Video Marketing: The Future of Content Marketing

In 2018, Video Marketing has fairly earned the title of the top type of Content Marketing and Digital Advertising medium. Marketeers, entrepreneurs, business owners and even small companies are trying to take advantage of its power. Leaders in every sector including retail, health care, banking, food and beverages and travel are posting videos to promote their products and services, showcase their industry expertise and educate consumers.

But Why Videos?

Online videos have indeed a prominent place in the everyday life of the average consumer, gaining more and more influencing power. By deploying them into marketing strategies, it is almost impossible for them to go unnoticed. Through Video Marketing practitioners can give a boost to brand awareness and traffic. At the same time, thanks to Video Analytics, marketeers can now gather valuable information about their customers's engagement. Before we move any forward let's take a look at some numbers:

• According to predictions, by 2019, Online Video will be responsible for four-fifths (or 80%) of the global Internet traffic;
• 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every day;
• Social Media users share video 12 times more often than text and photos;
• Embedded videos can increase the traffic of a website by 55%.

Successful Video Marketing

Are you already producing promotional videos? Unfortunately, this does not mean that you do successful Video Marketing. Video Marketing refers to dynamic online videos with quality content, uniqueness, artistic value and a strong link to your brand. Here are three helpful tips to make your brand videos more effective:

Arouse curiosity

20% of people will stop watching a video within the first 8-10 seconds. This means that you need to grab your audience's attention by the first 5 to 8 seconds. Keep in mind that online brand videos should go straight to the point by making their purpose clear from the very beginning. In addition, they should not exceed 2 minutes of total duration, since they may be considered boring.

Focus on Plot

...and not directly on sales! As the goal is to give the desired value to your audience, when developing your videos, be sure not to focus only on the product or service you are promoting, but also to emphasize the value you provide through the video's storyline. Online videos play a crucial role in consumer purchasing decisions. So, it's worthwhile deepening their needs and hidden desires to create content that affects their emotions and directs their decisions without showing that you're only targeting sales growth. Moreover, research suggests that plot is the most powerful video content characteristic in terms of its impact on a social media user's decision to create an online story about a brand video in social networks. In other words, an interesting (to the audience) narrative, could also help increasing your video's virality.

Carefully Select Background Music

In Greek mythology, sea travelers had more to worry about than just the waves, wind and other natural perils of the ocean. In the event that they wandered excessively near to specific islands, they would hear the alluring songs of sirens. Those who heard the singing were not able to resist, following it to their deaths as their boats crashed into the island’s rocky shores. Although few would argue nowadays that music is sufficiently strong to render audiences as defenseless as the doomed Greek travelers, studies show that music does have the ability to influence individuals exploring the waters of today’s media-soaked society.

Music is utilized as a method of influence in modern advertising. Experiential research in media impact recommends that music, combined with other content characteristics (e.g., narrative structure, visual images, text), may have many effects in Video Advertising. It may attract attention, carry the product message, act as a mnemonic device, and create excitement or a state of relaxation.

Choose the music background of your brand videos wisely and make sure that it fits your video's narrative and overall message.

In Conclusion

As discussed above, by 2019, it is estimated that traffic resulting from online videos will account for 80% of the global Internet traffic. It would be a huge mistake for a modern company with Internet presence to ignore this sign. Videos are the future of Content Marketing and for this reason, if you want to stay competitive, you should just start practicing your Video Marketing skills.