5 Video Marketing Trends to Watch Out For

When it comes to con­tent mar­ket­ing, videos take a much big­ger role than most oth­er types of con­tent. Video mar­ket­ing grew rapid­ly over the past cou­ple of years. Will it be able to keep up the pace in 2018?

There’s no doubt about the effec­tive­ness of video mar­ket­ing. In fact, it’s one of the most pow­er­ful con­tent mar­ket­ing strate­gies that most mar­keters are invest­ing in with­out hes­i­ta­tion. Neil Patel is one of those mar­keters who plan on spend­ing $144,000 on video mar­ket­ing in 2018.

Why spend that much mon­ey to cre­ate videos? Because 90% of con­sumers find prod­uct videos to be help­ful in their deci­sion-mak­ing process. Which is prob­a­bly the main rea­son behind why video mar­keters can gen­er­ate 66% more qual­i­fied leads every year.

Clear­ly, every busi­ness could ben­e­fit from video mar­ket­ing. If you plan on get­ting start­ed with a video mar­ket­ing cam­paign this year, here are a few trends that you should keep an eye out for.

Facebook Vs. YouTube

YouTube used to be the biggest and the best plat­form for video mar­ket­ing, but now Face­book has been giv­ing them a run for their mon­ey. After launch­ing video as a con­tent form on the social net­work, Face­book now gen­er­ates over 8 bil­lion aver­age video views every day.

Face­book is much more effec­tive at snack­able videos than YouTube. These are short­er videos, with text, that gets shared across mul­ti­ple pro­files. For starters, the social net­work has a reach of over 2 Bil­lion active users and the plat­form also pro­vides you with eas­i­er ways to boost your video reach with afford­able adver­tis­ing. You also get bet­ter and more detailed ana­lyt­ics for your videos on Face­book. You can also eas­i­ly team-up with influ­encers on Face­book to cross-pro­mote video con­tent as well.

Because of all these rea­sons and more, mar­keters will pri­or­i­tize on Face­book video over YouTube this year to effec­tive­ly pro­mote brands and products.

More Instagram Stories

When Insta­gram copied Snapchat’s pro­file Sto­ries fea­ture, which allowed users to fea­ture short videos and pic­tures tem­porar­i­ly to their fol­low­ers, many thought it would fail. Well, they were wrong. In fact, Insta­gram Sto­ries now see more dai­ly users than Snapchat. 250 mil­lion dai­ly users over the 166 mil­lion on Snapchat, to be exact.

Insta­gram Sto­ries offers users and brands an eas­i­er way to cre­ate more engag­ing video clips. Unlike reg­u­lar posts, these fea­tured sto­ries are high­light­ed on the fol­low­ers’ home feeds to encour­age them to view the video.

Brands are already using this fea­ture to their advan­tage. This year, we’ll see more busi­ness­es join­ing Insta­gram to use this bril­liant way to inte­grate video mar­ket­ing with Insta­gram promotions.

The Rise Of Twitter TV

For some rea­son, many mar­keters seem to avoid Twit­ter claim­ing it as an inef­fec­tive plat­form for video pro­mo­tions. It’s quite the con­trary. Believe it or not, video is quite a strong medi­um of con­tent on Twit­ter. Video con­tent is viewed by more than 82% of Twit­ter users.

More brands are now push­ing video con­tent to their users on Twit­ter as well. Twit­ter is also plan­ning to launch a live broad­cast­ing sec­tion on the plat­form to pro­mote live stream­ing on the micro-blog­ging site. This sec­tion, dubbed “Twit­ter TV” will stream dif­fer­ent types of TV pro­grammes live 24/7 to viewers.

Twit­ter also claims to have streamed over 800 hours of live con­tent in Q1 2017 alone. With this new announce­ment, mar­keters will once again ral­ly behind Twit­ter to start pro­mot­ing video content.

Videos In Email Marketing

It’s a known fact that peo­ple hate read­ing long emails. This is why email mar­keters try to get their mes­sage across to their sub­scribers with­out tak­ing up too much time. That’s why video is per­fect for email mar­ket­ing as well. There’s no bet­ter way to sum up a prod­uct and its fea­tures than a video.

For exam­ple, you can include explain­er videos to show­case prod­uct fea­tures or embed a cus­tomer tes­ti­mo­ni­al in your pro­mo­tion­al emails to help users make bet­ter choic­es. Or you can use a mix of a video with a com­bi­na­tion of a count­down timer to add scarci­ty to cre­ate the ulti­mate email that gen­er­ates bet­ter results.

While many pop­u­lar email mar­ket­ing ser­vices pro­vide eas­i­er ways to embed videos in emails, some ser­vices still advise against it since some email client apps have issues with han­dling embed­ded video scripts. Hope­ful­ly, things will final­ly change for the bet­ter this year.

Interactive Videos

Sto­ry­telling takes an impor­tant role in video mar­ket­ing. Includ­ing a cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ry in your mar­ket­ing can make a big dif­fer­ence for the suc­cess of your cam­paign. Many brands now use emo­tion­al sto­ries and humor to influ­ence the audi­ence and cre­ate more mem­o­rable ads. Things will change in the near future.

Inter­ac­tive videos are the future of sto­ry­telling. These videos allow you to add more than one nar­ra­tive to your video mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and also puts the view­er in con­trol of the video to let them cre­ate their own journey.

Warn­er Bros. used this strat­e­gy to pro­mote one of their movies with an inter­ac­tive gam­i­fied video called Focus On The Con. This gave view­ers an amaz­ing expe­ri­ence of becom­ing a con artist by allow­ing them to make their own choic­es along the video.

Imag­ine using this same strat­e­gy to cre­ate vir­tu­al tours inside stores and shops. Or cre­at­ing per­son­al­ized mar­ket­ing videos based on dif­fer­ent user groups, age groups, and gen­ders. Soon, we’ll see more inter­ac­tive videos used for mar­ket­ing than ever before.

Over To You

Like in most mar­ket­ing strate­gies, inno­va­tion is the key to cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Instead of copy­ing oth­ers and cre­at­ing the same old bor­ing types of videos, find your own way to stand out and get people’s attention.

Whichev­er method or plat­form you plan on using, you should get start­ed on cre­at­ing videos before it’s too late and stay ahead of the competition.

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