5 Striking Reasons Why You Should Use Video For Your Marketing

Since the dawn of television, video has been key to connecting businesses with customers. Some of the most memorable moments of the last 60 years were created through people discussing what they saw in an advertisement or show. And with the age of information, videos were more easily shared and passed around — remember Crazy Frog? — through email, discussed around the water cooler, and talked about with family, friends, and neighbours.

Video marketing is becoming more popular as it becomes more affordable, and advances in technology allow your content to captivate a wider audience. To successfully develop marketing videos for your business, you need to understand human psychology, and creatively engage your target audience to reach them on their level.

Videos that are emotional, educational, and relatable can go viral within hours, garnering millions of views for your business. The most creative video advertising gets noticed fast and stokes action in anyone who watches. But what exactly is video marketing, and why is it so important?

Read on to learn Frantic’s top tips on how to make sure your business bosses it when it comes to video marketing.

In short, video marketing is developing a marketing strategy that is engaging, interesting, and works effectively across both online and offline platforms. It helps spread the message of your company, brand, products and services. Thanks to the developing technology that is now at our fingertips, we’ve moved beyond only having access to videos on a TV. Social media has made it infinitely easier to share thought-provoking or funny videos quickly, a factor which almost any forward-thinking brand has begun to capitalise on.

This is why more brands are adopting video as a way of increasing their reach and promoting their products organically. Read on to discover exactly why video has become such a crucial format for businesses’ marketing efforts, no matter what they’re selling.

Video is an easy tool to grab viewers’ attention, and get your business noticed in ways that few other strategies can. Videos are shared 1200% times more than text and links combined, and over 82% of internet users watch them. This rise in popularity has stemmed from social media platforms, and people now spend an average of 100 minutes per day watching online videos.

The trick is to make your video as memorable and relatable as possible, especially since 48% of video watchers only watch content they have an interest in. So the funnier, more provocative, or visually appealing the video is, the more likely it is to be shared, which can have a massive impact on your company’s brand awareness.

The three leading social media platforms are Facebook (over 2 billion active users worldwide), Youtube (just shy of 2 billion active users) and WhatsApp (1.5 billion active users). That’s a lot of potential for your business to increase.

There is an overabundance of information on the internet, so much so that we can reach overload very quickly. This is why you need to communicate effectively with the people you’re targeting, and video marketing is a hugely successful way of doing this. The stats speak for themselves — 62% of customers watch product review videos, which contributes to 84% of all purchases made.

To gauge what will work best for your audience, try experimenting with your video marketing strategy, with interviews, video testimonials, product demonstrations, and anything else you can think of. In fact, the creative possibilities for video marketing are almost endless. Whether you link back to your website in your video description, make announcements to get your customer base excited, or offer reviews and details of your products and services, video will help customers make informed decisions.

Did you know that 63% of online traffic comes via mobile users? You may even be surprised in learning that 53% of online purchases are made using mobile too.

So it shouldn’t be a shock that over half of online video content is viewed on mobile phones, with 92% of these mobile viewers sharing videos with others. Watching videos on mobile devices gives viewers more of a personal connection to what they are watching, which makes it even more useful for marketing purposes.

Optimising your videos for mobile audiences will not only appeal to wider audiences but will encourage active engagement in your content. Make sure they’re scaled and edited correctly for the platform you use, and consider targeted advertising to aim your content directly at your brand’s key demographics.

Sometimes, explaining things with the written word isn’t quite as effective as you’d expect. By contrast, videos offer a multifunctional approach to explaining concepts or instructions — you can use words, alongside images and verbal explanations, the combination of which can resonate with people. With a clear and well-defined video marketing strategy, you can truly boost awareness of your business.

Often, the issue that most businesses have when it comes to talking about their products or services is how to go beyond simply telling customers about what they have to offer. Video is perfect for showing the basics of your products and services to prospective customers, and you can also use it to provide examples of complex processes that are easier to digest.

You can also create a series of videos to help develop not only trust and understanding, but a story about your brand itself, helping people to learn smaller pieces of information more quickly. This can increase the size of your audience, and improve brand recognition. Businesses rely on developing trust with prospective customers, so the more you can teach them, the more confidence they will have in you in return.

Videos make your products and services more accessible, so make the experience positive through humour and eye-catching graphics, and you’ll increase your reputation through word of mouth.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) increases your website’s rankings on search engines like Google, and improving this will get you seen by more people searching for specific key terms related to your business. Video SEO works much in the same way, and you can apply many of the same techniques to help your content get found more easily.

Here are some guidelines that you need to follow to rank on search engines:

• Provide a transcript of the video everywhere you publish one. Transcripts act the same way as any other piece of written content, in that search engines can “read” the text and identify key terms.
• Include an engaging thumbnail. The higher the play rate, the better the video will perform on search engines, and an attractive thumbnail can increase the likelihood of your video being played by 30%.
• If your video is hosted on your website, keep the text on the rest of the page relevant to the video, and optimise it for SEO. You can do this through using relevant keywords, and using the correct alt text and meta descriptions for the page. This will help search engine algorithms identify your content and go towards improving your site’s rankings.