How to make a promotional trailer that stands out online

With online content, it is important to present your most important, most impactful point first. To grab the attention of audiences online, you have a matter of seconds to make an impact. Features of traditional marketing and filmmaking such as slow fade-ins or long introductions with company names and logos will cause people to scroll by before you have had a chance to showcase your work.

At The Space we are often asked how long online videos should be. The answer is that there isn’t a perfect length, but it is important to be concise and to consider how much time you are asking of people – particularly when reaching out to new audiences who may not know you.

Keep 1-2 minutes in mind as a maximum and perhaps create some shorter edits too. Remember that more content does not equal more engagement: just because you make it longer, doesn’t mean people will digest more information about your work. Do the hard work in the edit so people don’t have to. Be selective, and if necessary, brutal, in the editing room in order to create something impactful and concise. You can always use unused footage as additional content elsewhere later.

If you are promoting a performance or live stream, you may not have a huge amount of source material to create a trailer. Be resourceful and think about what you have in your archive that can be used creatively. You might have some high-quality images or videos of similar performances, or pictures or audio clips from rehearsals that you could overlay text onto. Trailers don’t have to be long and cinematic to make an impact: use what you have.

Following these steps should help you produce an effective trailer that cuts through in noisy online spaces where competition for attention is high. If you’d like to know more about finding audiences online, download our Online Audiences Toolkit.