Why Video Marketing Is Essential To Your Business
Video is the present and the future of content marketing. It’s vital to review what works best on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter so you can plan accordingly.
Trust is the foundation of conversions and sales. Building trust should be a target on its own, and begin with authenticity. The concept of content marketing is based on creating trust and long-term relationships by providing users with interesting and useful information. Selling shouldn’t be your primary focus. We couldn’t have said it better than Mark Schaefer, the Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions:
Video Marketing Builds Trust
“The new era demands a focus on ignition, not just content, on trust, not just traffic, and on the elite people in your audience who are spreading and advocating your content.”
Google Loves Video Marketing
Videos increase the time spent by visitors on your site. Longer exposure builds trust and signals search engines that your site has great content. Moovly gives a whopping statistic: Your business is 53 times more likely to show up first on Google if you have a video embedded on your website. Since Google owns YouTube, there has been a significant increase in how much videos affect your search engine rank.
Mobile Users Love Video
Video and mobile go hand in hand. 90% of consumers watch videos on their mobile devices. YouTube reports mobile video consumption rises 100% every year. Since people like to watch videos on the go, and the number of smartphone users is growing, the video audience keeps getting bigger and bigger. Consumers continue to value video content highly as part of their buyer journey. While viewers most commonly use videos as a starting point to build their knowledge about a product or service, videos have also acted as a ‘tipping point’ for an overwhelming majority of consumers – a decisive factor that convinces them to buy or download a product or piece of software.
Video Encourages Social Shares
Social networks also encourage video content with their new features. Facebook has launched 3600 Video, Live Video, and Lifestage (A Video-Centric App for Teenagers). Instagram put in place 60-Second Videos & Instagram Stories, Twitter has Periscope. And YouTube is the second most popular social network in the world.
In a social media context, businesses must remember that people share emotions, not facts. Many users say they would share a branded video with their friends if it was entertaining. Emotions are not exactly ROI but social shares can increase traffic to your site, and you can take it from there.
Facebook Favors Video Marketing
Facebook has the largest audience of any social network with more than 2.07 billion monthly active users. That’s more than one-third of the world’s population, and a whole lot of those people are watching video. Around 100 million hours of video are watched every day on Facebook. Like YouTube, Facebook has a massive and diverse audience. The most important thing to remember about Facebook is that people come to be entertained. In other words, cat videos. Last year, for instance, a video titled “How to wrap your cat for Christmas 101” got more than 80 million views and 405,000 shares. Make sure to experiment across a wide range of creative strategies to identify what works for your brand, and keep in mind that entertainment tends to win the day on Facebook with emotionally-charged content. Set targets (such as for more views or engagement) and track your performance.
Here are some great tips:
- Add a featured video: You can pin a video to the top of your page to introduce your brand or highlight a new product.
- Upload videos directly to Facebook: Native videos give you analytics and better visibility in the feed.
- Call To Action: Give them something to do after they watch the video with an on-screen CTA.
Youtube Survives On Video
More video is consumed on YouTube than any other social network. Over 1 billion hours of video are watched daily on YouTube in 88 countries in 76 languages, according to YouTube’s statistics. YouTube is also the world’s second-largest search engine after its parent company Google. Out of the 87 percent of marketers who have published video content on YouTube, a whopping 90 percent found it to be an effective strategy. YouTube has the most variety of video on any social network with people streaming everything from entire movies to six-second clips. Even if you don’t have a YouTube channel yet, start with what you already know about your target audience.
Here are a few more pointers to keep in mind:
- Get personal: With such a diverse platform, start by targeting your audience.
- Be interactive and try new things: Youtube is one of the widest platforms to experiment with.
- Release new videos on a regular schedule: YouTube is eating up viewing time from TV networks, so keep your content fresh to pick up these viewers.
- Optimize your content so it ranks: Remember, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. You’ll also be helping people find you from Google. Write clever titles and metadata with engaging calls-to-action.
- Make sure you’re sharable: Enable embedding so people can share the love they feel after watching your video. Go to advanced settings in your Video Manager, then Distribution options, and check “Allow embedding.”
People love Instagram as an alternative to information overload. There’s a simplicity of gazing at visual content without having to read. Even though it’s not the biggest social network, a lot of users like it the best. A 2017 Forbes article entitled “Why Instagram Is The Top Social Platform For Engagement” broke the network’s success down to its highly visual nature and simplicity, which is solely mobile based. The stats on the network are impressive. There are 800 million monthly actives, 500 million daily actives and 250 million daily stories actives, according to Instagram company data. Marketers are loving it, too. Of the 41 percent of marketers who have used Instagram video, 78 percent found it to be an effective strategy.
So how do you get the attention of all those Instagrammers? According to James Quarles, Instagram’s VP of business, “People are in a mindset of being open to discovery.” To harness that, Quarles recommends that the interests of users makes effective targeting signals for ads. It’s good advice for creating organic video as well.
Although video is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Twitter, maybe it should be. According to Nielsen, Twitter video is two times more memorable than other premium platforms. The effectiveness of video on Twitter is pretty impressive. Video tweets are six times more likely to be retweeted than photo tweets. Why is that? There’s research showing people feel like Twitter video is organic in their social feeds and they respond better to it.