Video is a powerful tool for businesses of all kinds. Learn why and how video should be made part of your marketing mix.
Video consumption and its effectiveness in marketing are rising proportionally. Current research demonstrates that 55% of people watch videos online every day, and 80% of customers remember a video that they’ve watched in the past month. Even more astounding is video is projected to account for 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.
As a result, more and more brands are utilizing video as a marketing tool - 63% of businesses, to be precise. However, when this topic comes up with small-to-medium size business owners, we at Adept Marketing often hear a recurring sentiment: “video is great, but it doesn’t make sense for my business.”
If you’ve found yourself thinking that way about your own business, you may want to reconsider: as technology evolves, the costs and equipment needs that used to make video production much more expensive are now within reach for businesses of all sizes. Making a quality video without a full production crew might have been challenging in the 80’s and 90’s, but in 2018, it can be done with a much lower investment - especially when looking at how impactful video content is.
In this post, we’ll discuss a number of reasons why video is key to marketing for businesses of all sizes.
From Gen Z to Grandma, Everyone’s Watching Video
Widespread online video consumption applies to all age groups. As you might predict, Gen Z and Millennials consume the most video content, averaging just over an hour a day spent on watching videos online. But even adults over the age of 60 spend nearly four hours per week viewing online videos.
Brand Awareness
Whether your business is brand new to the market or has 100 years to its name, there is always a need to inform and educate potential buyers about your brand. There are a variety of marketing tactics that you can use to get the word out like social media advertising or placing ads across relevant websites. But while all of these channels have proven successful at lifting brand recognition, if you add video to the equation, their effectiveness heightens significantly:
- Digital ads with videos drive up to 60% more conversions than those without.
- 65% of ad impressions on Instagram are a result of video content.
- Facebook compiled a case study about Pair of Thieves, an ecommerce apparel retailer who ran a campaign featuring video ads on Facebook and Instagram. Compared with prior campaigns that did not include video, the campaign saw an 8.3x increase in online sales, and a 12.2x increase in website traffic.
Nurturing Potential Customers
The first time a potential buyer visits your website, it’s unlikely that they are going to ask for a quote or make a purchase. This is especially true if your product or service has a high transaction value. They are more likely to sign up for a newsletter or download a piece of content. This is where lead nurturing comes into play: brands must remind prospective customers they exist while the customer is making purchasing decisions.
A common and effective nurturing tactic is email. With video, email marketing drives even better results:
- Not only does including the word “video” in your email subject line boost open rates by 19%, simply adding a video to marketing emails can boost click-through rates by as much as 200-300%.
- In one case study, rental unit company Extra Space Storage found that incorporating videos into their emails increased conversion rate by 50%, and rentals of storage units by 23%.
Drive Home The Sale
If you are spending money to drive users back to a landing page for a specific product or service, adding video to that page is a great strategy to improve your ROI:
- 64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.
- Shoe retailer Zappos certainly saw the benefits of including video content on their product landing pages, to the tune of a 30% increase in conversions.
Get Your Customers to Buy Again - and Tell Their Friends
It costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one, which is why it is important for brands to continue to communicate with and drive loyalty amongst existing customers. Tactics used for outreach to existing customers typically include email (which we’ve already discussed the effectiveness of) and organic (non-paid) social media. At this point, you’ve probably already guessed that video content works wonders on organic social:
- On average, Facebook videos receive 135% more organic reach than photos.
- Meanwhile, on Twitter, videos are 6x more likely to be retweeted than photos, and 3x more likely than GIFs.
- Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
It Benefits Everyone, Even B2B
We’ve heard hesitation to adopt video from many of our business-to-business clients, which we can understand; on the surface, video may seem like a no-brainer for consumer products and ecommerce brands, whereas those selling to other businesses think it’s unnecessary. However, the data says otherwise:
- 74% of B2B marketers have found that video converts better than other content types.
- 96% of B2B organizations use video in some capacity in their marketing campaigns.
- When text and video are available on the same page, 59% of senior executives say they prefer to watch the video.
If you’re seeing these facts and wondering what this all means, it is best summarized this way:
Not having video as part of your business’s marketing strategy would be like not having a website.
That may seem intimidating to small business owners, but it can’t be emphasized enough: creating quality videos is more affordable than ever. At Adept, we provide our video production capabilities to clients across the board, from small local businesses to large national brands.
Our advice: If you want to show up where your potential customers are looking for your product/services, capture their attention, and keep up with your competitors, you need to invest in video.
Want to learn more? See how Adept approaches video production here. Or, if you would like to learn more about how Adept makes video a part of your marketing strategy, contact us.
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