To Make a Long Story Short: A Movie Trailer Approach to Digital Marketing

Watch the csc.com teaser trailer below the fold

By Zack Cannon

Think of the last movie you saw. Now, what made you decide on that particular movie? Probably a few factors helped guide your decision — a movie poster on the side of a bus, a late night talk show interview with the lead actor, a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, or maybe a friend's strong recommendation. If you're like me, your interest likely peaked several months prior when you first got a glimpse of the official movie trailer.

Ah, yes, the movie trailer. The king of all marketing tactics. Is there anything else that could get you to commit $12 on something within a two-minute pitch? Well, except for a Snuggie? The modern movie trailer is more than just a Hollywood advertising machine — it's a true art form — and a great marketing lesson.

Take your typical thriller or action flick — the quick edits, the "in-a-world" voice-over, pounding sound effects, action-packed scenes, the music's crescendo finale. It's a carefully constructed package intended to tease the audience by presenting the film's two-hour story in an enticing and compact way.

It's hard to argue against this "short and sweet" approach in a world with 140-character limit distractions and myriad ways to consume content, not to mention social media.

Applying the movie trailer mentality

The driving force behind our csc.com content marketing strategy is the alignment of content across all phases of the IT buyer's journey. It's fundamental to our digital marketing engine — to give visitors the right type of content they're looking for, whether it's articles, white papers, trend reports, infographics, and more. Without a clear path to the right content type, it's like fly fishing with vegetables as bait. The fish will simply move on.

Online video, as a medium and content type, is extremely versatile because it's able to reach beyond all phases of the buying cycle — in the form of offering videos, product demos or success stories, but it's especially impactful early on, where buyers simply want to seek out general information. It's no surprise that, next to Google, YouTube is the No. 2 search engine in the world.

Video for B2B marketing is a perfect fit for this early stage where the goal is awareness building. Video on csc.com is much like the movie trailer's relationship to a feature film: It's a great way to grab your audience's attention.

We took this movie trailer approach one step farther by launching CSC Video Snapshots — our best stories packaged as bite-sized videos and primed for social media engagement. And each video is under two minutes.

I use three guiding principles when producing new videos for csc.com: (1) limit talking heads (which is hard to do with corporate/ B2B content; (2) show (do not tell); and (3) use a "less is more" approach. In 2012, the average time watched per video view on csc.com was just under three minutes — a key lesson from the minds and attention spans of our visitors.

CSC.com: The Trailer

Reflecting on the last year and our team's big accomplishments with the csc.com redesign, I realized that one thing was missing from our multiphased launch: our own movie trailer — one that captures our own epic digital marketing journey and taken right out of J.J. Abrams’ playbook.

After all, every blockbuster has one.

ZACK CANNON is a digital content manager on CSC's digital marketing team. Follow him at @ZackINova.