When you’re creating a digital marketing strategy, you have certain areas you can focus on. There’s email marketing, for example —a highly effective yet often overlooked area of digital marketing. There’s social media marketing, an area of digital marketing that is in for a big change in 2018. There’s influencer marketing, which is becoming increasingly popular. And there’s content marketing, the area of digital marketing that will probably get the most attention in the next couple of years.
Within content marketing, video content is positioned as the most interesting to invest in right now. Almost everyone has access to the technology needed to create great-looking videos. In fact, everything you need to get started could already be in your pocket — some smartphones can capture video ridiculously well. And there are plenty of websites that will host your videos. But still, creating top-quality videos will require time and some money, so you might need more reasons to start making them. Here are six.
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Google Wants You to Use Video
If you’re using digital marketing, you probably understand that doing the things Google wants you to do is a rewarding strategy. Google is the biggest search engine in the world, after all, and it’s often the gateway to your digital assets. When it comes to video, you know that Google likes it because having video gives you a better ranking in search engine results. Especially if you use YouTube to host your videos.
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Video Increases Your Conversion Rates
There is evidence that adding product videos to landing pages has a noticeable positive effect on the landing page’s conversion rates. However, video can do even more for you — it can significantly increase your sales. Granted, you will have to master the explainer video format. But when you do, you will notice that people often watch explainer videos when they’re planning to buy something and that the videos have the power to nudge them in the right direction.
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Video Is Cost-Effective
We mentioned earlier that you will have the opportunity to create videos on the cheap, and you will. But it pays off to invest some money into your videos. The increased production value will have a positive effect on the viewing experience. This will make it easier for your videos to achieve the goals you want them to achieve.
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Video Performs Well Among Mobile Users
9 out of 10 consumers will watch videos on their mobile devices. How many videos they watch increases year after year. At the same time, the amount of time people spend on their mobile devices, as well as the things they can do on their mobile devices, is increasing. As mobile devices become even more important than they are now, so will producing video content.
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People Like to Share Videos
It will take you some trial and error to discover how much time you can ask your customers to spend watching your videos. It will depend greatly on the quality of the videos, but the content will be deciding factor. You will want to nail the balance between length, quality, and content right — people will quickly see they don’t like a video and browse away from it. You don’t want them doing that before they have shared the video with their friends. And video is a highly shareable type of content, and you don’t want to miss on that.
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You Have a Sea of Possibilities with Video
Video is an incredibly versatile format for content. There isn’t a lot of things you can’t pack into a video. You can create short and funny videos that will go viral. You can create tutorials and explainers that can vary in length. You can create whole courses that last for hours, and people will still be watching them. Contrary to popular opinion, shorter isn’t better when it comes to video. If you have good content that will attract customers’ attention, you can have really long videos with good view numbers.
By 2018, every major social media platform has included video content in one form or another. Digital marketing is increasingly moving towards moving pictures as its go-to content. It’s not just content marketing — social media marketing, email marketing, and even SEO are starting to rely more on video. The sooner you start catching up with them, the shorter the distance you’ll have to traverse.
