Video content marketing is an effective type of content marketing that both marketers and audiences want. Are you looking to learn something? Maybe you are trying to figure out how to fix your credit score or which smartphone projector to buy. Now let us ask this question: As a consumer, what do you prefer? Page after page of boring, monotonous text or a simple short video that explains everything? The answer is not surprising. That’s why the popularity of video content marketing has been soaring high since the dawn of high-speed internet.
Now, I am not suggesting that blogs or text-based content are obsolete. But, I want to bring to your attention the ever-growing cohort of consumers who prefer multimedia content.
Content marketing comes in many avatars – blogs, podcasts, videos, etc. But, videos have come to play a larger role in the marketing world.
This is because a video instantly conveys a message that is attractive, informative, and easily consumable by users. This, combined with their ease of production, has helped businesses rapidly establish their presence and market their brand across various content marketing platforms.
Due to its versatility and wider appeal, marketers have long recognized the importance of video’s role in reaching and engaging customers. If you combine videos with marketing, you have an entirely different beast.
In this blog, let us discuss what exactly video content marketing is, why you need it, and how to perfect it.
What is Video Content Marketing?
Simply put, video content marketing is nothing but delivering content in the form of videos to promote a brand, announce product launches, or provide walkthrough support to consumers. It can come in other forms like webinars, courses, and live videos. It is one of the most popular and effective types of content marketing.
Videos are inevitable in content marketing as they are the best strategy to engage the audience. The digital explosion has brought social platforms to swiftly create, collaborate, and share video content. It is no exaggeration to say that it has become child’s play to create and share a video on social media.
When YouTube was launched in 2005, it saw unprecedented growth in the number of users and the hours of video content consumed by them. People love to watch and upload videos on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Due to these factors, the demand for video grew exponentially.
Realizing this potential, many clever brands quickly boarded the video content marketing train. They provided free videos in the form of infotainment on YouTube and Facebook. As a result, they enjoyed unprecedented levels of brand awareness, engagement, and customer retention.
Long story short, the video content experiment was a huge success. It is a win-win for consumers and brands, as it educates, creates awareness, advertises, and generates leads in one go.
Why Do We Need Video Content Marketing?
Videos are a great way for businesses and brands to reach potential targets. It becomes very obvious and clear if you look at the data. In a survey conducted by HubSpot, 54% of the people preferred video content compared to the 18% who preferred blogs/articles. A whopping 36% of the people preferred to watch and engage with video content. In addition, research says that an average person spends around 2 ½ hours on social media and half an hour on YouTube daily.
People aged 18-25 spend almost an hour daily on YouTube and social media. Therefore, Video Content Marketing might be the most effective way to reach Teens and Gen-Z. This is down to the ability of videos to help engage, attract, and retain potential clients. Videos can convey emotions. Something difficult to express in articles, images, or infographics. Moreover, their simple, elegant, aesthetic, and cost-effective nature helps products and services reach better than other forms of marketing.
Video content marketing is no doubt at the frontier of the content industry. In short, ignore it at your own peril. Let us look at some key reasons why video content is here to stay.
1. Rapidly Boosts Brand Awareness and Engagement
Users get to know more about your product through videos than textual information. If you are serious about it and create a good video, it can become viral in a few days. If done correctly, video content can reach millions of audiences in a shorter span of time.
The key is creating content that interests users and discusses their pain points. Demonstrate your expertise by helping your viewers in solving their problems. This way, you can build a lot of trust and establish brand authority in the minds of your target audience.
A tailor-made video engages the users about the brand and plays a major role in transforming a user into a customer. Customer feedback, reviews, and comments boost your salability and influence other users to connect with you.
The videos help the audience in their decision-making process. When the users find your videos answering their questions, they get back to you frequently. Eventually, they will rely on you to find solutions and products from your brand.
2. Increases Sales and Boosts Revenue (Better ROI)
Once you get their attention and gain their trust, it is a matter of time before they convert into real customers. People are likelier to trust the videos they watch since they are easily consumable and impressionable. This directly translates into more interest and, eventually, sales. A study has found that users are more likely to buy a product after watching its video.
Surveys after surveys assert that video content brings a better return on investment (ROI) than other counterparts. For example, according to Wyzowl’s survey, 80% of video marketers have observed a direct increase in sales revenue due to video content.
3. Better Shareability Across Platforms
What is unique about video content is that you are not stuck with a single platform to host your videos. Unlike other content types, video content need not follow the same rigid constraints. The boundaries are loose when it comes to inter-platform shareability.
Let us say you created a YouTube video as part of your campaign. Sharing it on social media like Facebook and Linkedin is easier than you think. Moreover, it has the potential to gain the same traction it originally had in its parent platform.
Social media marketing on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram can be harnessed to host your video. It can be a webinar, live, animated, narrative, documentary, etc. This way, you can reach the widest audience in the shortest possible time.
Finally, a barrage of video-creating tools has empowered users to create professional videos in a matter of hours. This has become the tipping point in the success story of video content.
4. Search Engines Prefer Video Content
A well-optimized video with great content, a relevant thumbnail, and a meaningful title will take you miles ahead in the SEO game. Google’s search engine algorithms pick up web pages embedded with videos with optimized content. SEO and video go hand in hand. Period.
Videos consistently help you rank better, increase click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates, generate backlinks, and reduce bounce rates. This way, they bring more organic traffic to your site than traditional methods.
The more time a user spends watching a video on your blog, the better it is. This is recognized by the search engine, which understands that you have valuable content. Therefore there is a high likelihood that your website ranks better.
Popular video sites, like Facebook and YouTube, include features that enable you to see how your content performs. Knowing the views, shares, likes, and social interactions can help you plan future campaigns, which makes your content more effective at reaching your target audience.
How to Get Started with Video Content Marketing?
Using video to engage clients can be a bit complicated at first. However, it does not have to be expensive. Anyone having a smartphone with good picture quality can start creating videos.
Also, easily available video editing software like Lightworks and Blender help increase the attractiveness of the video and captivate the viewers. Using social media like YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram to promote content is an easy and effective way to increase viewer engagement and reach.
Chances are that if the video content is engaging enough, the curious viewer might even visit the website to know more. Thereby becoming a potential client.
Creating video content is simple, although it can be very challenging in some aspects. Here are some points to make a note of when creating content for a video.
- Define a clear goal and a purpose for making the video. Plan your target audience and brainstorm the content and intent of the script.
- Design your budget, timeline, production, and deadlines.
- Strategize your video content just like creating an article or a blog. Manage, structure, and optimize it for better engagement and reach.
- Make your content genuine and authentic rather than making it artificial and flashy.
- Even allocating a small budget for promotion to increase traction might go a long way.
Initially, getting people to view the content might be a bit hard. As the quality of the content improves, viewers and subscribers also improve. Viewers will crave more content regularly. Staying consistent in making videos and providing different types of innovative content keep this marketing strategy thriving.
Advantages of Video Content Marketing
- People trust what they see. Explaining a walkthrough or a how-to helps the viewer get a better understanding of the product or service. Moreover, using testimonials helps build a sense of trust between you and the client, which helps maintain better customer relationships.
- Out-of-the-box thinking and captivating videos grow in popularity across social media platforms and remain on social feeds for longer. Also, social media platforms rank video content higher compared to other forms of content.
- A small investment in creating videos and achieving greater user engagement helps attain a higher ROI. Videos rank higher in Google SERP with an increase in organic traffic.
- Showcasing a video on a website or landing page increases the website’s engagement, resulting in lower bounce rates. Research shows people stay twice as long on a page with a video, helping improve the website’s rank.
FAQs
How do I create marketing video content?
Marketing video content can be created by knowing your audience. The idea of marketing is simply to push out a message and pull a response from your target audience. Outline your video content plan. Divide and conquer to produce your video content. Upload your video content (or go live!). Keep an eye on your metrics.
What are the 4 elements of a good video?
The main four elements of a good video are sound quality, length of the video, relevance, and emotional component.
What makes a video successful?
When it comes to a successful video, the main content must effectively bring your brand story to life. This will instantly gather interest as people scroll through their feeds. You must be clear with the purpose of the video so that the audience can decide if watching it is worth their time.
What are the principles of videography?
The principles of videography are framing, shot types, angles, and basic editing elements like editing space and timing, camera position, camera motion, frame length, and time.
How can I make my video stand out?
A video can stand out for various reasons: it should have a thumbnail, engaging within the first 5-10 seconds, use a lot of emotion, use human senses, and most importantly, tell a story using proper content.
Closing Thoughts
Video content’s popularity is rapidly increasing day by day. As content marketers, we must grab this opportunity as quickly as possible. The right planning, delivery, and consistency in video content marketing can work wonders for your brand.
The key is to start now. Your first video may not look so good in the beginning. But it will definitely help you stand out from the competition. Eventually, it will contribute to increased brand awareness and reputation. If you are unsure, you can always take help from professionals at ContentMarketing.io to level up your video content marketing game.
Keep visiting our blogs for more interesting insights about the world of content marketing.
