10 benefits of using video marketing for business

Video has long been a key element of content strategy and is increasingly being adopted by organizations of all types, large and small, in every industry. Users-consumers prefer it to other types of digital content because it is immediate and engaging.

Brands choose it because it’s memorable and measurable. And all of these characteristics together make video the format of choice for marketers, who are increasingly aware of the enormous benefits that video marketing can bring to their development plans and, ultimately, to the company’s business.

With visuals taking precedence over expressive content, video communicates complex concepts better than other content and allows audiences to more fully experience, creatively own, and share brand stories. In fact, video inspires and defines specific marketing initiatives, and within individual activities it converts like no other content.

As digitization continues to evolve in increasingly advanced technological, methodological, and organizational forms, it is helping to change the expectations and preferences of customers and employees. Marketing’s shift to a digital-first approach is a direct consequence of this, never final, transformation.

On the other hand, markets have become extremely fluid, chaotic, and crowded. Here video proves, once again, to be particularly valuable because it makes it possible to conduct an analysis from a data-driven perspective: it enables companies to monitor and measure audience engagement in a way that is truly meaningful because it is more accurate, complete, and synthetic.

What are the advantages that make companies choose to integrate video marketing into their content strategy? Below are 10 great reasons why your business should invest in video creation and distribution!

1. For unstoppable growth

In 2020, the number of videos on the web increased by 80%, with the peak, reached on April 22, of 103,603 videos uploaded online. The pandemic has had a major impact on the amount of time people spend watching videos: in 2020, the minutes of videos viewed online increased by 85%, for a total of 12.2 billion minutes in one year (Not Another State of Marketing Report – Hubspot, 2021).

While this increase is undeniably linked to the health, social, and economic crisis produced by the spread of COVID-19, it is equally true that the emergency situation (with its long periods of forced isolation) has only accelerated a trend that had been triggered for some time – at a speed that no one could have predicted.

Companies (the most far-sighted at least) had already increased their production of video content in response to a precise demand from the market, and they will continue to proceed in this direction. For further confirmation, let’s take a look at the data:

• The size of the worldwide video marketing market will expand further, from its current value of about $33.3 billion to $45.6 billion by 2025 (Statista, 2020);
• Video is the fastest growing segment, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that will reach 6.5% by 2025 (FinancesOnLine).

2. To increase return on investment

For marketing teams that focus primarily on finding new ways to interact with potential leads and designing personalized experiences, video has become the cornerstone of their plans. But not just because of issues related to creative possibilities. In fact, video has a positive impact on a company’s economic performance. Achieving a significant return on investment (ROI) from video marketing initiatives is now considered a winning bet by most industry insiders.

Marketers are increasingly convinced of this: they have quickly realized that the ROI of video is a value to watch out for, destined to increase in the near future. If in 2015 only 33% believed they could get a positive ROI from video, now this number has skyrocketed, (we’re talking about 87% of respondents) and doesn’t show any signs of stopping its ascent (Wyzowl Video Survey, 2021).

3. To increase market share

Companies that increase investment in content and concerted digital marketing efforts during a period of severe crisis seem to have a leg up, and often succeed not only in minimizing damage but also in gaining more market share. One example? The case of Amazon, which actually grew by 28% in 2009 thanks to the powerful pull of marketing efforts.

By relying on high-quality video content designed for specific audiences and equipped with the latest interactivity and automation features – such is the case with Babelee videos – you’re significantly increasing your chances of generating leads. According to OptinMonster, video marketers get up to 66% more qualified leads per year (source: entrepreneur).

4. To learn more about your customers through data

The data that can be obtained through video allows you to provide a lot of articulated information, with a greater degree of detail and accuracy because it comes from the personal profiles of users-consumers.

It’s called granularity and it means that the layers of meaning and the depth of the information extracted from video marketing initiatives become available to the teams of the various departments (digital, communication, sales, HR, IT) for the optimization of processes, the formulation of targeted commercial proposals, the development of ad hoc creativity, the search for the most performing keywords, the timely updating of user master data, etc.

This is the power of video analytics (which we’ll talk about in the next chapter) that doesn’t remain unchanged but provides for the adaptation of metrics as the video and the context in which the video is inserted evolve. Today, for example, you can track how long people have watched a piece of content and which segments are skipped or watched again.

In summary, an analysis of the engagement produced by individual content – enabled by the most advanced video marketing analytics – allows you to:

• Track the consumption patterns of potential buyers,
• More quickly identify leads that are actually engaged
• Intervene quickly on the specific frictions that discontinuous or interrupted video viewing brings out (for example: at what point do users most frequently abandon? Do conversion triggers need to be moved and optimized?),
• Demonstrate the value of the initiatives promoted, especially the boldest and most innovative ones.

5. To maximize the value of content

But video has not only transformed the way companies communicate their products and services and sales teams execute their deals. Above all, it has helped to redefine the nature of the relationship with consumers (acquired and potential), equipped service teams with new tools to support customers, and human resources with technologies that can improve onboarding flows. To put it another way: video is incredibly useful throughout the funnel, not just in the brand awareness phase, which is no longer conceived as a circumscribed moment but as an overall branding action to be associated with the entire relationship with the brand (source: The ultimate guide to video marketing, Hubspot).

From an operational point of view, this flexibility makes it possible to make use of all the content into which a single video can be divided. In fact, it makes it possible for companies to maximize the overall value of the video by leveraging individual content segments as independent units and distributing them throughout the network, channels, and touchpoints.

6. To improve B2B communications

Even in the case of B2B marketing, the most rewarding strategy your company can implement is to get your customers – at the most appropriate times and places – content that is truly valuable: interesting, informative, relevant.

By including video marketing in your company’s inbound marketing and sales strategy, you can:

• Diversify your content offerings,
• Attract more potential customers,
• Demonstrate your company’s identity and authority,
• Recount experiences that clarify your institutional value system, and most importantly, keep people engaged.

For B2B, the people who need to give you their attention are the business decision-makers who are interested in the topic you are proposing for strictly professional reasons and are usually short on time. Here, time is the variable to which you have to pay maximum attention, on which the use of video allows you to obtain more than positive results.

• Video content is easy to consume in a variety of situations. And since executives travel a lot and use their travel time and other downtime to do research – video content is ideal here. In fact, it’s more immediate to understand or memorize than a blog, whitepaper, or other structured text.
• Video content helps summarize and clarify complex positions because it tends to get to the point much faster than text content. Watching a video means you don’t have to worry about mentally scanning the page to fixate on the key information: conclusions will come in a more timely and concise way.
• Accessing video content is now easier than ever thanks to huge advances in connectivity and the widespread availability of devices capable of receiving large amounts of streaming data.

7. To increase sales and conversions

Products and services can be very complex, and it’s essential that your consumers understand their qualities, how they work and – why not – their limitations before they make a purchase.

An explainer video gives you the opportunity to show, not just tell, potential customers what you’re offering and how to solve a certain critical issue. This feature is definitely appreciated: more and more people proceed to purchase after watching a video (we’re talking about percentages ranging from 64 to 85% more likely to buy).

Videos drive conversion events more frequently than other formats. That’s why marketers employ them throughout the entire funnel. In the case of email click-throughs, for example, even just including the word “video” in the subject line can increase open rates by 19% and click-through rates by 65%. According to Martech Advisor, including video in emails can increase click-through rates by as much as 300%.

8. For a stronger brand connection

Watching a video provides a series of intense audio and visual stimuli because it simultaneously summons the sense of sight and the sense of hearing and activates related neural processes. Simply activating both of these areas of the brain implies a degree of engagement that can naturally result in a deep-seated and lasting interest in the content they are consuming.

This is the physiological mechanism that makes storytelling more powerful for a company, whether it’s a small business that seeks brand recognition and depends on loyal customers, or the big brand that needs to consolidate or update its image.

Moreover, because video is extremely flexible content, among the most shared on social media, it easily fits into the conversations consumers establish with brands. Brands, just by being present on the virtual walls of their customers, gain in visibility and newsworthiness and are loaded with additional meanings that make them contemporary and more authentic.

9. To stand out from the crowd

This point on the list is related to the previous one: visibility and credibility are the prerequisites for expanding the size of your business and increasing profitability.

And again: videos are particularly effective in making the brand visible, distinct, and distinguishable. But to make an impact, videos need to be thought through as part of a strategy designed to build a story that is consistent and gets to the right audience at the right time. Your company’s messages need to layer up and acquire a depth of meaning before they can be compelling and resonate with consumers.

Videos – the well-produced, dynamic, personalized, interactive ones – not only allow the brand to gain visibility but also to be credible, precisely because, in the best inbound tradition, they provide consumers with content that is useful and relevant to them.

10. To automate processes

Last but not least, video marketing can leverage automation methods and technologies to achieve important benefits:

• Make tasks more efficient that would otherwise risk engaging your employees in repetitive, low-value tasks.
• Avoid wasting valuable time and minimize the resulting waste of economic resources.
• Unleash the creativity of your company’s people, who can put their domain knowledge to good use by translating it directly, and effortlessly, into a moving image narrative.

By equipping yourself with the best software for your company’s needs, you can independently create videos that more accurately reflect specific needs, adapting to your consumers’ profiles.

That’s why the winning move for marketers today is to equip themselves with a video automation platform that can automatically transform data and insights into highly dynamic and communicative videos in which information from any type of database is integrated into individual scenes.

In the highly mobile and changing landscape we’ve described, it’s not surprising that growth in the use of video by marketing (and other business functions) has remained steady, reflecting a renewed confidence in the format’s potential.

Video, more than other formats, such as written texts, lends itself to function as a vehicle for a change – currently underway – that in many ways we could define as “epochal.” It’s a change that concerns consumer empowerment and is reflected in the collective imagination linked to the brand and in the practices of content production and creation. We are talking about both the possibility for consumers to work alongside the brand in the co-creation of its messages (including the appropriation, editing, and social publication of micro-texts and post visuals) and their increasingly felt urgency to manage themselves independently throughout the journey, in a way that we could define as “self-service.”

In a purchasing and consumption space in which the voices that demand (claim) to be heard are multiplying, video offers countless advantages (we have tried to summarize them in our 10 point list) and, thanks to its technical qualities and its narrative dimension, it is a powerful and versatile tool that brands use to connect, inform, educate, create trust, and establish relationships.