The idea behind video marketing is very simple. You’re using video to market and promote your brand. Video marketing essentially means using videos to achieve your online marketing goals. Online videos teach, explain, demonstrate, influence, or simply entertain.
An Immediate Connection
Video marketing works because it creates an immediate connection. Videos evoke feelings and get an emotional response. Just think of a video that you’ve seen online and enjoyed enough to share with others. The reason you shared it is that it triggered an emotional response and you wanted others to feel that emotion too.
The videos that are shared most are those that engage, make you laugh or cry, or evoke feelings of joy or wonder. These are videos that keep the audience interested, entertaining while they inform.
It’s much easier to reach people through video than through other online content types. Videos pack a great deal of persuasive power because they show rather than just tell. They combine 3 of the most effective learning styles – visual, text (when included in the video or subtitles), and auditory.
The Numbers behind Video Marketing
To give you an idea of how important video marketing is, let’s look at some numbers.
According to data by iMedia, video content accounted for nearly 60% of consumers’ internet traffic in 2012, and that number is expected to increase to about 70% by 2017. Another report by Invodo puts that number even higher, saying that 74% of all web traffic will be video – by just NEXT YEAR!
Video site YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the web with around a billion visits per month. It’s estimated that visitors to YouTube consume a total of about six billion hours of video per month.
As the importance of videos grows, companies increasingly invest their resources in video marketing. The iMedia data shows that companies spent about $4 billion on digital video in 2013 and this is expected to double by 2017.
A Few More Facts about the Importance of Video:
- Video attracts 3 times as much traffic as other content types.
- Web visitors spend 88% more time on a site that has video.
- About 65% of video viewers make it 3/4 of the way through a video (which is quite high when you consider how short attention spans are online)
- Visitors who watch a video are 85% more likely to buy than those that don’t
- People of all ages and socioeconomic demographics watch video.
So you can see, video is an essential part of any good online marketing strategy.
