The popularity of demand for video in marketing keeps rising every day. In 2021, more than 87% of online marketers said they use video in their campaigns in one way or another. Considering how everyone is watching video content, it’s almost guaranteed that video marketing will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.
Based on what happened last year, Breadnbeyond rounded up facts, figures, and predictions about the state of video in marketing in an infographic. Before we jump into the infographic, let’s take a look at some of the highlights.
WHAT ARE THE BEST PLATFORMS FOR VIDEO MARKETING?
There are multiple possible answers to this question that depends on several factors, namely your target market and preferred campaign model.
This is the platform that was designed with professionals and businesses in mind. Video marketing was not a good suit for LinkedIn because of the lack of native video upload and playback on the platform. That is until they rolled out an update that allows users to upload videos natively to LinkedIn.Being a social media platform with 530 million professionals, LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B companies. It was a great platform before the native video update – the update just made it that much better for marketers to upload their explainer videos, webinar promotions, demo videos, or whatever video content they can use to reach executives from other companies.
It goes without saying that Facebook is scarily big – they have the largest and most diverse users in the whole social media industry (as long as we don’t count Google’s platforms). The size and diversity of Facebook’s users make it easier for B2C companies to reach a specific group of an audience by using an organic and paid approach. Advertising on Facebook is arguably one of the cheapest across the Internet with costs as low as $0.40 per click for the e-commerce category. What’s more enticing is you pay less to reach more people – this definitely helps your company grow its name in a cost-efficient way. There’s also the feature to create and manage your own company’s page that will help you connect with your customers easily. This feature also supports multiple administrators, which means your customer service staff can share workloads!
There are many other platforms that you can leverage to your benefit in video marketing – which we’ll talk about later in the infographic. Here is a brief look at those platforms:
Instagram is a brilliant visual marketing platform for B2C brands. Yes, visual, as in both photos and videos. Instagram is one of the platforms where you can truly be creative in how you engage your followers. In fact, the average engagement rate on Instagram is 15 times higher than on Facebook.
YOUTUBE
If creating video content is not your forte, you can create a short explainer or commercial to advertise on YouTube. There are millions of creators covering various topics, so you don’t need to worry about running out of choices.
VIDEO MARKETING TRENDS?
Trends are always difficult to predict because the nature of video content is creative. We can’t predict what will become viral and which company will throw a huge PR blunder. With that said, we can predict how certain genres of video content will perform based on their popularity throughout 2021.
LIVE VIDEOS
Broadcasting via mobile devices is now easier than ever, thanks to the improvement of mobile data bandwidth, app updates, and affordable smartphones. Eight out of ten customers said they prefer live videos to other types of social media updates. Live videos on many social media platforms have been proven to be more engaging than pre-recorded videos. This is due to a sense of ‘urgency’ that live videos give your followers – knowing that they can’t interact with you real-time once the Livestream ended. There are many platforms to do live broadcasts, choose one depending on which one has most of your audience:
- Twitter (Periscope)
- YouTube (using the YouTube app)
- Snapchat
- Timed Video Content
Timed videos are only available for a certain amount of time. An example of timed videos are snaps (Snapchat), and stories (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Their popularity is very similar to live videos – the urgency. The amount of internet traffic is growing rapidly, a visually appealing content is not enough anymore because it’ll just drown after some time. By making your content only temporarily available, you’ll be able to force an engagement from your audience.
VIDEO IS UNAVOIDABLE
Sure, you can try to avoid using video as part of your marketing, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Video in marketing is unavoidable. And, with each new year, those businesses that haven’t figured out a way to use video as part of their marketing will see themselves falling further and further behind.
Even if you’re not comfortable with video right now, pick up a tip or two from this article and give it a try. Before long, you’ll be using video in your marketing more effectively and maybe, just maybe, you won’t be able to do without it.
