Brands are realising that video is powerful content. Only a few years ago, online video was simply about putting a film or TV ad on your website. Now many businesses are using video as their main growth driver, spreading the word rapidly about their brands.
Popular by demand
Video is playing a crucial role in securing an increase in brand engagement and exposure. It’s incredibly website friendly, plus visitors continue navigating for an average extra two minutes after watching video content. There are over one billion unique visitors to YouTube each month and 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. As popularity increases, audiences are demanding more personalised, relevant content. Mobile seems to be driving this demand and makes up more than 25% of YouTube’s global watch time whilst overall online video accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic.
Bite size videos
Bite size videos are opening the doors to all sorts of brands and companies, even not-for-profit organisations. In less than 20 seconds a brand can raise awareness of a fundraising campaign and engage support. The launch of Vine and Instagram is dominating the way brands interact with short videos. They have their own communities that can stimulate action through social media, for example, encouraging users to donate money and create a message using hashtags. This, of course, can be mirrored across a range of brand campaigns.
Socially acceptable
Social media with video is the perfect mix because you can watch, talk about and share thoughts on a brand instantly. 60% of people share their video experience and are more likely to comment or like it than a text article. For brands, video offers the opportunity to match television advertising with real-time content, pushing it out onto social networks such as Facebook. The number of video ad views reached 15.8 billion in May 2013 in the US alone. Consumers have an opportunity to post a comment about an ad and brands have a unique opportunity to extend the reach of a TV based ad, and ensure that people are watching it.
Driven to distraction
Video has been around for years and it catches people’s attention instantly if delivered in the right way. However, today we live in a media-rich environment and if a video ‘pops up’ when scrolling down a social feed it may not always be welcomed; it can be distracting and quite simply annoying. On the flip side, video that is embedded and part of meaningful content will work much better. A recent survey found 60% of visitors watch video content before reading text on the same web page. YouTube videos can be embedded in blogs, websites and online stores.
Sharpen up your service
Businesses are increasingly using video to complement their existing marketing activity, with encouraging results. ECommerce stores with product video reviews produce better conversion rates for their brands. Online video is six times more effective than print and direct mail. Brands realise that the things they did before can be better with online video. Video is incredibly powerful and can add personality to your business. Brands can tell their story in a smart, simple way. In fact, Forrester Research believe one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words.
Sources
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/63399-how-bitesize-videos-are-changing-the-way-brands-communicate
www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html
www.therealtimereport.com/2013/06/20/us-consumers-watch-over-6-billion-minutes-of-online-video-ads/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sVv9CHsY40
www.threemotion.co.uk/the-power-of-online-video-the-stats-2013/
