Video is powerful, personal, and it is the future for all marketing departments whether B2B and B2C, to engage their audiences in a way that has a lasting impact.
According to HubSpot, video accounts for 74% of all internet traffic, while Cisco predicts that number will rise to 80% by 2019.
Therefore, it is important that brands have a comprehensive strategy for using video in place in your organization. Instead of displaying videos as a separate channel, brands should focus on how to integrate them into all campaigns:
Video for marketing and sales funnel
Again and again, we hear questions about how and when a prospect should be brought into contact with a video, depending on where they are in the funnel.
We know one thing very well: whether it’s a first-time engagement or a long-term subscriber, video can drive potential customers to final conversion.
But how can brands find the right channel and content?
It starts with mapping the customer journey and its daily, weekly, monthly, or annual interaction with you. It may vary, but the universal truth of the video is that it has been shown to move the needle and increase profits. With powerful video analytics, brands can test and iterate on what works and what doesn’t including the types of content and channels that will best appeal to your prospects.
Top of the funnel: brand awareness with video
Social videos have become the main driver of engagement and awareness. In fact, Facebook now receives 8 billion video views per day and Facebook organic posts with video have the highest engagement. While these can be futile numbers, they are an important aspect of complete funnel marketing.
These opinions and impressions leave a lasting brand impression on potential customers, both organic and paid. Those impressions can eventually lead to engaging contact so marketers can nurture leads. Also, social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn can generate website/landing page views when linked to a video. Video postings only outperform images and text across the board.
By using videos on social media and directing users to landing pages that also contain video, brands exponentially increase their chances of capturing information from someone.
Powerful analytics can tell marketers exactly how your video content is performing on these different networks.
YouTube
Perhaps surprisingly, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. This powerful channel can help brands find users organically and expose those customers to high-quality video content.
Like a blog post or landing page, posting a video on YouTube can be lucrative for brands trying to recruit users and fill the top of the marketing funnel.
As with SEO strategies, brands need to use the right titles, descriptions, and even external/internal links to optimize their YouTube presence.
According to Backlinko, brands should search for “video keywords” that Google ranks in their search results as well as YouTube. According to Backlinko, Google uses these search topics most often: Useful Keywords (“How To Rank On YouTube”) Reviews (“TwentyThree Video Marketing Platform Review”) Tutorials (“Setting up a video portal”) While YouTube is useful for finding organic users, it also has limitations in terms of reporting and automation.
Once on your website, you can effectively track and manage your video campaigns with a video marketing platform.
Hosted videos
Hosting videos on your website with a video marketing platform can increase your overall marketing data by up to 50%, according to our research at TwentyThree. Aside from improving your data, native videos can also be automated based on who viewed each video and how long they were involved. Powerful integrations allow you to automate video marketing with your existing marketing stack and technologies.
It is of paramount importance that a user accesses your website regardless of the channel. Hosting your own videos will give you valuable insight into their activity while they surf your webpages.
Did you know that simply adding a video / GIF thumbnail to an email increases your CTR by 62%? Email is one of the most private channels marketers can use to reach their target audience.
It offers the ability to reach customers, users, prospects, or prospects at any time of the day or night.
The average person receives 122 business emails a day, which means brands have to work even harder to stand out from the clutter. Adding attractive GIFs and content to emails can fix this problem.
Webinars and product videos
Webinars can be powerful content for users in the middle of the funnel, but simply hosting them on YouTube is a disadvantage to their impact. By hosting webinars on your website, marketers can not only track them but also see the analytics behind how much of each webinar is viewed and attended. That way, they can see what content is most important and duplicate their strategy. While webinars can be specific to B2B, both consumers and businesses can use the hosted videos.
For example, Audi, one of the most creative video content producers in the world, hosts its own video content on its website: Audi Video website. This gives Audi control over the appearance and data of its videos. These hosted videos also allow marketers to optimize pages for SEO by embedding code that Google will effectively crawl to get the right results.
Sell with the power of video population
When Dropbox first released, they did so via a demo video before writing a single line of code: It drew hundreds of thousands of people to the site. Our beta waiting list literally went from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight.
We were blown away, “said Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox. These demos are powerful and effective. They can be memorable for customers trying to find answers to their problems. In the case of Dropbox, that MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was enough to get customers to the bottom of the funnel and sign up for their waiting list.
For other brands, a demo/product video can entice an eCommerce customer to buy again or a potential B2B Saas customer to finally speak to a salesperson.
Video case studies
All marketers know the power of case studies, but video case studies take it to another level. You give a real face and voice to the customer you want to advertise to and create a personal bond with the other potential customers you want to convince. These case studies can range from one minute to ten minutes.
However, with 76% of web traffic now going to video, it is of the utmost importance that creative and automated campaigns are measured and optimized.
