What’s the Future of Video Marketing?

Video marketing is one of the most valuable and essential methods you can use to increase awareness, leads, and revenue for your business. With smartphones saturating every corner of the globe, anyone anywhere can now connect with your video content.

So then, what comes next?

We asked a handful of leaders in the video marketing space to give us their thoughts on what the future of video marketing is. From gamifying to live streaming to interactive video, there’s a lot of exciting potential just ahead. Read on to see their thoughts and predictions.

Live streaming of video to social media had decent engagement for a while, and is still pretty good if you are influential, but overall video engagement via social media has been in decline due to competition from ads, and other algorithm tweaks.

So I think the future of online video marketing is very similar to how it started, focusing primarily on YouTube to maximize views and engagement.

As marketers, our primary goal has always been to create intimate, authentic connections with our audiences. Through the continued advancement of technologies and platforms supporting video, it’s easier than ever to create personalized messaging with clients through video and associated tools.

Copy will always be a useful tool for telling stories and conveying messages but it will never have the same impact as seeing a live human and interacting with someone face to face.

As video becomes more common, it will become less of a competitive advantage and more of a requirement for both marketers and sales teams to leverage in order to effectively and authentically interact with their customers and clients.

Marketing is no longer about grabbing attention. It’s about holding it. Instead of brand “awareness,” more organizations are focused on brand affinity. That affects the entire buyer’s journey and makes everything in marketing perform better.

When it comes to video, this means we’ll see a continued rise in brands making original shows, not just one-off videos or “pieces” of content.

For instance, the video software company Wistia is both creating their own shows like Brandwagon, a late night-style show for marketers, and building tools to help other brands who want to create original video series.

Video shows aren’t about budgets, either. They’re about crafting a unique concept, an enjoyable episode format, and using engaging on-air talent to capture hours instead of seconds of attention.

They’re found everywhere, too: startups (ProfitWell just announced a media network of original video shows), billion-dollar brands (Mailchimp Presents), e-commerce businesses (Death Wish Coffee), and even single-location brick-and-mortar companies (Razors Barbershop) are getting in on this movement.

They understand: great marketing isn’t about who arrives. It’s about who stays. Shows are the world’s best approach to achieving that.

Video marketing will continue to grow in popularity simply because it builds better relationships with your customers or potential customers.

Being able to see someone’s face, watch their expressions, and hear their tone of voice helps your customers connect with you on an emotional level.”

As of last year, a Hubspot study showed that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from the brands and businesses they support… and the customer’s always right, right?

According to Dreamgrow, video content boosts conversions and sales, increases ROI, builds trust, and can improve your website’s SEO. And it’s been predicted that by 2021, video will account for 70% of all mobile traffic.

It only makes sense that more and more businesses will include video in their marketing strategies.

From live video to a well-produced YouTube video, creating real videos that show your lovely face to your audience is a powerful way to make a connection with them.

Just remember that your content marketing strategy will be essential to creating effective video content that reaches your ideal customer. From concept and scriptwriting, to writing video notes and overlay text, video marketing – like any other aspect of content marketing – will always require the talents of a content creator.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but even a moving picture is only as good as the message it portrays.

The future of Video Marketing is that companies, big and small, will recognize that they should be producing the majority of their videos in-house, and not outsourcing it to a video production company.

Why? For many, many reasons, but here are just a few:

1. This is generally the only way a company creates a true “culture” of video

2. This allows the company to produce, in most cases, way more videos because the cost is much less (especially when you consider that most companies that are GREAt with video are producing 50-100 videos per year.

3. Video takes time and practice– for the producers as well as the subject matter experts that are on camera. This “practice” doesn’t happen by simply outsourcing a company to come in and shoot a couple times a year.

YouTube is already the second largest search engine on the Internet. If that’s not incentive enough to take your video marketing seriously, then listen to this.

I’ve been implementing a fun little SEO experiment lately great early effects. That’s been recording & uploading YouTube videos to accompany my long-form content—and embedding those videos within my long-form articles.

Not only does it allow my existing readers to consume the content in a different medium, but it also signals to both YouTube and Google that I’ve created content in both mediums (on the same topic) for my blog and on their video platform.

This tends to get my YouTube videos significantly more views early on, and thus increasing the number of clicks back to my blog.

It’s still early in my experiment, but there’s definitely a positive connection between producing long-form written content for your website and including a YouTube video marketing strategy alongside it.

The future of video marketing will be interactive.

Videos alone do not require active participation from the viewer — which means people may switch off after a few seconds, due to our ever-reducing attention spans.

Interactive video on the other hand, allows marketers to not only keep viewers engaged by encouraging them to take action, but it also allows the combination of multiple marketing methods rolled into one (e.g. a viewer signs up to a lead gen form right there in the video, which then adds them into a contest — gamifying their experience!).

The possibilites are endless; the power of video coupled with interactivity is already proven, yet massively underutilized:

A Wyzowl study found only 24% of marketers used interactive video, but 92% of them said it was effective.

Conclusion

While it may seem that video marketing is already everywhere, uses are still growing exponentially with technological innovations. Video is already far more effective than text and pictures when it comes to conveying information to consumers. And with advancements in analytics and household AR and VR just around the corner, exciting new business opportunities await those willing to take advantage. If you’re curious about how you can make video content a part of your marketing — now and in the future — contact us for a free consultation.

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