One of the most prominent marketing strategies to come to popularity is video. Video content is becoming one of the most engaging and effective communication mediums out there, and as such, the importance of video marketing cannot be overstated.
The importance of video marketing is so palpable that keeping video out of your content marketing is no longer a viable long-term option. If you want to produce content that today's audiences are looking for, then investing in video marketing is a must. To help get you started, take note of the following breakdown of video marketing, why it’s a force to be reckoned with in your inbound marketing, and how you can use it to maximize your lead conversions.
What is Video Marketing?
Simply put, video marketing is content that you write a script for, film, edit together, and then release online as a produced video. Defining it is simple, using it properly is less so. The importance of video marketing comes down to how versatile and approachable it can be. Anyone with a smartphone can effectively film, edit, and upload a video, which means including video in your marketing efforts doesn’t even have to be a substantial financial investment.
While high-production values can be nice, they aren’t necessary. Casual and informal videos, like the kind used on Snapchat or in an Instagram Story, can be incredibly useful marketing tools. Videos like these can connect with prospective clients on a level they’re comfortable with and make it easier for them to want to engage with you.
Ultimately, good video marketing focuses on integrating video into a content channel that already exists in your marketing strategy. It stands alongside blog posts and podcasts and is intended to create the kinds of helpful, entertaining, and valuable content that your audience is looking for. What makes video different from a traditional blog ultimately comes down to the form the content takes and the kind of audience that it’s valuable too.
When compared to a blog post, a video also takes less attention to engage with and usually less time to consume. This means it’s a versatile and adaptable form of content that’s especially useful for people with busy schedules. When you understand the importance of video marketing, you can reinforce every stage of the marketing funnel, and develop loyalty and trust in your brand’s expertise.
What Does the Importance of Video Marketing Look Like?
Now that you’re acquainted with what video content marketing is, and the roles it occupies, we can shift our focus towards what the importance of video marketing looks like and how you can implement it in all of your content marketing efforts.
Meeting an Audience’s Needs
Audiences want content that will meet their needs, and with people growing increasingly busy and attention spans dropping as a result, producing video content is becoming increasingly useful. It’s an often compact, visual-based medium that can be quickly consumed and easily shared.
As an inbound marketer, you always want to be pursuing the kinds of content that your audience will find useful. While not everyone prefers video-based content, there’s such a large audience for it that including it in your marketing will only diversify the ways your audience can engage with your brand and its content.
The versatility of video content extends to social media as well, where video is routinely a powerhouse performer. Forbes reported in 2017 that “Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it on video, compared to 10% when reading it in a text. The increase in click-through rate with video is as high as 96%, and videos are shared 1200% more times than links and text combined.”
Unsurprisingly, the millennial generation is especially supportive of video content. A report from HubSpot illustrates the importance of video marketing with the graph below, which shows how 65% of adults aged 18 to 24, polled from a population of over 3,000 people worldwide, said that they want to see more video content in the near future. That’s not an easy statistic to argue with and is just one more reason to get involved in video marketing as soon as possible.
Increases Sales
If your audience is looking for video content, then it is in your best interest to provide it. Multiple research outlets cite video as being a powerful sales tool, and in a study reported on by HubSpot and conducted by Wyzowl, not only are 81% of businesses using video in their marketing efforts—a substantial increase from last year’s percentage—but 76% of marketers who use video content say it helped them increases their overall sales.
How Can You Use Video Marketing?
At this point, you should see the importance of video content and why it's become such a necessary marketing tool. It’s relevant to your audience, easy to consume and share, and has consistently proven itself to be a profitable marketing strategy. If video is so versatile though, then what are the best ways to implement it in your content marketing strategies?
Video can do just about anything, but if you’re in need of some foundational ideas, the list below covers some of the most useful and effective video outlets:
Thank You Videos
Saying “thank you” can go a long way. You’re no doubt familiar with the value of a good thank you page—which should greet a prospect after they fill out a form on your website—but adding a friendly thank you video to a traditional web page can provide a customer service experience that goes above and beyond expectations.
Whether you’re just getting started, or are already an established presence in your industry, adding a short video to your thank you page can be a great way to foster community loyalty, build better brand awareness, and consistently delight your audience.
This can also help personify your brand, as you’re providing your audience with a face and personality to interact with instead of a normal web page. Thank you videos function as mini-advertisements as well, since the customer is literally watching someone talk about why they’re happy to provide their audience with content that makes them happy. It’s a mutually beneficial technique that is easy to create and consume, making it a reliable tool to fall back on.
Demonstrations
Depending on the kind of product or service your company offers, a demonstration can sometimes be an incredibly useful motivator in convincing someone to buy. In these cases, offering a visual explanation of your product or service can illustrate to an audience the value of that product.
Video demonstrations are often the bread-and-butter of video content marketing because they offer tangible information that’s easy to consume and can be posted on your blog, social media profile, or even in an email.
Staff Interviews
Everyone loves getting to see behind the curtain. As such, providing your audience with a glimpse at the people and faces who make your company run can be a clever and endearing way to build brand loyalty and personality. Interviews with your staff, or casual video encounters with whoever is around in the office, can make for great social media content that highlights why your company is unique and worthy of a prospect’s business.
This is also a versatile tool because video streaming and output can be used on all of the major social media outlets without requiring a lofty budget or extensive video recording experience. It’s an easy, laid-back approach to video marketing that capably builds rapport with your audience as they move through your sales funnel.
Repurposing Content
Repurposing content is arguably the best way to use video in your content marketing strategies. Since the audience for video content is probably not the same audience that reads all of your blog posts, you can easily take your history of blog posts and convert all that writing into helpful video explanations and lectures. The same approach can be taken with email content, product pages, or just about anything you’ve created in your content marketing efforts.
Offering the same material in multiple formats is never a bad idea. It increases your content’s accessibility and broadens the kind of audience you can interact with, showing us once again how tangible the importance of video marketing is. It’s a straightforward process, and since you already have all of the written material, you can save yourself time by producing better content in a more time efficient way.
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