The transformation of the world from the early 90s to 2020 has been one to behold. At the product level, most people no longer use normal phones. Since Steve Jobs gave his famous introduction to the iPhone in 2007, the mass adoption of smartphones has been incredible.
The last 20 years have seen the world introduced to social media. The number of users on Facebook is more than any other country in the world, with 2.7 billion users now on the platform. On YouTube, close to 5 billion videos are watched daily.
Even the world of social media has seen a mini-transformation. While Facebook started with mostly text content on the platform, the text has gradually been replaced by engaging, snappy, and crisp video content. No matter which social media platform you choose, video content dominates.
Creators on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are making copious volumes of video content. Arguably, Twitter remains the only social media network where text content still holds value to a certain extent. With the average consumer getting their information more and more from the social media platforms, it has become imperative for businesses to transform digitally, especially in terms of their marketing.
The days of dominance of offline marketing through television advertisements are dwindling. Marketing is becoming more sophisticated and targeted. New techniques of inbound marketing have emerged in the 21st century. Amongst these marketing innovations, video marketing has become one of the essential means to enable business growth.
The two trends of increased video content on social media platforms and the need to have a sophisticated and targeted digital and social media marketing strategy means that you cannot ignore video marketing if you want to succeed as a business. This short article covers 7 reasons why it is essential to switch to video marketing to grow your business!
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1. Greater Conversions And Sales
Let us start with the obvious. Videos for sales can help you grow your revenue. Research has shown that if you add a product video on your landing page, the conversions can increase by 80%.
If you want to work out why this happens, the explanation is simple. Have you ever been to a new business’ website and gotten puzzled about what the business does? Videos on landing pages tend to solve that problem by clearly communicating who you are and what you do to people who visit your website.
2. Full Bang For Your Buck
The most surprising thing is that video marketing as a strategy gives value for money. They give you a full bang for your buck! People may think that video stuff is challenging, especially things such as making a video email, or creating a customer journey video for your prospective customers, or even creating an intro video.
But with the presence of some excellent easy to use online video tools such as Hippo, the job of creating professional, decent production-value videos is made much easier. The tools help reduce the time and effort required to create videos, and given the revenues and conversions that video marketing will help you generate, you can rest assured that videos will provide you with the best Return on Investment (ROI).
3. Consumer Trust
An often ignored point about video marketing is that videos help you gain trust. Through a video, you are not talking about how great your business is. You are transparently showing your prospective customers about what your business can do for them, how your business works, and what value they can take out of buying your product or signing up for their service.
4. SEO
Never forget the elephant in the digital marketing universe – search engine optimization. Almost every business that wants to survive and thrive in the 21st century needs to have people doing search engine optimization or SEO for them. SEO can often seem like a rat race, especially if you are not using the right tools.
Fortunately, video marketing is one of the best means of improving your SEO. Google seems to love videos. Some schools of thought suggest that you are 5300% more likely to be first on a google search if you have a video embedded on your website.
Of course, this gargantuan number should be taken with a pinch of salt as there would be multiple factors involved in someone topping the SEO race. But, if you think logically, someone who is having top-notch SEO is doing several things right, and one of the most important things to get right is video marketing.
5. Mobile-friendliness
If you are doing business in the 21st century, then the likelihood is that your customers have smartphones. Video content makes for convenient viewing for your prospective customers, giving you a great chance of completing the steps from awareness to conversion.
6. Stories Mean Comprehension
According to a report on the state of video marketing, 85% of businesses surveyed are using video marketing as an effective tool. One of the key reasons for businesses using video marketing is the impact of storytelling. Video marketing provides a very effective means to tell stories, and stories are a more precise way of getting your message across and are much easier to comprehend compared to written text, at least for most users.
7. Social Currency
Finally, one of the points that often gets missed is social currency. Videos have a much higher likelihood of being shared by people to their social media networks. This is what can be termed the social currency quotient of videos – in simple terms, a video is much more sharable than plain old text, especially if it is of high quality or has humor or inspiration or other such qualities that humans find alluring.
Video Marketing In The 21st Century Is A Must!
In a nutshell, being a business in the 21st century means that you cannot escape digital and social media marketing. And among the most effective, easy-to-implement, and high return strategies is video marketing. Especially with the proliferation of easy-to-use online video tools, making quality videos has never been as easy as it is now.
