With almost four out of five companies employing an active content marketing strategy, video marketing has emerged as a campaign that can help brands differentiate themselves from their competitors. The importance of video marketing is tied to the growing complexity of digital marketing. As digital channels expand, creating content devoted to each one isn’t a sustainable practice. Consequently, the best strategy is one that focuses on creating content that can be used across as many channels as possible.
Video marketing is also more accessible than ever. The hardware needed to produce video is more affordable, and the growth of video production agencies makes these services more cost-effective when outsourced.
The statistics speak for themselves. Video marketing has a huge effect on sales:
- Online video users are expected to double to 1.5 billion in 2016.
- Globally, online video traffic will be 55 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2016.
- 76 percent of marketers plan to add video to their sites, making it a higher priority than Facebook, Twitter and blog integration.
- More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, spending more than 4 billion hours watching videos.
- 2 billion video views per week are monetized on YouTube, and every auto-shared tweet results in six new YouTube browsing sessions.
Wondering how to add video to your marketing strategy? Here are 5 ideas to get you started:
- Share big announcements with your customers via video. It’s one of the easiest and fastest ways for viewers to consume and understand the information you’re sharing.
- Add customer reviews and testimonials via video to your website. It not only adds a human touch to your business but also allows customers to connect to others on a deeper level (and creates confidence and trust with your brand).
- Use this as an opportunity to create new content. Webinars and video blogs can be posted to your website, YouTube, Facebook and other accounts!
- Add a clip or two to your email marketing campaigns. Either embed the video or add a screenshot that people can click on that leads them to a video on your website. Again, it’s the quickest and easiest way for viewers to consume your information and makes it a great, engaging way for your content to be shared – and drives traffic to your websites or social platforms.
- Demos, training, interviews, and live event coverage are all great opportunities to share more information about your brand and business without ‘selling’ your brand.
These 5 are ones that you can use daily, but there are plenty of other ways to incorporate video into your 2016 marketing strategy.