Video Marketing

It doesn’t take an expert to point to the fact that social media and the internet have changed the landscape forever. And into this tumultuous world comes online video, something with the power to emotionally connect just like TV ads, but backed by highly targetable technology with data analytics and interactivity. It’s held in the hands of 1.3 billion people and backed by the giants of Facebook and Google. So the rewards are there for brands nimble enough to break the shackles of old models. Now, having the biggest spend will certainly ensure success but won’t guarantee continual category dominance. The democratization of the internet means the door is open for smaller brands as well as big ones.

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62 per cent of B2B marketers rated videos as an effective content marketing tactic in 2016 and there are countless stats about it… but the person you should listen to most is Nicola Mendelsohn, VP of Facebook in Europe, who very simply says ‘ the future is video, video, video’.

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HOW BIG IS VIDEO IN MARKETING?

● 62 per cent of 18- to 32-year-olds prefer to check their smartphone if they have any ‘downtime’ rather than just sit and think.4 ● 37 per cent even check their smartphone if there’s a short lull in conversation with friends.4 ● In 2021, a million minutes of video content crossed the internet every second.5 ● Video will be 82 per cent of all IP traffic (both business and consumer) by 2023, up from 75 per cent in 2017.6 ● Content delivery network (CDN) traffic carried 71 per cent of all internet traffic in 2021.5 ● More than 60 per cent of marketers and small business owners said they planned to increase investment in video marketing in 2017.7 ● Live video will grow 20-fold from 2016 to 2023.

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At Digital Market Guru, we feel that there are two ways to go about with any given marketing project.

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How publishers think – pull:

● How can we attract viewers to our content? ● How can we keep viewers coming back with regular schedules and growth of content identity? ● How do we get people to recommend our content? ● How do we entertain? ● How do we make people feel?

 

How marketers think – push: ● How can we get our message in front of people? ● How can we get into people’s lives? ● How many messages can we send to people? ● How do we inform?

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YouTube vs Facebook

Contrasting Facebook with YouTube opens up numerous lines of thought and is a useful exercise. Let’s first cover a major difference that underlines the necessity of understanding the range of platforms. As discussed at the start of the chapter, YouTube is a fixed platform, whereas Facebook is fluid, and it is from this fundamental difference that other differences spring. If a video is uploaded to both Facebook and YouTube on the same day, it will perform very differently on each platform over time. With a decent weight of media spend behind it a Facebook video will have immediate views and create a lot of social noise quickly. It will deliver higher viewer numbers for your budget than YouTube, but once the backing of the media spend stops, viewers will tail off. The YouTube version, however, will take longer to get viewers but once media spend dies off there will still be activity on the video and more importantly on the channel around it. YouTube will therefore have a longer tail of ROI, deliver higher levels of completed views for your budget, and is most likely to deliver higher levels of engagement.6 So what is the cause of these differences? Fundamentally people that arrive on YouTube do so to watch video; they are actively looking for content to watch and have the sound on. Facebook users arrive to socialize, not watch. Brands can use thumb bait to get them to watch a single video but once it has finished they will return to their feed. Further to that, Facebook users typically have the sound turned off and the phone in portrait. None of this makes users especially open to video. The main thing to take away is that a well-balanced video campaign will use both Facebook and YouTube, getting the instant awareness-raising benefits of Facebook along with the higher engagement and longer activity tail of YouTube.

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Why does Video Marketing work?

● Fear of missing out (FOMO): Some people are motivated by the fact that others are already doing something – a useful motivator to drive behaviour change. ● Laziness: ‘Our product will make your life easy’ is a very powerful motivator. ● Loss aversion: People will put more effort into avoiding losing something they already have than they will to gain something new. Suggesting that not taking action will mean they lose something can be enough to get viewers to engage. ● Vanity: You can look better than everyone else with our product! ● Social proof: People’s behaviour is influenced by social norms about what they perceive is ‘acceptable’, popular or trending. Content that reminds viewers of the wider success of a product can sway behaviour. ● Goal dilution: People are more likely to maintain focus on (and achieve) single goals rather than multiple goals, so focus your messaging on one thing. ● Control or ‘help my life run smoothly’: We all live in a busy world; giving consumers the idea that their life will become less hassle can be a powerful motivator. Videos with this driver should consistently prove benefits such as saving time and money. ● Desire for a life that is about more than just ‘surviving’: Allowing consumers to accept that life is about more than just fulfilling basic needs is key to persuading people to use luxury items. Viewers should be made to feel free to gratify any urges that make them feel happy. ● Belonging or ‘You know who I am’: Content that proves a brand is closely aligned with the self-orientation and beliefs of its audience will help foster a shared identity and build engagement. This is a non-exhaustive list of motivators that you can look to leverage in your content, but it gives a good springboard for your thinking – which do you think would motivate your audience to change its behaviour?

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