The Power Of Video Marketing
Our current world culture heavily revolves around Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and other forms of mainstream online media and websites. Interestingly, the three main types of content we munch on every day are either in text, picture, or video format (or the three of them combined in one go).
But video content remains at the top as one of the most consumed forms of media. Literally, all mainstream websites that are commonly used today contain videos.
According to the statistics published on Hubspot, over 500 million people watch videos posted on Facebook daily! But the most interesting tidbit we can take away from the statistics is that they were mostly watched without sound.
Now, remember that the all-time popular YouTube? Over 1.9 billion registered users visit YouTube every month. All of these users combined watch over billions and billions of hours of videos every day. That’s more hours than someone’s entire lifespan.
Apart from conventional digital marketing strategies – such as search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) – it is no surprise that video marketing is possibly one of the most powerful tools digital marketers have in their arsenal.
Imagine how powerful video marketing is when it is possible for a single video to raise a targeted product’s or service’s brand awareness through the roof, create new connections to new audiences (while strengthening ones with existing fans) and telling a story that illustrates a company’s mission and purpose.
While a picture is worth a thousand words, a minute of video is easily worth nearly two gazillions. Viewers of videos also retain more of what they see in a video and for a longer period of time, thanks to videos stimulating more powerful sensory pathways in the brain (humans are visual creatures, deal with it).
And this is what makes video marketing so powerful. The basis of video marketing is that it is a forward-facing marketing strategy for your marketing campaigns fit into a visual (and audio) feast.
Video marketing can be used for nearly everything. It is essentially words transformed into moving visuals with sounds incorporated. You can do an origin story, how-to’s, live-streaming or customer testimonials – all the while delivering virally addictive and entertaining content.
The beginning of the use of digital videos with marketing intentions began in the early 2000s. However, it wasn’t until 2016 when the spike in the popularity of video for content marketing happened.
In 2017, videos content marketing rose to the top of the best marketing strategies while, in 2018, it evolved from being used as a singular marketing tactic to dominating entire business strategies.
So that brings us to 2019 – the golden age of video marketing. Almost all brands and companies are producing videos as more than 50% of consumers want to see videos from brands and companies. These alone are more than any other type of content.
Incorporating a video onto your landing page has the ability to boost conversion rates by two times that of conventional digital methods.
There are tons of videos being uploaded onto YouTube and other social media platforms which places it right at the heart of the netizens.
Most customers that we know today are relying heavily on videos to help them decide whether a product is worth buying or not.
Producing videos in the past used to be mega expensive. The production costs varied around the cost of the equipment as well as the man-hours needed to edit it. It used to be time-consuming too!
It was this expense that either turned off many marketers or blow your company’s bank account.
Fast forward to today, it is definitely now much cheaper and accessible. Even video editing programmes are much more accessible and easier to use.
This new accessibility was the turning point that convinced companies and brands to start using video once again. Even small to medium business enterprises are beginning to produce videos on the internet, though their productions remain more humble.
In fact, there are tonnes of companies out there that have formed dedicated teams who work solely in the video department.
The cost of producing a video in-house and churning them out has proven to be an efficient method for being cost and time effective while being impactful.
This also translates into a higher chance of seeing some form of payoff from your videos. With so much impact that videos are producing nowadays, marketing professionals worldwide have labelled video marketing as having the best return on investment (ROI) for any type of marketing content.
A Much Better SEO Experience
The biggest video sharing platform, YouTube, is owned by Google. Coincidentally, companies, brands, and enterprises ranging from homegrown SMEs to large corporations are now uploading their videos onto YouTube in the hopes of getting noticed.
And if that still doesn’t show you the connection between the two, it’s that Google’s search engine loves videos.
Of course, YouTube is not the only video sharing platform available out there, but it is used by ALMOST EVERYONE ON EARTH.
In Google searches, YouTube videos are most likely to be placed in the first 10 search results.
Optimising videos uses conventional SEO tactics such as keyword-friendly title, descriptions and tags, followed by embedding into blog posts.
Translations and subtitles also help improve video rankings as it caters to audiences who speak a different language.
You Can Also Produce Ads And Have The World Notice Them
Every time someone clicks on a video that they are interested to watch, they would most probably have to sit through a pre-roll ad.
What is a pre-rolled ad, you might ask? It is that advertisement that plays prior to the content that users had clicked to watch which can be skipped after five seconds.
You would think that most users skip them as soon as they are allowed to. But, according to video analysis and news website, VideoNuze, nearly half of all viewers do not click on the skip button and actually watch the pre-roll ads until the end.
Pre-roll ads are the most common form of video advertisement today and it shows that companies out there are experimenting with new, trendy, and ‘viral’ methods. Try analyzing pre-roll ads on YouTube today: they are produced to be catchy, short, and straight to the point, which are things that users appreciate as they are ‘busy’ watching videos on the internet.
Once It Gets Rolling, Be Sure It Continues Rolling
Video marketing has never been a short term strategy. In fact, once a company finds traction in that segment, it would make sure that it continues to do so.
They are the prime methods of ensuring that your brand stays thriving.
The demand for good videos is still growing and so is the number of new videos that get uploaded each day.
Companies would either move on to produce a new video series for an entirely new topic or create a follow-up based on viewer response.
Questions-and-Answers, customer testimonials and product launches that describe a company’s journey that users can connect and see are the most common types of content produced. From there, the path of creativity is endless. If you’re seeking help to gain some traction in your path to be a YouTube star, then feel free to give us a call.