Now, I’m no mind reader but I’m guessing that the vast majority of you reading this just tried to click on the above play button! Am I right? Of course I am! It is therefore not at all surprising to learn that ‘the play button’ is the most compelling call to action on the web!

As a medium, and a relatively young one at that, video is the most rapidly expanding. Is it estimated that by 2017 video will be culpable for 69% of all online traffic.  And by 2019, It will take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month; this equates to nearly a million minutes of video content every second!

One question remains though; why?

“Videos are processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text”

Video appeals, in a way that text cannot, to an inherent and natural human preference and tendency towards laziness! This is predominantly because videos are processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text. The cognitive ability that it takes to consume a video is far less when compared to the level of neurological activities required to simply read; it’s the equivalent of a little power walk or running a marathon and I know which one of those I’d rather do!

When we take these findings and compare them to a recent study undertaken by Microsoft, the answer becomes a little clearer. Microsoft’s study showed how a strong steady growth in smartphone usage has aligned with a reduction in human attention span – from twelve seconds, in 2000, to a mere eight seconds today. Please note that even a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds and not the three that you have been deceived to believe.

Today, we want instant information digestion. The medium that can give us the most amount of content in the smallest amount of time will, in the end, win both the battle and the war:  As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and if this is indeed the case, after a few calculations, it turns out that the average video equates to a whopping 1.8 million words.

All things considered, it is little wonder then why video is emerging as the almost certain, and unrivaled, victor.

Video Marketing: Conquering the Content Crisis

Now we have settled why video is experiencing such an unbounded boom and what the appeal is, we must decipher what exactly this means for marketers and why video marketing is becoming so vital and more frequently included in marketing strategies.

Video marketing allows marketers to connect their brand with their consumers, engage with a much wider audience and to push their site up the Google ranks, or in other words; humanise, globalise and optimise:

Humanise

Video marketing affords your brand a dynamic shop front, and one that is available and open on a global scale. Video marketing, celebrating either your company, your services, your products – or indeed all three – not only sells and expresses your offering but connects with the viewer on an emotive level.

Using video to engage a customer with a prospect goes far further than the alternative; a cold call. It humanises the hard selling process whilst allowing the consumer to engage with the feeling and experience that you offer alongside your material offerings:

Video marketing allows marketers to move away from selling products and progress to selling the memorable, impactful and most importantly relevant customer stories. It brings your brand to life in a tangible and four-dimensional form:

“Top of funnel content must be intellectually divorced from your

product but emotionally wed to it.”   – Joe Chernov, InsightSquared

Through multi-sensory and multi-emotive engagement, entertainment and information are tied together and delivered in a particularly potent way: Video marketing is in fact  27.4 times more likely than plain copy to get that all important click through that we strive for.

Globalise

One crucial asset that video holds over any other content is its enormously easy and impactful ‘shareability’.

For instance, How many times a week will someone share say a brochure with you because it’s either entertaining or compelling? Now, how many times a week are videos shared with you, either directly or indirectly – as in those that appear on your social channel homepages due to the actions of others? So, if your daily life is like the majority of people out there (and you don’t indeed work in a brochure factory) the quantity of the latter, in all likeliness, will be far greater than the quantity of the former.

A recent study by Usurv has shown that consumers are 39% more likely to share, 36% more likely to comment and 56% more likely to give that coveted and sacred “like” to content, when it’s conveyed via video. Indeed, video shareability is epic. Think back over the past year and those hordes of viral sensations that came, and in a lot of cases didn’t go. The vast majority of these were indeed videos.

The ease and will of consumers to share videos gives video marketing its second formidable edge over its peers. It is this, almost consumer goodwill towards video marketing that endows it the ability to attract hordes of different audiences for businesses.

Once a video is live, it is likely to engage with consumers that would not, in other situations, digest your content in the form of an article or even white paper. This can be seen by the huge statistic that YouTube boasts of 1 billion unique visitors every month! Video vastly increases your catchment.

As an example, on average ⅓ of brits, at the very least, watch, at a minimum, one video per week online. Even so, this equates to a potential national audience of 20 million Brits per week. On an even bigger scale, 92% of mobile video viewers share videos with others. This pushes the potential UK audience up to about 19.5 million individuals. When we then evaluate autoplay on social media channels into this, the potential reach for videos is enormous and almost unbounded! Compare that to articles and traditional print, they simply can’t even begin to compete.

Optimise

In an age where the amount of content being shared and created online is obscene, marketers need to go over and above to stand out and to be heard over the, more often that not, white noise. Video marketing is one such solution, not just from an engagement or shareability perspective, video can crucially boost your pre-existing website’s stats – and as marketers we really do love a good stat don’t we!

Even Google has released the engaging potential of Video marketing. Video is in fact 50 times more likely to get higher organic search page rankings on Google than plain text results. And it gets better: A site or page with video content will attract people to stay, on average, two minutes longer.

So not only will you appear higher in search results with video content, but people will also stay on your site for longer, this, therefore, for any SEO exercise, qualifies video to be one of the best tools in the kit.

Video Marketing: Even On A Budget?

When we consider the above facts, it seems astonishing that only 24% of brands are using online video marketing to market to their consumers. This, however, is almost certainly due to the stigma of a high-cost and high-risk strategy investment that is attached to video production.

This, however, is a misconception. Although, it is undeniable that you can end up shelling out up to, and even above, a six-figure cost to video production companies for a really top of the line promotional piece. Nevertheless, this does not have to always be the case. These days, being firmly established in a fully integrated digital society, there are multiple levels of production available to the marketer, ranging from the high cost, polished productions down to extremely cost effective options.

For instance, I’m betting most of you are reading this on, or have on you right now, a device that can record video? Yes, well then even on the smallest of small budgets there’s your answer! Twin this with apps like Instagram, Twitter’s Vine and Vimeo, sharing video is now easier than ever. So what are you doing? Get out there and share your business’ story!

This being said, it must be noted that you do indeed get what you pay for, and depending on your company’s status, a certain amount of caution must be taken when selecting appropriate video marketing quality, because what you put out there fully represents your business.

In the end, it certainly is one media worth investing in. Not only is its return on investment, more often than not, huge, but, video too will work for you being evergreen content:

Video marketing videos are multi-functional assets. They can be used in a whole host of marketing arenas from websites, to social channels, to exhibitions, to emailers and many many more channels. Mark Robertson, founder of ReelSEO, has explained:  “Online video is the swiss army knife of internet marketing. It really can be used all over the customer lifecycle, whether it’s customer service, marketing, or even recruitment.”

In this light, it can be argued that video marketing is a cost effective way to be spending a marketing budget and it is, as I’ve shown above, going to be the way for marketers to be heard in the future, if not the way already.

Video Marketing: A Few Things to Bare In Mind

All this being said, it’s not time to completely bury print and more traditional content forms just yet.

Watching a video and reading an article require completely separate cognitive functions. For businesses it is important to understand the differences before you make a decision to use video marketing over primarily textual content. Articles will attract, albeit fewer, consumers but on like by like values, a far more engaged customer. Video watching requires passive activities, reading, on the other hand, requires active capabilities. This means that if a consumer is reading your content they are genuinely interested and fully engaged in your offering.

Video can offer a far wider reach but a less engaged reach: You must ask yourself before embarking on any new campaign what really is the most appropriate form of content? To be able to answer this you need to evaluate who your target audience is. Only then can you move on to research the most effective way to reach them.

A media-neutral approach is needed. It all boils down to your customer and their experience. It is vital to consider what your target consumer is likely to be most receptive of, both online and offline. Different channels and mediums play different roles for both companies and consumers, so selecting the correct tactics is extremely important to the success of any marketing activities.

Here at Rooster, we offer just that, being a fully integrated marketing agency. We focus on creativity: First we listen, then we create and ultimately, we deliver. It is our open channel approach and full-service offering that sets us apart, allowing us to marry traditional value with digital innovation to deliver the most effective campaigns and strategies for our clients.