As noted by Hubspot, if you think that video is the marketing tool of the future, you may be a few steps behind. Forty-three percent of consumers state that they want to see more video content from marketers. And more than half of marketers state that video content provides them the best return on investment. Video production for marketing is here. Would you like to know why this marketing tool is so effective and explore the ways it can be utilized? Read on.
Who Is the Target Audience of Video Marketing?
In a word: Millennials.
Who are millennials, though, and why do they matter so much to your marketing strategy? Millennials are individuals born between 1980 and 2000. They’re the individuals just now entering adulthood, those who are racing through their twenties and thirties. According to an Impact report from last year, this group of consumers is expected to begin spending more than $200 million a year, as of 2017. They’re here, they have money, and they want to spend it. However, as a group, millennials have their own buying habits and their own particular way of choosing the products they spend their money on.
Your newsletters don’t appeal to millennials. They’d rather watch a video. In fact, Impact states, a study by Animoto revealed that sixty percent of millennials want to watch your company video rather than reading your company literature. Eighty percent of them report using videos as a tool in researching products they’re interested in. They’re 150 times more likely than baby boomers to use videos for the purpose of comparison shopping, even when they’re in a store. And more than three-quarters of millennials surveyed report that they follow brands or companies on YouTube. Which brings us to our next point.
Where Would Millennials Find My Video?
Social media, most likely. As stated above, three-quarters of millennials are following brands or companies on YouTube. Half of them are using Twitter to follow brands and companies, and a whopping eighty-four percent are looking at a company’s offerings on Facebook and its affiliated platforms. As we have discussed before, video production the corner-stone for modern consumer engagement. If consumer A likes your video on social media, their friends — consumers B and C — see that interaction. And they watch the video too. Let’s say consumer C likes it so much that she shares it on her social media page. Pretty soon, you’re flying through the alphabet many times in a matter of hours. Videos go viral each and every day on social media. And for all of those views, more people are seeing the product. More people are clicking on your website because you have entertained and engaged them. And, subsequently, more people are buying your products.
Most social media platforms now include the ability to link to your posts on other platforms. Meaning, if you post your video on Vimeo, or your marketing strategy relies on YouTube videos, you can share the links on Facebook or Twitter, keeping the traffic moving to your content from various places.
But What Does This Audience Want to See?
Now that you understand who you’re marketing to, why, and where, the next question you’re likely to have is: How?
In considering what to do, it’s important to note what not to do. Don’t be overtly promotional in your video production. Why? Because two-thirds of millennials surveyed in the Impact report say that they’ll lose interest in a video if it’s too promotional. Consider, instead, Super Bowl TV commercials — considered by many to be the best TV advertising has to offer. Why are they the best? Because they go beyond simply promoting a product and deep into the territory of entertainment. And the reason they do this is because the advertisers know that their ad is going to be compared and in competition with all of the other ads, and it’s going to be played during a rare time of year that is entirely about entertainment.
HubSpot reports that fifty-six percent of all the videos produced last year are under two minutes long. And only the top five percent of those videos can expect to retain three-quarters of their audience until the last second. What does this mean for you? It means video production is here, it is reaching a large audience, it is being used to make purchasing decisions, and it is being shared with others. But, like the Super Bowl commercials, it’s facing a lot of competition and comparison and it’s being put before an audience that wants to be entertained.
You have two minutes or less. What do you want to say to the world, and how are you going to make the world remember?