Given the world’s appetite for brief, intriguing, easy-to-digest entertainment via mobile, it’s no surprise video marketing is growing exponentially. Even small businesses can no longer afford to ignore the trend.
Cisco predicts Internet video traffic will quadruple between 2015 and 2020, with total business and consumer videos combined slated to represent 79 percent of all Internet traffic by 2020. Stated differently, by 2020, nearly a million minutes of video content will be crossing the Internet each second.
As for marketing, business videos are expected to take up 66 percent of all business Internet traffic by 2020, and Nielsen recently determined 64 percent of marketers expect the medium to dominate their strategies in the near future. The greatest appeal of video? It’s entertaining, easy to digest and evocative enough to make several points within a short time period. It’s become more affordable due to falling production costs and increasingly user-friendly tools. And it’s proven to boost conversions; recent studies point to a 4.8 percent average conversion rate for websites using video compared to 2.9 percent for those that don’t.
“Video has emerged as the medium of choice, not only for peer-to-peer content sharing and broadcast media, but also for brand-to-customer communications in both B2C and B2B markets,” confirms Vala Afshar of Salesforce in the Huffington Post.
Some noteworthy trends:
- No other medium tops video in reach. For example, YouTube maintains more than a billion users; as of last year, 8 billion video views were being logged daily.
- Mobile is being maximized; at least 10 percent of all video is played via smartphone or tablet, while 90 percent of Twitter video views last year were conducted via mobile.
- Brands are using multiple videos throughout the sales funnel. Four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it, studies show.
- In a recent survey, companies ranked customer testimonials, on-demand product demo videos and explainer/tutorial videos as the three most effective kinds of business videos.
- Sales reps are increasingly recording personal greetings and follow-up messages as sales tools.
- Video testimonials are being leveraged to demonstrate brand success.
- Companies are creating libraries of short, live product demos and making them available for online viewing and sharing. How-to searches on YouTube grew 70 percent between 2014 and 2015, with 100 million hours watched last year.
- Interactive video has yet to become mainstream, largely because it requires customized video players that don’t work on every site. Afshar predicts a future that includes “integrated questionnaires, surveys, data collection forms and other practical tools that will help marketers turn static videos into active tools for generating leads, qualifying customers and driving greater engagement.”
- Personalization is slated to pick up in video marketing thanks to RTP (real-time personalization) technology. For example, ads touting website tools may soon feature the actual websites of prospective clients.
- More companies are devoting entire employee segments to video marketing.
- YouTube may see more competition from marketers’ own branded websites and custom video channels, as well as from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other venues.
- Use of video analytics is growing as marketers seek to track customers’ second-by-second viewing habits and trigger immediate action based on that engagement.
RingSquared can advise you on effective use of video in any marketing campaign. Contact us at 1-800-700-1987.
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