“Today, audiences expect marketing to provide not just information and education, but value. With the lines of customer experience blurring across sales, marketing, and product, people want utility from brands at all stops of their journey,” says Brent Turner, Senior Vice President of Solutions at Cramer, a global brand experience agency.

His own firm has seen an uptick in requests to help create longer video content for B2B, and he sees it as an effective strategy.

“For B2B brands with long sales cycles or B2C brands looking to drive retention, the long-form video provides deeper moments of relationship building,” he says.

Although it’s hard to quantify the ROI of these ambitious video projects, each of the brands above share the common goal of wanting to create a buzz, or goodwill, among their core audiences.

“As much as long-form content is an investment for brands, it is also an investment for audiences – an investment in their time, focus, and emotion,” says Turner. “We are entering a period of focused investment, where brands realize that everything doesn’t have to scale. There is value for brands when creating better content for narrow audiences.”

To stretch the investment into long-form content, Turner offers the following strategies:
1. Turn the video into a series. This may mean a second long-form follow up, or even a series of new “shorts” that keep evolving the storylines and characters.
2. Atomize the content. Look for ways to either pull out pieces of the story into their own chunks or spots to have audiences dig deeper. If your video’s character is shown playing a video game, release that game. If your character is referencing a study, release that study.
3. Move characters across channels. From ads to emails, posters to signage, voicemail greetings to downloadable ringtones, take a page from TV and movie studios: Layer your characters across your marketing assets. When video is done right, your audiences have a relationship with them now – they are invested in the characters – so keep them around.