Strategies

According to a report published by Social Media Examiner, the current percentage of marketers that say they use video is 60%, but this is set to increase with 73% planning to escalate their use of the platform. One of the biggest trends to report is that the majority of organisations are building true video strategies; video playing a pivotal role even in broader marketing strategies. These strategies will likely to be closely linked with social media, more than ever before. As aforementioned, social media presents an opportunity for marketers to leverage a massive audience that wants to consume content and this will also enable broadcasters to monetise the attention of the audience once it has been captured by the content.

It’s not surprising that more content is being created by organisations and brands. In fact, 73% of B2B marketers said that video positively impacts their marketing ROI. Video is engaging by nature, especially in comparison to text or images. Therefore, when distributed via social media, marketing videos tend to get increased engagement. In fact, social video generates 12 times more shares than text and images combined. Therefore the top benefits of social media video marketing are increased business exposure and increased traffic.

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Emerging Technology

With social media video proving to be such a beneficial tool for marketing, naturally the competition for viewing time has increased. This has resulted in the utilisation of emerging technology in an attempt to up engagement levels and boost the effectiveness of video marketing.

Tech such as VR, AR and 360-degree video aren’t gimmicks anymore, but are instead serious tools that have a proven record of increasing engagement and have the potential to drive innovation in video marketing. As a result of the development of these technologies, immersive video has emerged as a new category of video. This has the potential to become really popular, and is certainly in a position to fulfil that potential. Immersive technology is more commanding of the viewer’s attention, and therefore can capture and maintain it, so video marketing messages are less likely to be scrolled past on a news feed. This was proven by Hong Kong airlines, when a 360-degree video was 35 times more effective than the same 2D version.

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Telling the Story

The bottom line is, if marketers want to utilise video as a powerful marketing tool, then not only should they be taking advantage of the proven abilities of social media platforms and immersive technologies, but they also need to realise that a good video needs to tell a story that is memorable. It all comes down to personalised storytelling, without which video content is just noise and something that is used to ‘pass the time’. The tools are all there to attract the consumers attention, but now it is equally as important to keep the viewer’s attention, especially when building video strategies.