This week, we’ve got a guest post from the team over at Squideo.
As a business, having a top-quality product is just not enough anymore. You must be able to capture attention, engage your target audience, and build a solid, loyal fanbase. Although traditional marketing may still help to build your company’s presence, video marketing is more effective, fast-paced and a domineering means of advertising.
With the stiff competition online, it has become increasingly necessary for your business to step up. Videos have become an essential marketing tool in the modern marketer’s toolbox for businesses. In a recent study by Statista, it was discovered that 93% of online marketers use videos as part of their content on marketing campaigns. As internet users scroll through their social media feeds, video content is much more effective at grabbing their attention compared to text or pictures alone. According to a report by Small Biz Trends, online consumers significantly prefer videos to any other form of content. For instance, 60% of millennials enjoy watching a video over reading a newsletter.
Video marketing levels the playing field and is also known to significantly increase your conversions to sales – making it highly impressive in terms of Return on Investment (ROI).
Studies have shown that in 2018 video marketing will saturate the web, and these few tips can help you maximize and get ahead with video marketing:
Quality over quantity
To outshine and always be ahead of your competitors, you will need to step up your game in terms of the quality of videos you produce. Producing and uploading videos just for the sake of videos without taking out time and effort to invest into the content and quality of the video will not be of value to you, your brand or your target audience. This will merely see visitors click on your videos but would quickly opt out as they would notice that your video is of low quality and of no value to them. Low-quality videos will hinder the effort of your video marketing and in the long run, reflect your brand in a negative way. Therefore, if you are going to invest in video marketing, you need to do it well. Taking time and effort into producing videos of high quality and with content to capture the attention and engage your target audience. This will consequently drive better result to your website and will also prove to be an investment for you in the long haul, as it is an asset you can always rely on in future months or even years!
Create a coordinated content strategy
When it comes to video marketing you have to be strategic in your content creation. You can’t just create a random video and expect it to go viral as soon as you hit the ‘post’ button. You must take into consideration how your videos will be received across all platforms and devices and ensure that it is in sync with the rest of your marketing content.
Each social media platform is unique and differs in the way content is received and translated. The way your Snapchat followers would receive and interpret your video content would be different from that of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram etc. Also, thanks to most social media channels going mobile, a large percentage of people play videos without sound. So, when creating your video, you should also consider creating videos that can be understood regardless of sound by including subtitles.
Produce engaging videos
The truth is that without making a video that would capture the attention of your target audience or engage them; no one would watch your video. It is essential that your video should capture and grab the attention of your audience in the first three to five seconds. In that time the audience should already know what your video is about. Your videos should educate, inform, and explain to your target audience what your products and services are. An engaging video would utilise information and humour, too, in order to evoke emotion or pique the curiosity of your viewer.
To conclude, video marketing never stops evolving, and it has become essential for businesses to stay on top of the latest trends. Irrespective of the size of your business – large, medium or small scale – if you can produce amazing, educating and engaging videos for marketing, you can compete with organisations significantly larger than yours in terms of size and resources.