Online video faced a rapid growth over the last couple of years, and it is surely going to continue to do so in 2016.

Many studies indicate that video is the future of content marketing, and if you look at the numbers closely – you’ll know why. According to Cisco’s white paper, online video will account for around 55% of this year’s total consumer Internet traffic.

But what does this mean for companies?

How can you benefit from it?

As video becomes even more popular on social networks and video platforms, companies will be able to communicate with customers in a more direct and entertaining way. In this article, we’re going to find how videos can revolutionize your marketing activities, and make your campaigns more successful than ever before.

How Effective is Video Marketing?

You’re familiar with the saying: “A picture is worth a thousand words”…

..but do you know how many words a video is worth?

According to Dr. James McQuivey, it is worth 1.8 million words! Yes, and this value is only for a one-minute video. Now, go ahead and do the math to compare the impact of one-minute video vs images and text. I’m going to make it easy for you: video is highly effective! It is by far, the most appealing medium for advertising online.

Video is naturally engaging, measurable and it enables you to form stronger relationships with your customers. But most important of all, it coverts way better than text-based ads. Let’s check out some examples. WITSIA announced that the customers who watch product videos are 15-20% more likely to convert.

StacksandStacks published even more promising results – implying that customers who watched a product video were 144% more likely to make a purchase in contrast to those who were reading a text description of the product.

Having a good video marketing campaign can do you a lot of good – especially in this economy where consumers have low attention span. And this goes in favour of videos, because text-based content is nowadays easily ignored. Browser extensions like Adblock and Adblock Plus have tens of millions of active users – which is still a nightmare for marketers, but a very good indicator of how unappealing traditional ads truly are. Unlike text, videos are more welcoming, engaging and they carry more value in the consumer’s eye.

Top Video Marketing Trends for 2016

2015 was a big year for video marketing. Among many exciting news, here are the highlights: Facebook introduced video ads, Twitter added the video autoplay feature and Google’s made a step forward to incorporate video ads in the search results.

Evidence from previous year suggests that video will continue to grow in 2016 and beyond.

What evidence you might ask?

Here are some:

• Facebook announced that there are 8 billion video views each day. If Facebook keeps this pace by the end of 2016, it will reach around 20 billion daily video views.
• More than 400 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube every single minute, and billions of views are generated on a daily basis.
• Facebook’s COO Sharyl Sandberg said that In September 2015, 5 million businesses shared their video ads on the platform.

So what about 2016?

In which direction will video marketing move? Generally speaking, video should keep rising in usage on both, desktop and mobile devices. Platforms that offer video ad services should find more effective and innovative ways to deliver content to their visitors. This will allow companies to properly target new customers and have a better understanding about customer’s needs and behaviour.

Also, video marketing is predicted to become more affordable in the future for small and medium-sized businesses. Below, I present a few statistics about video marketing that speak for themselves.

• 96% of B2B organizations that participated in a study, are actively engaged in video marketing.
• Companies are cutting back on TV advertising and starting to allocate resources in video ads – which is yet another indicator of video marketing effectiveness.
• Cisco predicted that by 2019, around 80% of the entire customer Internet traffic will be video. As video platforms are constantly on the rise and there are mind-blowing statistics each year, it is reasonable to say that the majority of the internet will be video in the future.
• In 2016, 50% of the video traffic will be served through mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
• According to eMarketer, advertisers will spend more than $100 billion on mobile video ads this year.

5 Tips for Successful Video Marketing Campaigns in 2016

So if you’re finally convinced to get started with videos, there are some things you need to know about creating and advertising videos. Let’s go over some really important tips that will boost your campaign results.

Define your Budget and Goals

You didn’t see that coming, did you? But kidding aside: you can’t go anywhere without solid budget plan and set of clear goals about what you expect to achieve. This rule applies to everything you do – it doesn’t have to be video marketing. Define how much money you’re prepared to spend, and with that in mind, find a video editor or a team of editors to create your videos.

Keep your Videos Short and Informative

Videos are intended to be short and at the same time engaging and informative – this is what makes them perfectly suitable for the customer’s short attention span. But video’s optimal length depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Ideally, you should develop a story that’s short, fun and encapsulates everything that the customer should know after watching the video.

Make your Videos Interactive

Interactive videos are a great way to provide even more engaging user experience and get some valuable insights on customer behaviour along the way. Create a storyline with blocks of decisions your viewers can choose, in order to actively take part in the video and get a personalized outcome. This is something that we should start seeing more often in 2016. Here’s an example of a great interactive video:

Always Consider Adding Call to Action Button or Info at the End

The end of the video is just as important as the rest of it. When I say end, I mean the very last seconds of it. In fact, that’s the ideal moment to set Call-To-Action buttons that should engage visitors into purchasing your product.  It doesn’t have to be a Call-To-Action, you can leave some information about upcoming discounts, events or contact information, but what’s important is to never leave a black screen. That second or two at the end could be used to add value on the video instead of being blank.

Analyse Results and Measure Performance

This is the stage where you take your insights from the ad performance reports and analyse the results in order to see whether you reached the defined goals in the first step. The number of video views alone isn’t enough – you’ll have to dig deeper. Work with the stats from your videos and collect additional information like watch time, traffic sources, drop-off rate, devices, demographics etc. These will help you to properly approach your customers in your future campaigns.

Image Source and Attribution Info

1. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/epublicist/9293089656/in/photostream/ Author: https://www.flickr.com/photos/epublicist/
2. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132604339@N03/22891162583/ Author: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132604339@N03/
3. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132604339@N03/22896075781 Author: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132604339@N03/