Video Marketing - Why Haven't You Got It Yet?

The Growth of Video Marketing

Are you doing any videos? Do you know that a YouTube channel is the equivalent of a Facebook profile? Do you know that online video, yes video can help with your SEO? In addition, as opposed to TV ads, online videos are trackable and can be viewed repeatedly attracting the “long-tail” viewers while allowing you to measure the exact impact of the video and participate around it in the comments section or on blogs.



 

Some of the Trends

Advertisers Using Online Video

Advertisers are becoming more confident in using online video advertising, due to factors such as standardisation of ad formats, online video advertising is going from strength to strength. A recent study from ComScore, found that just over 45% of users in America viewed at least one video ad over a month. You can watch a more detailed video here Comscore - The State of Online Video.

What is surprising is that only average 30% of Youtube ads are skipped, this came from a conference in Manchester, Bruce Daisley, sales director at Youtube & Google.

Streaming Films on the Up

In a huge coup for Netflix, a recent study found that 20% of peak time donwstream internet traffic was streaming video from their site. This is great news for Netflix, and perhaps not so great news for the DVD market.

 

Bigger Screens Promote Video

Resulting from what previous Nielsen analysis identifies as the iPad’s larger screen, iPad users show substantially higher download rates for video content than iPhone users. One-third (33%) of iPad users regularly access TV shows, three times the 11% of iPhone users who do so. And the 32% of iPad users who regularly access movies is virtually three times the 12% of iPhone users who regularly access movies.

Mobile Using Video On the Rise

This is probably quite obvious but the people over at Nielsen recently reported that mobile video is on the rise. As more people start using smartphones e.g. iPhone, Blackberries) this is only set to accelerate even faster. The main thing is, we now have clear idea on how big and fast video consumption is growing. According to their recent State of the Media report Americans consumed more video than any quarter prior on mobile devices.

 

Live Streaming Growth at Over 650%

Comscore announced that the amount of time American audiences spent watching video on live video channels (Justin.tv, Ustream, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam) has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes. This phenomenal growth compares to a 68% increase in video views on Youtube.

Although this is still a small proportion of  the online video market, live streaming is growing in popularity and use. Many organisations are now enbracing this as way to extend their reach and engagement with employees. As people become more accustomed to this form of content growth will continue.

UStream are the dominant players in this, but Facebook is quickly developing its capabilities – recently introducing LiveStream integration with Facebook pages. This has the potential to hugely increase the live stream video market and see it really reach the mainstream.

Ways to Use Video for Your Business

Video is a powerful tool for marketing your business. If done well you can reach a large audience through a viral effect otherwise known as buzz marketing. Video can be distributed across multiple online platforms easily both as ads or for consumption across social channels. Video enhances response rates for other forms of marketing e.g. email, SEO, PPC…

Some ways video can be used for marketing:

• Product demonstrations


• Service testimonials


• Promotions


• Product launches


• Product training

Other ways you can use Video for your organisation:

• Business news


• Events/Keynote speeches


• Health and Safety


• Human resources (training/induction)

Some Tips

Social is just a label, the real challenge is figuring out how to deliver optimal customer experience that builds meaningful relationships between you and your customers and employees.

1. Move beyond using Twitter and Facebook - many businesses still only focus on these channels. Simple to add in a button to your website so that people can also find your YouTube channel.


2. Make sure you tag your videos with keywords that are relevant to the video but also are the ones you use for your SEO strategy


3. Make your YouTube channel a destination add it to your website as well as your Twitter and Facebook buttons. Name your YouTube Channel but put some thought into the name of your channel just as you would for the domain of a blog or website.


4. Take advantage of YouTube's advertising.  There are two types of advertising
   
   
   
   1. YouTube Search. They're the number two search engine out there. You can bid on the keywords people use when searching on YouTube just as you do on Google adwords (PPC). Instead of a text ad coming up on the right-hand side as it does on Google, you get a video and a thumbnail of a video. The cost is relatively low compared to Facebook or Google.
   
   
   2. Promoted Videos. This is just as the name says where you can promote a video you have uploaded. Once you have your video submitted as a Promoted Video, it then has the opportunity to run what are called 'CTA' ads. 'CTA' stands for 'call to action.'
   
   
   
   

A successful video marketing strategy focuses on attracting the right audience with a topic or theme that’s video-worthy and can be compelling! Get that right and you could dramatically increase your results.

 

Social Media Statistics - Seriously How Big is Social Media?

Socialnomics

Socialnomics by Erik Qualman has had a refresh and some new material added in which is well worth watching. The original version has had over 2.8M views, the 2nd video over 1.6M and doubtless that this one will achieve a significant number

Idea: many people have in there own business/market or vertical amazing figures that are often not pulled together or are not even known. If you want to to create something interesting for your industry why not explore this type of infomercial video for your industry. I appreciate in many cases it might not work but in some I imagine if done well it would spark a lot of interest.


 

Some more resources for social media facts and figures:

The BtoB Guide to Social Media guide have put together a massive list of facts and they are continually updating this as well. They have categorized the list so fairly easy to explore figures for any blog or article you are writing.

The BtoB guide to social media have put together over 1000 social media facts and statistics.

Infographics

Data can be pretty tough to get your head around especially if you like to see information more visually. However, infographics can take data and present it in visually stunning ways. It has become a captivating way of explaining often complex data in a brilliant and creative way. The daily infographic has some good and easy to view categories for you to search. Importantly infographics can be a key hook and provide traffic and buzz.

• The Daily Infographic


• Flowtown


• Flowing Data


• Visual complexity

Supplement you blog or an article with a good infographic it will help illustrate your article and break up the text.

Facebook

So much news and focus in social media is around Facebook. The growth of Facebook has been phenomenal and it continues to dominate the social networks not only for the size of the user base but because they are still evolving and changing. Brands and businesses are switching budgets to focus more on developing their brand communities on Facebook and it is no wonder when you look at how many followers some brands have.

• All Facebook


• FameCount

The Reports

Some of the best figures come from the research and reports that are generated by the specialist consultancies. Many are more of a generalist research consultancy such as Forrester and Gartner who produce industry and market reports that many organisations buy. However, often the data or at least some of the graphs filter through and can be picked up for free. Hubspot produces some excellent reports and most are free to download in return for signing up to their subscription.

On the flip side consultancies like Econsultancy through their blog release some great insights and reports. Other noteworthy consultancies are Borrell Associates and

Add to this blog

If you have any other resources or websites that you think are good and are worth adding to this list let us know and we will update it with your information and of course credit you with any links you provide.

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3 Types of Video for Facebook Engagement | Social Business

Is Video is becoming more relevant?

Is video now less about advertising and more about sharing stories and experiences? Are brands now exploiting emotions or changing to more relevant experiences?  Here are some examples from Coca Cola and Nike.

Coca Cola



Nike



Entertainment and experiences will become a necessary part of marketing a brand, available where, when and how we want it e.g. mobile. But we are not yet there and still there are hurdles and barriers yet to cross.

John Winsor’s recently wrote a blog post in which he said:

"Sometimes you have to destroy something you love"




John's point is that the model and the business of marketing needs to change, must change. If the people within the industry embraced change the shift to being social and collaborative, it would be a catalyst for greater things. His agency, Victors and Spoils, is one of many (e.g. Blur) that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.

As Clay Shirkey mentioned at SXSW:

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"

Brands now need to be in the experience industry, creating experience media that is innovative, inimitable and is sharable.

The future of video

As we have moved to a high speed world our love of video as a media both as creators and as consumers is astounding:

• As of Feb. 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide that searched about 92 billion pages per month. It means that we spend around 2.9 billion hours (over 325,000 years) on YouTube in a month.


• Video accounts in 2011 will account for 60% of mobile web traffic (source HubSpot)

This is part of the reason for the predicted growth in online video advertising.



Engagement is equally a part of being of being relevant (a key point made by Brian Solis) as it is to do with quality content. The creative concept therefore has an equal part to play in making it relevant to the audience, interesting and hopefully shared.

One of the most effective media is video; why because we can convey so much using it...but it is the many new and interesting forms of video that now make this media simply amazing. This year we will start to see many of these new forms of video become more mainstream: animation, augmented video's and motion graphics.

As Facebook continues to change and evolve video will play an increasingly important role in how brands use Facebook; we will see more Facebook pages with video embedded on the landing pages. It is already easy to integrate it video into pages; imagine the powerful combination of video and Facebook stores (f-commerce).

But what makes a video engaging, here are some examples that we think work in these formats:

What do you think?

1. Animation

Animators vary both in style and methods but one thing they have in common is the ability to engage and entertain often putting over complex ideas in a simple way.

Here are two amazing examples:

a. Commoncraft label themselves quite rightly as being in the explanation business


Another great company is RSA - here is an example of their work


The costs have lowered for animation, driven in part by lower costs of software but also due to machines more able to cope with production.

2. Augmented Reality overlaid

As in our last blog the use of augmented reality in video will take off. The idea of augmented reality videos in Facebook takes it to a whole new level.

The best example is Youtique:


3. Motion graphics

Similar to animation but with real world video and graphics blended there are limitles possibilities in how this can be used. A partner of ours Fraser Davidson in his show reel demonstrates the superb possibilities in his showreel.



So How are you going to use video to engage your customers - for businesses now it is imagination that is the limiting factor not technology. How do you imagine your future business?