Everything You Need To Know About Video Marketing

Video marketing has long surpassed blogging as the dominant form of content consumers prefer. Whether they need advice or entertainment, your customers are typically looking for videos to meet the demand. In fact, the value of a video marketing agency ally has grown exponentially in an increasingly virtual landscape. Customers want to see not just how a product or service works but also the way it impacts the lives of people who use it.

To satisfy the public’s voracious appetite for video content, business owners can spend hours filming and editing. While this is an excellent way to get started, video production is time-consuming and takes you away from other important tasks in your business, which is why hiring an agency can be so useful. What do you need to know about video marketing before getting started?

Most Businesses Are Using Videos

According to Hubspot, in 2016, 61% of businesses used video marketing as part of their advertising and PR campaigns. This has grown to 86% in 2021. Professional marketers have also increased their use of this content form. This year, 93% of marketers said videos made up an important part of their marketing campaigns. In short, if you aren’t working with a video marketing agency as part of your campaign, you’re falling way behind your competitors.

There Are So Many Uses for Videos

The best video marketing campaign begins by thinking of all the many uses videos can serve. Video ads just begin to scratch the surface of what is possible:

• Video Ads: Most consumers are accustomed to seeing video-style ads on TV and social media. Over the years, such spots have become increasingly bizarre, but people still prefer to watch them over reading text ads.
• Product Details: These days, you can purchase anything from houses to cars to food online. These 2.14 billion customers worldwide want to see what a product or service looks like before they buy, and video achieves this better than photos do.
• Tutorials: When people are frustrated, trying to parse complicated written instructions can make it worse. Having a video they can turn to that shows them precisely how to resolve the issue is much more helpful. Working with a video marketing agency to create these also frees up your customer service line.
• Greetings: Have you ever received a welcome video from a company or brand? It could the owner thanking the customer or giving a run-down of what the product or service has to offer.
• Testimonials: It’s one thing to see a nicely formatted text of someone thanking a business. Seeing a video testimonial from a real customer is even better. This is especially true when the person is someone others recognize, such as an influencer or celebrity.
• Entertainment: Some brands are intriguing all on their own and share content for brand awareness and lifestyle building. Brands that can benefit from this include short-term rentals, comedians, models, off-road capable vehicles and pets.
• News: Do you have a product announcement or need to do damage control in a more personal way? Working with a video marketing agency is an excellent way to accomplish this. Consumers trust vids more than text on a screen.

Return on Investment Is High

Without a doubt, videos are the most expensive content form to create. As is often the case in business, though, high investment leads to high rewards. In 2015, 33% of marketers saw a positive return on investment from video marketing. Now, 87% of marketers say the same. Videos are an excellent way to educate customers and divert them away from calling customer service reps. The medium is also an excellent tool for generating leads.

Creativity Is Part of Quality

When creating a video, quality is important. Even so, a boring high-quality video is still boring. This generation of buyers loves brands with personality, and these personalities must be easily distinguishable from others. Consequently, brands sometimes need to be open to taking some creative risks to create something that does more than maintaining the status quo. An experienced team at an established video marketing agency can help you determine what approach is most appropriate for your business and your industry.

Stories Beat Pitches Every Time

Modern-day consumers are bombarded with sales copies and ads on a regular basis. While companies should never try to hide whether something is advertising, it’s important not to make such content feel like ads. Telling a story in a video can attract buy-in, so customers actually want to see the video through. This is often more convincing than listening to someone from the company talk excessively about how amazing the product or service is.

You Have Just 10 Seconds

One of the downsides of customers being bombarded with ads is that competition for their attention is much higher. Consequently, you have about 10 seconds to engage people before they move on to something else that catches their attention. However, if you manage to secure that attention in 10 seconds, then you have a much better chance of the person seeing the video through to the end.

Viewer Insights Can Improve Your Technique

When you post videos on social media and other platforms, you usually get access to insights. These tell you who is watching your video, how long they watch it for and when they are watching it. This can help your video marketing agency tweak the way it films, edits and distributes your videos. For example, if people only watch 30 seconds on Instagram but up to 8 minutes on YouTube, then you can edit accordingly for different platforms.

Videos Improve Search Engine Optimization

No matter how much reading numbers continue to decline, blogging will play a crucial role in SEO. Search engines are more fine-tuned for understanding text than videos, images and audio. This has compelled business owners to delay video marketing or reduce funding to it. However, did you know that videos improve SEO too? In fact, while Google holds the number one spot for search engines, YouTube holds second place. Guess who owns YouTube!

Are you ready to work with a video marketing agency that can create videos to drive sales to your business? Contact EM3 for a quote today.