going to side with her. This is a simple example of misdirection.

The more you say something or show something, the more important it becomes for the audience — at least, you want it to appear important.

2. Use Empathy

A storyteller must be empathetic.

If your audience cannot empathize with what you are communicating, it would not have the intended effect. Storytelling is all about taking people out of their bodies and putting them in someone else’s.

If you are telling a story about the time your car broke down, you want people to empathize and feel the helplessness of being stuck on a highway, waving cars down to help.

Empathy makes people feel more human. Telling a story people can relate to, even if it didn’t happen to them, is a sign of a quality storyteller.

Don’t Use Too Many Facts and Figures

If you began your story by saying that 1/1,000 cars on the highway break down, that doesn’t evoke any major emotion. There is nothing human about it.

It’s an interesting stat, sure, but the audience is unsure how they should respond. Is that a lot? Is that because of the highway? Is it because of the drivers? Nobody knows… it’s numbered with no context.

However, if you told the story about that time you had to abandon your vehicle and walk down the highway in order to make your important appointment. Suddenly, the audience can empathize with the tribulations you have gone through.

Facts and figures are useful in reports, but not as much in compelling stories.

Evoke the Senses

If I talk about hot melting chocolate, standing in the rain, or the smell of your grandmother’s bedroom, your senses are activated. From all your life experiences, your brain is able to form familiar sensations without any physical changes to your surrounding. That’s the power of storytelling.

Good storytellers use these sensory details and descriptive imagery to spice up a story. This draws the audience in and gives them a more immersive experience when listening to your stories.

Ask yourself these questions:

- What does it smell like?

- What can you hear?

- What do you see?

- What can you physically feel?

This example from YouTuber, Kiril Dobrev perfectly exemplifies what sensory igniting storytelling can do. He illustrates the sensation of being in Hong Kong, not simply through visuals but physical motions and audio effects.

Use Metaphors

As a YouTube storyteller, sometimes you will have to communicate complex ideas. When that happens, use a metaphor to increase the impact.

If you are telling a story about how much you dislike your teacher, you can list off all the ways she is unlikable or you can sum it up with a line like this: “My teacher makes the school a prison.”

That is a metaphor comparing school to prison. Most people haven’t been to prison, but understand what the metaphor is insinuating. School is not a fun place to be because of that teacher.

By connecting two different things, you allow the audience to paint the image in their mind quickly. It doesn’t take a lot of words to create a memorable metaphor. I encourage you to use metaphors anytime you need to address something complicated.

3. Take the Audience on a Meaningful Journey

Perhaps the most important element of a good story is that the journey is meaningful.

- Is it educational?

- Is it entertaining?

- Is it motivational or inspiring?

Knowing how you want to leave your audience feeling is foresight that will improve your YouTube storytelling abilities. Before you start telling your tale, ask: How do I want to change my audience?

YouTuber, Jamie Windsor tells a few stories connected to creativity and plagiarism. Anyone who has ever created anything can relate to his story and thus his audience can empathize.

It is also clear as a viewer that at the end of this 15-minute long video, his audience will have gone on a meaningful journey with him.

His story is a cautionary tale. He wants to educate us so that we can avoid making the same mistakes he did. He used his real-life experience to teach us and that makes it a meaningful video to watch. That was a good story.

Are there any YouTubers that you consider to be fantastic storytellers? Please share it in the comments box below.

Select a Versatile Video Editing Software to Stand Up from Numerous YouTubers

Users worldwide highly recommend Filmora because it comes loaded with various features, which helps to discover the editing skills, add an image to the imagination, and empower creativity.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

0

In the distracting world, we live in, you need to be a good storyteller to grow your YouTube channel. Your audience is not going to stick around to watch your whole video if your content isn’t enticing or relatable. If you want to get people to watch all your videos, you need to get them emotionally invested with your stories.

Here are 3 methods for creating an awesome story:

• Method 1: CREATE SUSPENSE
• Method 2: USE EMPATHY
• Method 3: TAKE THE AUDIENCE ON A MEANINGFUL JOURNEY

1. Create Suspense

The hero has an objective, but the plan might fail.

The likelihood of something going wrong is what makes a story suspenseful. When you tell a suspenseful story, your audience will have a heightened focus and a strong motivation to continue listening. They want to know if the hero succeeds. Keep the audience waiting and expecting. Don’t give away the ending right away.

What Does a Suspenseful Story Sound Like?

When we talk about a story that is dragging on, it is because there is no suspense. There is nothing at stake, there are no obstacles, there is no problem and, with no problem, there is no promise of resolution.

Here are a few examples you can use to pump more suspense into your story:

- Address a fear (example: being alone for the prom)

- An objective (example: asking the crush out to the dance)

- Consequences of failing (example: being embarrassed in front of the whole school)

- Limited time (example: prom is next week)

- Obstacles (example: the crush has an aggressive ex.)

You can feel your heart rate speeding up simply thinking about the character’s story in the example. Does it have a happy ending or not? We want to know!

Raise Questions After Questions

A good storyteller knows that as soon as they answer a question for their audience, they need to present another one. The audience will always need to have a puzzle in their mind, one that needs to be solved. That is what will keep their interest.

For example: If the hero ends up going to the prom with his crush, the next big question can be: Will they kiss at the last dance?

This continues building on the tension and increasing the stakes evermore.

Check out the suspenseful story from YouTuber, MissRemiAshten . The way she tells the story, we discover more and about her psycho neighbor and the incident gradually. A little bit of information about the neighbor is revealed at a time… not all at once.

Include a Cliffhanger

We’ve all had those moments at the end of an intense television show where we are shouting at the screen because it suddenly cut to black as the main characters were left in a precarious position. That emotional outburst is brought to us by a good cliffhanger, and a good cliffhanger can assure us that the audience will return for more.

But there needs to be more! A cliffhanger is a promise to the viewer that eventually they will be rewarded for their patience and it will be satisfying.

In this cliffhanger from Casey Neistat, he simply asks us a question, “Was that good?” This calls upon us to recall all the awesome YouTube videos we have seen created by filmmakers that aren’t considered “prestigious.” A cliffhanger does not have to end with an epic reveal; it can wrap up with loose ends and allow the audience to tie it up themselves.

How to Deliver a Good Cliffhanger

Applying good cliffhangers to your YouTube videos is a balancing act. You want to draw your audience in, but you also need to have a payoff that is worth the wait.

Done well, a cliffhanger will leave your audience wanting more. Done poorly, a cliffhanger will leave your audience feeling to mislead and a little ripped off, hesitant to listen to more stories from you.

A good cliffhanger does not have to be life or death, but it does have to be the moment the story has been leading up to.

Before you start telling your story, consider the key details that are most impactful.

Once you have the points you want to hit, plan out the reveal. Weave the story together, but withhold the pivotal details until the cliffhanger. Thendeliver it on camera confidently .

Here are two ways you can present your cliffhanger for amplified effect:

1. Slow Down and Have Pauses

As your story intensifies, bring the pace down — or stop completely. The silence becomes the cliffhanger. It can last a second or more, depending on how confident you are in the tension you have built.

Your next words or shots can be the reveal. If you are skilled enough, you can lead into another story one that connects to the previous. If you are trying this, make sure that in the end, the payoff has double the impact. The reveal needs to be twice as powerful if you are going to take the audience on another journey before wrapping up and answering the long-awaited questions.

2. Use Repetition

Whether you want to misdirect your audience or hammer home a point, using repetition throughout your story will help you build the tension you need to establish the cliffhanger.

In this example, we see YouTuber, A little bit of Monika uses both pace and repetition in her storytelling method.

The video starts off at a speedy pace, all the way until the last scene where the confrontation occurs. That’s her slowing down the story so that we are all anticipating the reveal. Is she or is she not actor, Saoirse Ronan?

Through this short video, the repetition of the name is used to show her confidence that her roommate is not who she said it is. The more affirming she becomes, the more likely we as the viewers are going to side with her. This is a simple example of misdirection.

The more you say something or show something, the more important it becomes for the audience — at least, you want it to appear important.

2. Use Empathy

A storyteller must be empathetic.

If your audience cannot empathize with what you are communicating, it would not have the intended effect. Storytelling is all about taking people out of their bodies and putting them in someone else’s.

If you are telling a story about the time your car broke down, you want people to empathize and feel the helplessness of being stuck on a highway, waving cars down to help.

Empathy makes people feel more human. Telling a story people can relate to, even if it didn’t happen to them, is a sign of a quality storyteller.

Don’t Use Too Many Facts and Figures

If you began your story by saying that 1/1,000 cars on the highway break down, that doesn’t evoke any major emotion. There is nothing human about it.

It’s an interesting stat, sure, but the audience is unsure how they should respond. Is that a lot? Is that because of the highway? Is it because of the drivers? Nobody knows… it’s numbered with no context.

However, if you told the story about that time you had to abandon your vehicle and walk down the highway in order to make your important appointment. Suddenly, the audience can empathize with the tribulations you have gone through.

Facts and figures are useful in reports, but not as much in compelling stories.

Evoke the Senses

If I talk about hot melting chocolate, standing in the rain, or the smell of your grandmother’s bedroom, your senses are activated. From all your life experiences, your brain is able to form familiar sensations without any physical changes to your surrounding. That’s the power of storytelling.

Good storytellers use these sensory details and descriptive imagery to spice up a story. This draws the audience in and gives them a more immersive experience when listening to your stories.

Ask yourself these questions:

- What does it smell like?

- What can you hear?

- What do you see?

- What can you physically feel?

This example from YouTuber, Kiril Dobrev perfectly exemplifies what sensory igniting storytelling can do. He illustrates the sensation of being in Hong Kong, not simply through visuals but physical motions and audio effects.

Use Metaphors

As a YouTube storyteller, sometimes you will have to communicate complex ideas. When that happens, use a metaphor to increase the impact.

If you are telling a story about how much you dislike your teacher, you can list off all the ways she is unlikable or you can sum it up with a line like this: “My teacher makes the school a prison.”

That is a metaphor comparing school to prison. Most people haven’t been to prison, but understand what the metaphor is insinuating. School is not a fun place to be because of that teacher.

By connecting two different things, you allow the audience to paint the image in their mind quickly. It doesn’t take a lot of words to create a memorable metaphor. I encourage you to use metaphors anytime you need to address something complicated.

3. Take the Audience on a Meaningful Journey

Perhaps the most important element of a good story is that the journey is meaningful.

- Is it educational?

- Is it entertaining?

- Is it motivational or inspiring?

Knowing how you want to leave your audience feeling is foresight that will improve your YouTube storytelling abilities. Before you start telling your tale, ask: How do I want to change my audience?

YouTuber, Jamie Windsor tells a few stories connected to creativity and plagiarism. Anyone who has ever created anything can relate to his story and thus his audience can empathize.

It is also clear as a viewer that at the end of this 15-minute long video, his audience will have gone on a meaningful journey with him.

His story is a cautionary tale. He wants to educate us so that we can avoid making the same mistakes he did. He used his real-life experience to teach us and that makes it a meaningful video to watch. That was a good story.

Are there any YouTubers that you consider to be fantastic storytellers? Please share it in the comments box below.

Select a Versatile Video Editing Software to Stand Up from Numerous YouTubers

Users worldwide highly recommend Filmora because it comes loaded with various features, which helps to discover the editing skills, add an image to the imagination, and empower creativity.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

0

In the distracting world, we live in, you need to be a good storyteller to grow your YouTube channel. Your audience is not going to stick around to watch your whole video if your content isn’t enticing or relatable. If you want to get people to watch all your videos, you need to get them emotionally invested with your stories.

Here are 3 methods for creating an awesome story:

• Method 1: CREATE SUSPENSE
• Method 2: USE EMPATHY
• Method 3: TAKE THE AUDIENCE ON A MEANINGFUL JOURNEY

1. Create Suspense

The hero has an objective, but the plan might fail.

The likelihood of something going wrong is what makes a story suspenseful. When you tell a suspenseful story, your audience will have a heightened focus and a strong motivation to continue listening. They want to know if the hero succeeds. Keep the audience waiting and expecting. Don’t give away the ending right away.

What Does a Suspenseful Story Sound Like?

When we talk about a story that is dragging on, it is because there is no suspense. There is nothing at stake, there are no obstacles, there is no problem and, with no problem, there is no promise of resolution.

Here are a few examples you can use to pump more suspense into your story:

- Address a fear (example: being alone for the prom)

- An objective (example: asking the crush out to the dance)

- Consequences of failing (example: being embarrassed in front of the whole school)

- Limited time (example: prom is next week)

- Obstacles (example: the crush has an aggressive ex.)

You can feel your heart rate speeding up simply thinking about the character’s story in the example. Does it have a happy ending or not? We want to know!

Raise Questions After Questions

A good storyteller knows that as soon as they answer a question for their audience, they need to present another one. The audience will always need to have a puzzle in their mind, one that needs to be solved. That is what will keep their interest.

For example: If the hero ends up going to the prom with his crush, the next big question can be: Will they kiss at the last dance?

This continues building on the tension and increasing the stakes evermore.

Check out the suspenseful story from YouTuber, MissRemiAshten . The way she tells the story, we discover more and about her psycho neighbor and the incident gradually. A little bit of information about the neighbor is revealed at a time… not all at once.

Include a Cliffhanger

We’ve all had those moments at the end of an intense television show where we are shouting at the screen because it suddenly cut to black as the main characters were left in a precarious position. That emotional outburst is brought to us by a good cliffhanger, and a good cliffhanger can assure us that the audience will return for more.

But there needs to be more! A cliffhanger is a promise to the viewer that eventually they will be rewarded for their patience and it will be satisfying.

In this cliffhanger from Casey Neistat, he simply asks us a question, “Was that good?” This calls upon us to recall all the awesome YouTube videos we have seen created by filmmakers that aren’t considered “prestigious.” A cliffhanger does not have to end with an epic reveal; it can wrap up with loose ends and allow the audience to tie it up themselves.

How to Deliver a Good Cliffhanger

Applying good cliffhangers to your YouTube videos is a balancing act. You want to draw your audience in, but you also need to have a payoff that is worth the wait.

Done well, a cliffhanger will leave your audience wanting more. Done poorly, a cliffhanger will leave your audience feeling to mislead and a little ripped off, hesitant to listen to more stories from you.

A good cliffhanger does not have to be life or death, but it does have to be the moment the story has been leading up to.

Before you start telling your story, consider the key details that are most impactful.

Once you have the points you want to hit, plan out the reveal. Weave the story together, but withhold the pivotal details until the cliffhanger. Thendeliver it on camera confidently .

Here are two ways you can present your cliffhanger for amplified effect:

1. Slow Down and Have Pauses

As your story intensifies, bring the pace down — or stop completely. The silence becomes the cliffhanger. It can last a second or more, depending on how confident you are in the tension you have built.

Your next words or shots can be the reveal. If you are skilled enough, you can lead into another story one that connects to the previous. If you are trying this, make sure that in the end, the payoff has double the impact. The reveal needs to be twice as powerful if you are going to take the audience on another journey before wrapping up and answering the long-awaited questions.

2. Use Repetition

Whether you want to misdirect your audience or hammer home a point, using repetition throughout your story will help you build the tension you need to establish the cliffhanger.

In this example, we see YouTuber, A little bit of Monika uses both pace and repetition in her storytelling method.

The video starts off at a speedy pace, all the way until the last scene where the confrontation occurs. That’s her slowing down the story so that we are all anticipating the reveal. Is she or is she not actor, Saoirse Ronan?

Through this short video, the repetition of the name is used to show her confidence that her roommate is not who she said it is. The more affirming she becomes, the more likely we as the viewers are going to side with her. This is a simple example of misdirection.

The more you say something or show something, the more important it becomes for the audience — at least, you want it to appear important.

2. Use Empathy

A storyteller must be empathetic.

If your audience cannot empathize with what you are communicating, it would not have the intended effect. Storytelling is all about taking people out of their bodies and putting them in someone else’s.

If you are telling a story about the time your car broke down, you want people to empathize and feel the helplessness of being stuck on a highway, waving cars down to help.

Empathy makes people feel more human. Telling a story people can relate to, even if it didn’t happen to them, is a sign of a quality storyteller.

Don’t Use Too Many Facts and Figures

If you began your story by saying that 1/1,000 cars on the highway break down, that doesn’t evoke any major emotion. There is nothing human about it.

It’s an interesting stat, sure, but the audience is unsure how they should respond. Is that a lot? Is that because of the highway? Is it because of the drivers? Nobody knows… it’s numbered with no context.

However, if you told the story about that time you had to abandon your vehicle and walk down the highway in order to make your important appointment. Suddenly, the audience can empathize with the tribulations you have gone through.

Facts and figures are useful in reports, but not as much in compelling stories.

Evoke the Senses

If I talk about hot melting chocolate, standing in the rain, or the smell of your grandmother’s bedroom, your senses are activated. From all your life experiences, your brain is able to form familiar sensations without any physical changes to your surrounding. That’s the power of storytelling.

Good storytellers use these sensory details and descriptive imagery to spice up a story. This draws the audience in and gives them a more immersive experience when listening to your stories.

Ask yourself these questions:

- What does it smell like?

- What can you hear?

- What do you see?

- What can you physically feel?

This example from YouTuber, Kiril Dobrev perfectly exemplifies what sensory igniting storytelling can do. He illustrates the sensation of being in Hong Kong, not simply through visuals but physical motions and audio effects.

Use Metaphors

As a YouTube storyteller, sometimes you will have to communicate complex ideas. When that happens, use a metaphor to increase the impact.

If you are telling a story about how much you dislike your teacher, you can list off all the ways she is unlikable or you can sum it up with a line like this: “My teacher makes the school a prison.”

That is a metaphor comparing school to prison. Most people haven’t been to prison, but understand what the metaphor is insinuating. School is not a fun place to be because of that teacher.

By connecting two different things, you allow the audience to paint the image in their mind quickly. It doesn’t take a lot of words to create a memorable metaphor. I encourage you to use metaphors anytime you need to address something complicated.

3. Take the Audience on a Meaningful Journey

Perhaps the most important element of a good story is that the journey is meaningful.

- Is it educational?

- Is it entertaining?

- Is it motivational or inspiring?

Knowing how you want to leave your audience feeling is foresight that will improve your YouTube storytelling abilities. Before you start telling your tale, ask: How do I want to change my audience?

YouTuber, Jamie Windsor tells a few stories connected to creativity and plagiarism. Anyone who has ever created anything can relate to his story and thus his audience can empathize.

It is also clear as a viewer that at the end of this 15-minute long video, his audience will have gone on a meaningful journey with him.

His story is a cautionary tale. He wants to educate us so that we can avoid making the same mistakes he did. He used his real-life experience to teach us and that makes it a meaningful video to watch. That was a good story.

Are there any YouTubers that you consider to be fantastic storytellers? Please share it in the comments box below.

Select a Versatile Video Editing Software to Stand Up from Numerous YouTubers

Users worldwide highly recommend Filmora because it comes loaded with various features, which helps to discover the editing skills, add an image to the imagination, and empower creativity.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Also read: