In the world of online advertising, it takes exceptionally eye-catching, attention-grabbing campaigns to stand out above the clutter. It stands to reason that now more than ever marketers are turning to video. As advertising evolves, video advertising is becoming a progressively more popular marketing tactic for bringing awareness of a brand or product to an online audience.

Benefits Of Video Marketing

Through well-designed video advertisements, brands can command attention, convey much more than just their typical sales pitch, and reap a number of other benefits. Below, we list just a few of the benefits and provide advice for maximizing their impact on video marketing best practices.

Storytelling

Video advertising combines images, brand messaging, music, and script to tell a story; breaking the relationship barrier between businesses and the customers they’re trying to reach. Just a few seconds of video can give your viewers an exponentially more multidimensional idea of who you are than a flat banner ad. By publishing engaging video advertisements, businesses are able to humanize their brand, deepen customer loyalty, tell a story, and build a personal connection with their audience.

Best practices for video storytelling: Don’t drive away viewers by throwing a sales script in their face, use video to tell a story and make your potential clients feel connected to your brand. Concentrate on the value the product would bring, not just the product itself.

Quality Impressions

While banner ads are viewed and processed in a matter of seconds, video ads demand time, attention, and emotional investment from a viewer. The multimedia nature of videos appears to be a big reason why consumers are 27.4 times more likely to click on a video ad than they are a static banner ad. With moving pictures, closed captions, and engaging images, videos grab a viewer’s attention and hold the attention of 37% of those viewers until the end of the video.

Best practices for video impressions: Consider the first 10 seconds of your video to be the most valuable. If your viewers aren’t hooked in the first 10 seconds, they’ll most likely not stick around for the remainder. In the first 10 seconds, tell your audience why they should keep watching the video. Use closed captions to reach viewers that are watching your video on silent.

Return on Investment

An overwhelming majority of marketers agree that video performs better than other content for producing conversions, making it a valuable marketing method. This is supported by a study that was published by the Online Publishers Association that claims that 80% of video viewers recall the video advertisement they watched and that 46% of those viewers report taking action as a response to the video’s message. 

Best practices for video ROI: Use A/B testing on videos to see what videos are converting and what platforms they’re best suited for. Also, use data from the video to gain insights like where your viewers are dropping off. Apply these to your current and future video advertising strategies.

Distribution & SEO

The value of your website is constantly being measured. Search engines like Google use algorithms to measure the quality of messaging on your website. A website that contains diverse content is considered to be high quality, so search engines will boost your ranking if your website includes quality images, text, and video.

Social media platforms such as Facebook also prioritize video content. Recent data shows that 100 million hours of video are watched every day on Facebook, and one billion hours of video are consumed on YouTubeeveryr day, proving that video is a valuable resource.

Best practices for video SEO and distribution: Post your video content on video hosting sites and embed the video on your website. This way, you can take advantage of the large audiences on video hosting sites like Vimeo and YouTube, and drive traffic back to your website. When sharing your video content on social media, share it across multiple platforms for wider audience reach. Use tagging, keywords, descriptions, and video transcripts to make it easy for people to find your video and to boost your SEO rank.

Cost Efficiency

Video advertisements are highly cost-effective when compared to other types of advertising, as marketers are paying for views more than clicks. Most video advertisements on YouTube are less than a dollar per view, and those on Facebook and Instagram typically cost just pennies. Even taking into account holidays, peak hours, and prime-time advertising slots, Marketers across all platforms pay on average less per view than they do per click on a non-video ad.

B2C and B2B Video Marketing

B2C Video Marketing

Video has changed the way that B2C marketers reach their customers. By filming creative, brand-centric, eye-catching videos, B2C marketers can raise awareness for their brand and earn sales.

Retail companies often integrate messages of coupons, sales, or online specials to trigger impulse purchases and drive revenue. B2C businesses can even go one step further by hyper-targeting viewers by using data from Geofencing, social media accounts, shopping sites, search history, past interactions with the brand, and other online interactions, to show viewers ads that are tailored to them. Using detailed behavioural, demographics, and location data, businesses can control what ads a viewer sees, showing them only the ads that they are most likely to interact with.

While many B2C companies were early adopters of video advertising, B2B companies have been a little slower to explore its capabilities.

B2B Video Marketing

B2B marketers have a unique opportunity when it comes to using video to promote sales. Video can help drive a long-term sales cycle if they are implemented with careful consideration of the big picture, and catered to specific steps in the sales cycle. For example:

• Top of sales funnel videos that raise brand awareness.
• Bottom of sales funnel videos that drive conversions.
• Customer retention videos that provide education on how to use the product.

B2B businesses can use video to help instigate or enrich professional relationships and get their product out in front of decision makers by posting videos on B2B optimized social media sites like LinkedIn. While it is the #1 social media platform for B2B companies, video advertising strategies shouldn’t be limited to LinkedIn. B2B marketers also benefit from distributing their videos over multiple channels, including video veterans like YouTube and Facebook that are best optimized for video. To learn more about how B2B companies can benefit from Facebook, read our blog Digital Marketing Myth: B2B Companies Don’t Need Facebook.

There is no question that video is revolutionizing the digital marketing landscape, and that it’s not discriminating between B2B and B2C companies. With Cisco predicting that video traffic will make up over 80% of all Internet traffic by the year 2021, It’s in the best interests of B2B and B2C companies to stay educated, embrace video marketing, and get on board. If you need help distributing video ads or building campaigns to promote your product or business, contact us today!