Video marketing: Holy grail of digital marketing?
When pictures are said to say a thousand words, one can only imagine the power of moving images. Video has always been a powerful medium for storytelling, as we can see from the influence and importance cinema has in our lives. The ability to attract attention, tell a story and powerfully drive home a message is what makes video marketing such a great tactic to establish your brand in the minds of your audience.
Video marketing is a strategy which appeals to the basic human instinct of engaging better with moving imagery and can accompany the user right through the entire digital customer journey. Through effective use of video and sound, the friction through a customer’s journey can be reduced as they do not have to read through a lot of instructions or text to know the product or purchase it. This reduced friction eases the decision-making process for a user, making them more likely to engage with the product and/or purchase it. A survey conducted by Wyzowl in 2018 has shown that nearly eight out of every ten users have purchased a piece of software or app after having watched the brand’s video.
When you talk of video, it is almost natural to mention YouTube in the same breath. With over 2 billion logged-in users each month and over one billion hours of videos watched every day, the available audience is massive, to say the least. Combined with the fact that videos enjoy a higher recall than any other media like text or images, the potential for making your mark online is enormous. Available stats further our point - more than 60% of consumers purchase a product after watching social videos created by brands. About 80% of users can recall a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days and over 54% of people want to see more video content on the websites/apps they visit.
Statistics from social media platforms are equally impressive and show the dominance of video-based marketing:
- Facebook records about 8 billion video views daily and notes that users typically spend three times as much time watching videos as compared to other types of content. It boasts of more than 500 million active video marketers, with over 35% of them using Facebook Live.
- Twitter gets 2 billion video views daily, with over 90% of them coming from mobile devices.
- Instagram has seen an 80% increase in the time spent by users watching videos, since 2017.
- Even on LinkedIn, posts containing videos are shared 20 times more than those not containing videos.
- 84% of marketers on Facebook and 38% on LinkedIn use videos in their campaigns. On Instagram, video posts receive twice as much engagement compared to non-video posts.
YouTube marketing (or video marketing in general) has tremendous potential for a marketer, virtually guaranteeing an audience who is more “sticky” and willing to engage with the brand’s message, as long as it is tailored correctly. Simple tweaks like using or not using sound in a video (LinkedIn users prefer videos without sound) or adjusting the duration (short videos generally get more engagement) are a vital part of any great video marketing strategy. And when it comes to video marketing, what better choice than a video-oriented platform like YouTube?
It’s like having a vast sea in which you have to only dive to come up with a rich catch. If you think this is a gold mine for your digital marketing efforts, you have only just begun to scratch the surface.