In recent years, video marketing has clearly established itself as king of both social media and digital marketing, with different studies showcasing numbers that make the claim undeniable.
According to a Cisco white paper forecast, in 2017, video will account for 69 percent of all consumer internet traffic. But even that impressive number might not represent just how effective video is when it comes to digital marketing. On Facebook alone, a report found that users watch 100 million hours of video each day – a staggering number that’s part of its 8 billion daily video views.
And its continually rising popularity is not just due to an incredibly hot trend—it’s because it pays off. According to an Adweek report, 76 percent of companies who have used video in their marketing strategies in the past 12 months reported a direct business impact. As a result, 60 percent of those companies plan to increase their investments in video in 2017.
But while video is a rising star that doesn’t appear to soon plateau, you can’t just hop on the bandwagon. Here are a few things to keep in mind before you incorporate video to your marketing strategies:
Establish Goals
As noted by Forbes, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish with incorporating video to your marketing strategies. This will guide you into finding out exactly what type of content to create, as well as where to distribute them.
Develop Ideas to Support Your Goals
As you would with any other type of content, you need to get creative when developing visual story ideas to help you reach your goals.
The internet is inundated with video content, and with the shrinking attention spans of consumers, you’d want to ensure that you produce content that will be able to catch and maintain your audience’s attention, whilst also having a clear call to action.
Allow Video to Amplify Current Strategy
It doesn’t always to have to be a brand new strategy when it comes to incorporating video. You can simply align your identified goals with your current strategy, and amplify it with your video content. You can even repurpose old content and turn them into video form, or expand other content pieces through video.
It is also important to note that video isn’t a one size fits all thing – particularly when it comes to social media. Different platforms exhibit different behaviors, and for your video content to be effective, you need to take note of these, and tailor your content accordingly.
Captions have become essential to Facebook videos, where most users tend to watch content without sound. Facebook has made it easier by introducing in 2016 automatic captioning to videos posted on Facebook pages. Captions aren’t only conducive for those watching videos in crowded areas (or at work), they also make the messaging more effective, as viewers tend to digest content more accurately by reading rather than hearing.
Facebook live videos are also increasing in popularity, and is a much cheaper way to produce content. According to Social Media Examiner, Facebook live videos are watched three times as much as regular video content.
Instagram / Snapchat
With an estimated 95 million posts shared daily, with spending an average of 21 minutes on the app per day, Instagram is a channel where users are scrolling through their feeds at a lightning pace. For your content to stand out, you must carefully choose both a thumbnail and a caption that will get people’s attention.
Its lifted feature from Snapchat – Stories – also allows you to produce multiple visuals that together, get stitched into one message or CTA. According to Social Media Examiner, Snapchat reports that its users watch 10 billion videos per day, while spending an average of 25 to 30 minutes on the platform.
Similarly, Twitter users scroll through their feeds at an incredibly fast pace, which makes it challenging to produce content that will get users’ attention. But, if you do succeed in engaging your audience, Twitter allows for your video content to spread like wildfire.
Since introducing live video within the app, users have also leaned towards video content on Twitter, with a report claiming that 82 percent of users watch videos on the platform.
According to eMarketer, half of the marketers who used video in email campaigns saw increased click-through rates, along with increased time spent reading the email, and increased sharing and forwarding.
Naturally, video emails stand out from all the other mail. And apart from drawing attention, video emailing allows you to communicate your marketing message faster, while making complex subjects much easier to comprehend.
It’s important to note, though, that you will need to invest more in video emailing compared to those distributed through social media. There is a higher expectation when it comes to quality with video emailing, and you wouldn’t want to waste your audience’s time with hastily produced videos.
Takeaway
In case you haven’t yet, you should start re-assessing your digital marketing strategies to lay the foundations of incorporating the aspects of video marketing. Video proves to not just elicit more engagement compared to other forms of content but also allow for messaging to be communicated in a more concise and effective fashion. Who knows? Incorporating video marketing in your day-to-day marketing strategies could serve as a practice towards a more futuristic approach like Virtual Reality, which is another modern digital asset to boost your business.
But as with all the other parts of your marketing strategy, you should take time to identify your video content goals, and align them with the rest of your marketing goals. There are a plethora of ways video can work for your brand, and when executed properly, this type of content can amplify your marketing message, and expand your reach above and beyond what you had pre-video.
Jolina Landicho is a marketing specialist devoted in creating strategies and teaching professionals how to bridge the gaps between businesses to businesses, businesses to customers, and customers to customers.
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