Video marketing: where does the future of digital strategies go from here?

To understand why video marketing is a “mandatory” approach for any company that wants to build an effective digital marketing strategy, we need to start with data. The Digital 2022 Global Overview Report, an annual study dedicated to the state of the digital world, was recently published by We Are Social and Hootsuite.  As it does every year, the report showed the evolutions and main trends related to the digital sector; trends that have obviously been particularly affected by the coronavirus emergency. 

Among the many aspects that it highlights, the most interesting ones concern users’ habits online. Specifically, one of the activities that people most engage in online is watching videos. When it comes to content, it turns out that many of the respondents prefer videos over any other type of content available online.  

Therefore, it’s not surprising that more than a quarter of the time that users spend with their cell phones is using video playback applications. This amounts to just over an hour a day, every day, for a total of 23 hours a month. Similarly, it is also not surprising that YouTube.com is the number-one most visited site in the world, where around one billion hours are viewed every day around the world.  

Even this brief summary would be enough to answer the question posed in our title. Videos are by far the most popular type of content on the web, the kind most willingly watched by users, and best suited to be enjoyed through smartphones and other mobile devices, which have now become the “first screen” in terms of usage. 

However, this isn’t the only reason why video marketing is an indispensable approach for any truly effective digital marketing strategy. In fact, there are at least four other reasons why brands can’t do without this type of communication. 

One of the most valuable things users possess is time and, in particular, the time they spend giving their attention to something.  Attention is an extremely limited resource and one that is increasingly shrinking, given also the vast amount of messages that reach every consumer on a daily basis.  This means that standing out among the many competitors and getting people to notice you is increasingly difficult. 

In this sense, videos are a great tool to address the problem, since not only are they able to attract attention better, but also because they are able to keep users on a page longer. In fact, there are several statistics that show that people spend on average more than twice as much time on a page that also contains video content than on a page that does not. 

Moreover, this communicative capability is very attractive because it can be leveraged through various digital marketing channels to greatly increase the effectiveness of communication. 

Consider, for example, email marketing: both a newsletter and a single email are more likely to reach the recipient and properly convey a message if they contain a video. In fact, there is evidence that more than half of people pay more attention when they watch a video than when they enjoy any other type of content and that, at a later time, they are able to remember an average of 95% of it. In the case of text, however, this plummets to 10%. 

The same is true when it comes to other channels, such as social networks. Embedding a video in your feed makes it more relevant and interesting to the user, who is more likely to stop scrolling, watch, and perhaps take a response action. 

The second advantage of adopting a video within your digital strategy is that it’s able to push the user to take certain actions in a more persuasive way than all other types of content.

In fact, videos are undoubtedly the most persuasive medium that the web offers, and this is for a very simple reason: because videos simplify communication, which is consequently made more clear and immediate. Think about when you have to sell a product: if you place it within a video, not only do you give the user a better understanding of how it works, but at the same time, you place it in an informational or entertainment context that is perceived as relevant and not merely “marketing.” 

Again, this is confirmed by the data.  According to recent research by Hubspot, 64% of people who watch a video are more likely to move on to purchase; this also explains why making videos with certain products can increase their sales by up to 144%. 

After all, this is only natural: users’ buying habits have changed profoundly, and mobile devices are increasingly being integrated during the purchase phase. It is, in fact, now quite common that, before buying, a consumer consults the Internet to learn more about what he or she is buying, coincidentally using a smartphone, which is the most widely used device for watching videos. 

Another reason that makes video marketing particularly effective is the fact that video content is not only loved by users, but also by search engines. 

In fact, well created , interesting video content with proper use of SEO techniques can improve your site’s position on the results page, making it more visible and consequently able to generate more traffic. 

To give you an idea of what we are talking about, a video embedded on a web page is 50 times more likely to generate organic search results than regular text, thus increasing organic search traffic by more than 150%. These numbers are particularly interesting when considered from the perspective of standing out from the mass of competitors and being able to make your content more relevant, including through its positioning and findability. 

One of the most important trends in digital strategies for 2022 is to put the individual at the center of communication, the buying experience, and of course, the marketing approach. This is precisely why video marketing is indispensable, since it is based on content that is most capable of creating a connection with the viewer. 

In fact, through video, it’s easier to leverage human emotions and thus make your storytelling much more engaging and more memorable for the user, who, not surprisingly, can get emotional, laughing or crying when watching a video. 

While video content makes it possible to bring any company closer to people, eliminating the distance and communicative “divide” that separates them, it has a limitation that is not insignificant, namely the fact that it is a unidirectional medium, one where the user is relegated to a solely passive role. The risk is that by not being able to interact, the person feels marginal to the lived experience, which moreover turns out to be the same as that of many other users who, like him, receive the same content. 

This is why it’s important for companies to adopt innovative solutions to remedy the problem, perhaps by trying to use interactive and personalized videos. Personalized videos are based on so-called compositional storytelling, which allows the user to actively modify what he sees by making certain choices within the video, as if he himself created the script. 

In this way, the experience provided is immersive and at the same time engaging and memorable, as each customer can enjoy content that is more than personalized, or even tailored to the recipient. Therefore, if video marketing is the future of digital strategies, we can go so far as to say, in conclusion, that personalized videos are one of the most effective marketing tools for being relevant and innovative in the (increasingly demanding) eyes of every user.