How to Use Psychology to Make Persuasive Video-Nir&Far-Episode#48

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business, behavior and the brain. On this show I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews and ask me a question. By leaving a review, I promise to read it and possibly include your question in a future episode. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com.

How to use Psychology to Make Persuasive Video this guest post is excerpted from Natalie Nahi's best selling book, Webs of the Psychology of Online Persuasion what makes Video Special? Compared to other media types in the web, video is unique in the immediacy with which it can convey a vast amount of emotional and informational content to its viewers. By virtue of the fact that video is an instantaneous form of communication, it has the advantage of being able to create a shared experience in which people can watch the same thing at the same time wherever in the world they may be. As with all social content, enabling people to participate in a way can create a profound sense of connection and community, which can help generate word of mouth and amplify the reach of your message. Unlike images or copy, video and audio set the pace at which a story or message is delivered. Although it is true that people can stop watching whenever they choose, the analytic tools built into video hosting platforms are making it easier than ever to access when people are bouncing away. This means that you can track exactly how far individuals get through a piece of content before they stop consuming it, which may help infer why the video isn't engaging as viewers as expected. This can then inform the process by which you optimize your media, making video one of the most trackable forms of web content, as well as one of the most emotive. When used on site, videos can also help boost conversion rates, both in general and when used to showcase specific products or services. A private study exploring customer behaviors on electrical goods website AO.com found that those who watched a product video were 100% more likely to convert, spending an average of 9.1% more than those who didn't. In another study, customers who watched videos of all kinds, not just Those products, on Wistia.com were found to be 63% more likely, on average, to convert. Why we watch From a psychological standpoint, there are various reasons why we watch videos. The first, while it may not sound scientific, it's just because the Internet is replete with bizarre videos that go viral for no apparent reason, and in such cases, the magic dust that contributes to their success is ephemeral, hard to articulate, and therefore rarely replicable after the fact. Perhaps more tangibly, we also watch videos because they provoke curiosity by providing a pattern of interrupt, a sequence or narrative in which our expectations are flouted. A great example of this is Geico's 15 second going up fast Forward advertising, a pre roll ad on YouTube that starts in an elevator in which a woman is telling her friend how switching to Geico saved her money on her car insurance, while a bald man with a comb over watches on. Before we can see any more, the video cuts short as an image fills the screen displaying the message geico. We now fast forward to the end of this ad with an accompanying voiceover. We rejoin the video a few seconds later to find that all three now are bald as the women scurry out of the lift complaining, next time let's take the stairs. The video ends with a link inviting people to click to see what happened, and I won't spoil the surprise by giving the end away here. The reason this is compelling is because it disrupts our expectations around the format and content of the pre rolled ad, which we've come to expect to be linear in narrative the last 30 seconds and then be salesy and self serving in tone. By challenging our assumptions and provoking an emotional response, our attention is piqued and we feel the pull to actively attend to the message. This leads us to the very heart of why we watch videos. We engage with content to change our emotional state. Because video includes so many of the real life cues we rely on to communicate with and understand one another. From facial expressions and gestures to linguistic content and tone of voice, it is one of the most effective content types for transmitting emotional contagion. This is a phenomenon which can be leveraged at both ends of the emotional spectrum, from the delightfully cute to the painfully sad. And we need only witness the ubiquity of cat videos to see in this action. Believe it or not, scientists have actually conducted research to examine why we spend so much time watching videos of our feline friends. As it turns out, even a short clip can be enough to deliver an emotional payoff, with participants reporting that they feel more energetic and positive after only a few minutes of watching cats. Persuasive Storytelling While we tend to enjoy and share content that has a positive emotional balance. Videos that move us towards sadness and anger can also be persuasive and powerful. A great example of this is one of Amnesty's video campaigns contrasting the mourning ritual of a girl living in Australia to that of her counterpart living in war torn Syria. By presenting the narrative as a split screen story, the left side of the screen showing the young Australian and the right, the Syrian, Amnesty communicates not only the nominal similarities of each situation, but also the contrasting realities confronting each child. The reason stories such as these are so compelling can be found at a neurological and a psychological level. In an FMRI study conducted at Princeton University, neuroscience professor Dr. Yuri Hassan and his team set out to investigate exactly what goes on in our brains when we tell and listen to a story. They discovered that when two people are engaged in such an exchange, both display similar response patterns across remarkable numbers of regions in the brain, an act they describe as neural coupling. Far from being a passive process, they propose that storytelling is in fact an experience which, when successful, results in the teller and response receiver literally getting on the same wavelength. Achieving this, however, requires a skillful, nuanced approach. Whether you're trying to move people to buy your product or donate towards a cause, feelings such as sympathy, sadness, and compassion have been found to play a central role in motivating us to engage and help others. From a psychological perspective, finding a way to tell your story through the narrative of one person, as opposed to of many, can also have a profound impact on the way that your message is received. Charities have long known the effectiveness of this approach, and subsequent research supports their strategy. Given that our attention actually magnifies our response to emotionally charged situations, and that the larger the group, the more our attention and ability to focus diminishes, it makes the sense that a story would be most compelling when conveying the plight of a single individual. For instance, battle scenes in films tend to be most engaging when they focus on the protagonists rather than the mass of fighting people. Since they are more likely to view a single person as a psychologically coherent unit than a group, this may explain why we tend to feel greater compassion and distress towards the former, described in academic literature as psychophysical numbing, it is the phenomenon that is thought to be at the root of many behavioral asymmetries we see today. The discrepancy in emotional reaction towards minor stories compared to those of much greater magnitude points towards a profound difference in the way we process events. That's why if you're trying to engage your audience with videos that compel them to take action. Focusing on a specific emotional, discrete story around one individual will tend to be more effective than speaking about an abstract, homogeneous group. Emotion and Arousal Whether the stories we tell are large or small, complex or simple, they all serve to take us on a journey from one emotional state to another, often with many transitions in between. Depending on the length and purpose of your video and the profile of the audience for whom it was created, there are various different models you can use to help structure your narrative. A good place to start is by reading the Hero With a Thousand Faces, a seminal book that explores a journey of an archetypal hero written by American mythologist Joseph Campbell, used to craft compelling tales. One of Campbell's most famous narrative arcs is A Hero's Journey, a 12 step sequence that appears in everything from drama and myth to religious ritual to psychological development. This pattern is used in many of the stories we know and love today and was even acknowledged by George Lucas for its influence in the Star wars films. Whether you're using the Hero's Journey or another of Campbell's models, two adverts that are worth watching for their use of this approach are John Lewis Christmas advert the Journey and MetLife's insurance advert My Dad's Story Dream for My Child. Both videos carefully orchestrate the ebb and flow of emotion to hold the viewer's attention until the very end, at which point they leave the audience with a heightened positive emotional climax. The importance of a powerful ending cannot be overstated, and in behavioral economic circles, there's even a phrase used to describe this heuristic known as the peak end rule. This term refers to our tendency to judge experiences based on how we feel at their peak and at their end, rather than taking an average or sum of every moment. If you want to create persuasive videos, you can leverage this dynamic to craft emotional highs and lows. Music can also elicit such responses, from boosting our motivation, feelings of pleasure and relaxation to reducing levels of pain and anxiety. Music can even increase or decrease our breathing and heart rate, depending on how upbeat or meditative tempo, respectively. This is why when choosing the score for your video, you should ensure that it lists the level of arousal that matches both your content and the call to action. Not only is music influential in grabbing people's attention, if you're narrating an advert or piece of video content, research has found that lowering the pitch of your voice can signal status, which can be perceived by others as dominant, prestigious and admirable traits positively correlated with behavioral influence. However, when a person's voice goes down in pitch, they can also be judged as wanting to be more intimidating and domineering, so it's a balance that must be struck with care. Of course, if you're working with a video, you can also make use of nonverbal cues such as body language, gestures and clothing so as to mirror your audience's preferences and expectations, making this work for you on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. All these platforms enable auto playing videos, which means that to get the best response, your content has to be visually compelling even without sound. As these channels are primarily accessed through mobile devices, your video format can be vertical since browsing behaviors will typically be in the feed. Whatever the content of your video, it has to be visually attention grabbing within the first few seconds in order to capture the fleeting attention of Fast Scrollers on YouTube despite its reputation as the primary video hosting platform, YouTube's most popular content has historically been music. In terms of branded ads, those that are most successful tend to be videos that disrupt our expectations, change our emotional state, and make us laugh. On Vimeo, another popular hosting platform, this channel typically attracts a smaller, more creative community and can be a good place to share your work and receive more constructive feedback on your website. The videos you create for your website will naturally be designed to achieve a different outcome than those created on your social channels. On site Videos should be goal oriented and work within the context of a page, never sitting in isolation. If you want to increase playwright, you should match the visual branding of your video with the brand and website. The video's prominence on the page will also impact engagement, and as a rule of thumb, the higher up the page it is, the more views it will accrue. Whatever content you create, a beautiful, purposely designed thumbnail will more likely trigger plays. Video Hosting for Business if you're designing videos specifically to use on your website, there are several platforms that you can use that have been developed specifically for this use, such as Wistia, brightcove, and Vidyard. Offering more detailed analytics tools and functionality for personalization than social video platforms, these services can provide a great way to manage your content and gather vital data that can help you optimize your approach.

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