As technology improves, the ease of watching videos on a phone or tablet increases as well. Gone are the days of a one-minute video taking five minutes to load and buffer on your phone. In a way, businesses are rediscovering the advantages of video with the rise of content marketing and the improvements of on-the-go technology. Video marketing is getting a facelift as companies are increasingly using multimedia in their content marketing strategies.
A study by eMarketer suggests that in the coming years, video viewers will steadily increase and the amount of money spent on video marketing will almost triple:
The latest eMarketer projection shows that by 2014, nearly three-quarters of all US internet users will watch video online at least once per month. Alongside rising viewership, spending for video advertising, both desktop and mobile, will rise from $2.93 billion in 2012 to $8.04 billion in 2016.
Big businesses have obviously jumped on the Internet video marketing bandwagon, as evidenced by the plethora of ads Internet users encounter on a daily basis. But that doesn’t mean that small businesses are left out in the cold if they can’t afford splashy video campaigns.
Small businesses that don’t have a video camera or sound equipment are taking advantage of video marketing with a little creative thinking. PowerPoint presentations can easily be converted to videos, and businesses can take a Ken Burns-esque approach to using images and infographics as the sole content for their videos.
In a way, small businesses that go this route have an advantage: Videos with such informative, custom content are more engaging that the commercial videos that consumers are oversaturated with as they wait to view their favorite television show on Hulu.
In addition to engaging consumers, videos are advantageous for SEO purposes, as Cheryl Conner explained in the Forbes article “10 ½ Ways to Take Advantage of ‘Social SEO’“:
YouTube is not only the second-largest search engine, but it is also owned by Google, who happily rewards your uploads with higher rankings in their search engine. Additionally, visitors who view product videos on a website are 85% more likely to purchase the product.
Even seasoned executives have discovered the benefits of multimedia content marketing. Oren Frank, former CCO of MRM Worldwide and current CEO of Talktala, spoke with Adam Singolda about Talktala’s decision to focus on content marketing as the company’s main advertising strategy.
Singolda notes how the marketing landscape is changing, with the rise of content marketing in the form of videos and blogs:
It was obvious that some sort of marketing was needed but Oren, being an advertising veteran, thought that the traditional advertising of brand advertising was broken… We once painted Time Square with our logo and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a day with the hope that the masses saw it. Today, we can write 10 stories, or produce 5 low cost videos to tell our story but only to the people who care to listen — and get some of them to pay us for our service.