What Is Video Content Marketing and Why Do We Need It?

We have heard of the most trending word of the decade: “Content marketing”.

Content marketing is a marketing method that involves developing and delivering valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a specific audience. 

Content marketing involves various mediums like images, audio, influencers, graphics, and videos to present a brand’s value proposition. 

Out of all these mediums, content in the form of video has drastically increased and has grabbed a major portion of the content marketing space in the last few years. 

With the rapid growth and influx of video-based social media platforms like YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Instagram, video-based content marketing has acquired a great market share and continues to grow. 

Video content marketing involves sharing valuable and relevant information in the form of a video. These videos can be made using live artists, static images, animated graphics, and suitable audio. Often, the duration of the video is determined by the placement or the platform on which the video is made or published.

The reason video content is known to be effective is that:

• Statistics state that the human brain can process video 60,000 times faster than text.
• 55% of the online audience worldwide watch videos online every single day
• Over a third of all activity spent online is dedicated to watching a video.

Based on the increased adaption of video-based social media platforms and the growing habits of the audience to consume video content, video content has become highly effective and popular in the online marketing space.

Also, according to a poll conducted by WYZOwl, 87% of consumers agreed that they’d like to watch more video marketing from brands and 83 percent of business owners believe that video content provides a good return on investment, which makes video content a highly preferred choice for business owners.

Video content is also known to work effectively because of the attention it receives and the trust it builds.

• Videos help see and understand the products/services visually, which in turn builds a sense of trust and credibility
• Product or feature demonstrations over a video are known to be highly effective in conveying unique selling points and increasing product consideration
• Videos containing human interaction create a sense of relatability and increase overall brand consideration
• In one research, 94% of respondents said they used video to help them make a purchasing decision.

Few other actors that make Video content marketing effective and essential are:

• Videos are useful for effective SEO outcomes. Uploading videos to YouTube target popular search terms that can help your brands rank on Google’s first page.
• Most social media platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok are heavily investing in developing features and access to video content.
• Trends like influencer marketing and live-streaming have increased drastically, which in turn have contributed to increased online buying trends.

As we transitioned from traditional television and large-scale video productions a few years ago, online video content was assumed to be a difficult and expensive content type to be produced. However, the development of technology and access to online tools like video maker and inbuilt features of social media platforms have made video content marketing both easy to create and highly cost-effective.

Some key factors to consider while implementing a video content marketing strategy are:

• Define your audience: The digital space and social media have varied demographics. Reaching the right audience plays an important role in the effectiveness of your video campaign. Consider the content to suit the age, community, gender, and behaviors of the audience.
• Authenticity: Through videos, the audience expects to have a genuine interaction with the brand. Making sure that the videos present authentic and reliable information helps the brand earn higher ROI and loyalty from their customers.
• Duration: The attention span of the online audience varies from platform to platform. Marketers need to keep in mind that the duration of a video has to be sufficiently timed to meet the platform’s criteria and also convey the message to the audience effectively. According to HubSpot, 89% of global marketers plan to spend the same or more on short-form videos.
• Set clear goals: It is important to set clear objectives on why and how a particular video is going to support your marketing initiatives. Define if the video is designed to drive awareness, interest, or consideration of the product. Creating a strategic distribution plan helps increase the success rate of your video marketing campaigns.
• Adapt to trends: With the rise of creators and influencers, the online space has noticed an increase in trends and styles in how videos are made. It is important to understand what formats and styles of videos attract your audience the most. Adapting to trending video formats can increase your potential reach and higher engagement with your video content. Many online video makers and tools have formats and features to easily help you create videos in the required styles and formats.

Some important metrics that will help you determine the success of your video marketing campaign are:

ROI: Return on investment helps you determine the total gains or profits you have made minus the total cost of producing the video content. This is one of the most important metrics if your videos are aimed at direct sales.

Play Rate: The number of times a user clicks the play button on a video is referred to as the play rate. A survey conducted by DataBox found that most video marketers’ play rate averages between 41 – 60%. 

Average View Duration: The average view duration measures how long your viewers spend on average watching your video. The average view duration is calculated by dividing the overall watch time of your video by the total number of video plays (including replays).

Click-through rate (CTR): Click-through rate is the metric that helps you understand the traffic you have received to your website or landing page from your video content. It is calculated by dividing the number of visits to your website from a link shared with your video by the number of views it has.

Finally, 

Considering the above insights and the increasing demand for video content, we can be assured that video content is going to be a vital medium for online marketing efforts in the coming years. Be it an SMB or an established brand, video content is definitely an effective medium of online content marketing that we should consider implementing.

Have you started video content marketing yet?

References:

• https://www.yansmedia.com/blog/55-video-marketing-statistics#:~:text=Consumers%20retain%2095%25%20of%20a,that%20video%20increased%20user%20understanding.

• https://www.siegemedia.com/strategy/content-marketing-statistics#ch6

• https://www.siegemedia.com/strategy/content-marketing-statistics#ch6
• https://databox.com/improve-video-play-rate