Marketers agree that video content outperforms other formats by far.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful approaches today’s marketers can use to reach audiences, generate leads, and close sales. But content comes in many forms, and some forms are better suited to driving engagement than others.
Nearly nine out of ten marketers say that video generates a significant return on their investment. It helps with lead generation. It drives traffic to their websites. It directly helps increase sales. It should come as no surprise that 95% of video marketers plan on increasing or maintaining video spend throughout the next year.
Why Video Marketing?
Video is a versatile and engaging medium that condenses a great deal of information into an easily digestible format. It isn’t as simple as converting words to moving images, though. Video offers a unique window into the content creator’s personality, attitude, and lifestyle.
Even the shortest clip of someone speaking can say more about who they are than a dozen written essays. A video presentation has more in common with a face-to-face dialogue than it does with reading a book. Video content simply shows more than other formats can.
It’s important for digital marketers to understand what video content shows. It’s not just your marketing message, or the data that you want to communicate to viewers. Video builds trust by establishing an emotional connection.
Digital marketers who rely on video find it easier to build trust and credibility with viewers. This is extremely important, because it paves the way towards authenticity. Without credibility and trust, it’s nearly impossible to convince your audience of that.
This explains some of the statistics behind video marketing’s success:
- 97% of video marketers say that video helps consumers understand their products better.
- 91% of marketers feel like the global pandemic has made video more important than ever.
- 43% of marketers report that video content reduced the number of product support calls they received.
- 78% of video marketers report that their efforts improve sales and boost the bottom line.
How to Succeed with Video Marketing
While the vast majority of marketers understand the value of video, not everyone is using it optimally. In fact, very few marketers are truly making the most of the video marketing technologies available to them.
It’s easy for newcomers to equate video marketing with an oversimplified workflow. You start shooting testimonials, product explainers, and promo content, host it on YouTube, share it on social media, and wait.
That is one way to do video marketing, but it leaves out a great deal.
For example, how do you know what products to focus your video content on? Which customers should you solicit testimonials from? How can you use video to reach audiences outside of your existing social network?
Marketers who take the time to answer these tough questions will enjoy far greater success with video marketing than their peers. Give yourself the advantage you need to achieve data-driven results using video content.
Here are some examples of ways you can do that:
1. Incorporate Video Into Your Email Campaigns
Email remains one of the most effective channels for communicating with audiences today. Email marketing spend generates an average return of $51 for every $1 spent – far better than almost any other content marketing option out there.
Modern email marketers have to reach a high standard of quality, however. Spam filters are more stringent than ever, and anything less than high-impact, valuable messaging will be automatically discarded before it gets opened.
In order to succeed, your email marketing campaigns need to offer value in a clear and unambiguous way. Your emails need to be captivating and engaging, or risk getting lost forever under a pile of hundreds of other messages.
Personalization is one of the best ways to showcase the value of email content. Personalized emails have higher open rates, higher click-through rates, and better returns than boilerplate messages.
That’s why companies like Amazon use your name in every email. Nobody feels like there is an important message waiting in an email that starts with, “Dear valued customer,”.
These benefits carry over to video personalization as well. Personalized videos are great for capturing viewers’ attention, especially when combined with personalized emails. Even something as simple as a holiday greeting takes on an entirely new level of significance when delivered through the most personal medium there is – video.
2. Create an Animated Review
Reviews have always been a staple in marketing. Reviews build trust amongst audiences, and showcase your expertise on things such as technology, games, products and even books. Even the shortest clip of someone speaking, especially in the context of an animated review, can say more about who they are and the product they’re showcasing than a dozen written essays. For example A video presentation on a book review, particularly when transformed into an animated video, has more in common with face-to-face dialogue than it does with reading a book. Video content, and particularly the engaging format of an animated review simple shows more than other formats can. Animated Reviews build confidence, trust and overall engagement to your audience.
3. Use Video On Your Best-Performing Landing Pages
Landing pages are a critical element to marketing success. If you are using online ads, you should be directing ad traffic towards a well-designed landing page that generates conversions.
But what is a well-designed landing page? What makes some landing pages work better than others?
Every landing page has a single purpose – to get website visitors to complete a certain action. That action might be clicking on a link, or signing up for a newsletter, or buying a product. Any landing page is only as good as its ability to convince visitors to do that one thing.
For digital marketers who understand the power of video, using video on landing pages is a no-brainer. Clicking on an ad and moving down the sales funnel to become a customer should be a frictionless process. Explaining how great your products are using walls of text causes friction.
Marketers who neglect to optimize their landing pages with video end up losing potential leads. Anyone who doesn’t feel like reading further will simply hit the back button on their browser and be transported away from your website – possibly for good.
Video landing pages change that story entirely. By relying on video to deliver your landing page messaging, you are putting your strongest, most captivating content up first. This ensures that a greater percentage of overall traffic will end up converting.
Actively engaging website visitors is challenging. Relying on a content format they don’t appreciate only makes it harder. That’s why marketers are moving away from text-based landing pages and towards video. The video format is far better-suited to eliciting the kinds of emotions that motivate people, like amusement, awe, and surprise.
3. Gather and Analyze Viewer Engagement Data
Whether using video for email campaigns, landing pages, or something else entirely, one of the most important things marketers need to do is gather and analyze viewer data. This is the fundamental thing that enables marketers to earn, calculate, and report ROI on video marketing investment.
It’s also the primary method video marketers use to identify their most successful videos. Sophisticated video analytics allow marketers to segment their audiences and find out which messages perform best in specific circumstances.
Most marketers already optimize their content in every other medium, but resign themselves to nothing more than counting views when it comes to video. Views are just one metric that video hosting platforms offer their users – and certainly not the most important one.
Attention span data can offer a much deeper insight into how your content truly performs. People have high expectations of video content. If you manage to create engaging content that viewers resonate with, they will continue watching. The moment your content stops delivering, they switch off and turn somewhere else.
Marketers who measure attention span data can pinpoint the best-performing parts of their video, and cut out the parts that viewers skip. By optimizing your video to capitalize on viewers’ attention spans, you will drive video ROI in a data-driven way, and pave the path forward for continued marketing success.
Choose a Video Hosting Platform that Supports Your Marketing Workflow
Choosing the right video hosting solution is one of the most important decisions that a digital marketer can make. Hosting your videos on a free video hosting platform like YouTube might be sufficient to get your content out there – but it cannot deliver the valuable insights that video analytics offers.
Your video hosting partner must be able to deploy the technology that your digital marketing techniques rely on. In order to deliver value, it has to augment your capabilities and give you the ability to track viewer engagement so you can continuously optimize your approach, and earn better returns in the process.
Cincopa is a video hosting provider that offers in-depth viewer engagement analytics to marketers. Optimize your digital marketing strategy with high-impact videos informed by valuable viewer data today.
