Video marketing

Written by Sandra López

Video Marketing is a marketing technique in which audiovisual material is used to promote a brand, service or product. Although video marketing is not an exclusive online marketing strategy, it has grown significantly thanks to the Internet and social networks:

9 out of 10 Internet users consume videos of the brands they follow on social networks.

Advantages of Video Marketing

• Engagement: Video allows you to convey a message in an original way. Content that uses storytelling, humor and appeals to users’ emotions, both positive and negative, are particularly effective.
• Message: a message conveyed through audiovisual content is clearer, since several resources are used to convey it: image, music, voice-over and text.
• Memorability: since the message is transmitted using several resources, it reaches the user through several senses at the same time, sight and hearing, and it has been proven that this favors its memorability. Users remember a brand much more if they have seen a video of it.
• Consumption: video consumption is very easy and convenient, so users tend to associate it with leisure and be more receptive. It is easier to capture users’ attention with audiovisual content than with text content.
• Virality: videos are more likely to be shared and, as we have seen, by promoting engagement they can become viral content more easily.
• Purchase: working the brand’s video marketing increases conversion. It has been proven that videos help in the purchase decision as they allow to have a better conception of the appearance and operation of the product or service.
• SEO: videos hosted on platforms such as YouTube rank relatively easily on the first pages of Google results. But in addition, a page containing a video can also obtain SEO benefits since, on the one hand, it increases the time spent on the page thanks to the reproduction of the video, and on the other hand, if it is shared, it will be getting links to the web.
• Referral traffic: content hosted on video platforms is a source of traffic to the company’s website.

Types of videos for companies

There are many different formats that can be worked into the video marketing strategy:

• Advertising videos: these are the well-known commercials that are usually found on television, but can also be distributed through online media.
• Corporate videos: these are videos that show the company’s values and, sometimes, its facilities and employees. These contents try to capture the corporate culture in images.
• Portfolio videos: these are videos showing examples of the company’s work.
• Product or service demonstration videos: they show the advantages of a product or service and its main features. They serve as audiovisual reinforcement to express the product’s value proposition and thus encourage sales. Individual videos can be created for each product, for each of the parts or features of the product, or a general video of the company’s catalog.
• Training videos and video tutorials: these are explanatory videos that aim to show some functionality of the company’s services or products, or to offer training on related topics, so that the company or the professional is positioned as an expert in the sector.
• Testimonial videos: reflect the opinion and experience of the company’s customers with one of the products or services.
• Video blog: in this format the protagonism is acquired by the reference person of the company or the professional, and looking at the camera, he/she exposes topics of interest.
• Video contest: in this case the videos would be made by users based on guidelines and themes given by the company.
• Event videos: show the company’s presence at an event and summarize what happened at the event. They usually have a dynamic set-up and background music to transmit the sensations experienced at the event to the attendees and interested parties.

Thanks to new technologies, today it is easier than ever to create a quality video. Depending on the technique used in the making of the video, we will find real image videos or animated infographics, although it is common to combine several techniques in the same video.

Platforms on which to work the Video Marketing strategy

There are several social networks and platforms where companies can develop their video marketing strategy. Depending on the company’s objectives and target audience, it will be interesting to use one or the other:

YouTube

It is the main platform for video consumption on the Internet, the highest rated social network and the second most used after Facebook (by 66% of Internet users according to IAB). YouTube’s growth is unstoppable, and besides being able to develop our own channel with interesting content, we can manage ads for our business to appear with a short spot in the videos of others, through YouTube Ads.

Vimeo

It is another video platform, but it has a more professional image than YouTube, so it is often used for corporate videos and also by image professionals, such as wedding photographers and videographers.

IGTV

Instagram, in addition to the possibility of uploading videos to normal publications and to its stories, live and delayed, also offers the possibility of generating longer audiovisual content -of more than 60 seconds- which are uploaded and viewed through the same Instagram application, or the IGTV application itself. They can be up to 15 minutes long when uploaded from a cell phone, and up to 60 minutes long when uploaded from a computer. Here you can see the requirements of this platform.

Periscope

It is an App that allows live video broadcasting from smartphones and tablets with iOS and Android operating systems. It belongs to Twitter, a company that acquired this application before its launch in 2015.

The consumption of videos on social networks has increased significantly among users, being the second most popular activity on social networks, just behind social use, i.e., seeing what their contacts are doing.

In fact, some generalist social networks have begun to include video on their platforms. This is the case of Facebook or Instagram with its Instagram Stories and IGTV, as we mentioned above. This is causing video formats to be transformed and the purely advertising video is beginning to give way to other types of video, much shorter, designed to be viewed on social networking applications of smartphones, and above all, to be shared.

References on Video Marketing

The power of video: 5 reasons to use video marketing – Puromarketing.

Infographic: History of Video Marketing – Redframe, video marketing production company.

5 things your video marketing strategy should include – John Rampton in Forbes.

Using Periscope in the online marketing strategy – Maria Santonja in the Human Level blog.

Video marketing and YouTube: go viral – Manuel Barrios in the Human Level blog.