What is inbound video marketing?

Summary

In this post we will focus on inbound video marketing:
– How to overcome the challenges of video marketing?
– Inbound marketing: what is it and what is it for?
– Why is video perfect for inbound marketing? And in what ways? 
– A 4-step path to inbound marketing video 
– The importance of personalization

How to overcome the challenges of video marketing?

Designing an omnichannel strategy, expanding your audience, knowing how to operate in the huge and competitive arena of social networks, being adaptable but consistent with your brand image, and embracing the turn toward data driven and personalization: these are the main challenges of video marketing today. 

How do you overcome these challenges? 

Clearly, there is no universal and miraculous recipe; but we have given you some very concrete suggestions, tips and best practices on how to make a successful marketing video in another post.

Now, we want to take a step forward and isolate a more specific, but absolutely crucial field: we are referring to inbound marketing video. We’ll start with definitions: and we’ll see what is meant, in concrete terms, by inbound marketing. 

Right off the bat, we’ll see why video can and should play a decisive role in this area. In the next section, we will draw a path in 4 stages. It’s our updated version of the 4 classic stages of inbound marketing, which we will summarize in four themes: attract, make aware, convert, and retain. 

We’ll understand how and why video is a formidable weapon along all these 4 stages, and how it offers companies and marketers a formidable boost for their campaigns. Finally, we’ll close the post by talking about personalization and personalized video: the real turning point for inbound video marketing. 

We’re ready. So, let’s start with the basics! 

Inbound marketing – What is it? What is it for?

Let’s start, as promised, with the definitions: inbound marketing is a type of strategic approach that focuses on creating connections with your target audience based on the concerns, problems, needs, and requirements that your audience already has or may have. In short, you focus on creating valuable content for your customers with the goal of creating a tailored, long-term relationship. 

Often customers look to companies for solutions that suit them: and, through inbound marketing, companies aim to offer just this type of response, with a view toward being as one-to-one and as personalized as possible. It differs from traditional “outbound marketing”, which focuses on the brand and its products or services, with a classic one-way and one-to-many communication. 

Here, a key point has already emerged: the main goal of inbound marketing is to create a tailored and long-lasting relationship with your customers. 

Good.  

But how important is it to do that? 

This data tells us: 

• For a company, winning a new customer costs 6 to 7 times more than retaining one (inc.com).  
• A 5% improvement in Customer Retention can produce up to 25% more profit (bain.com). 

We could share many more similar statistics. But these two are clear, authoritative and eloquent…and they leave no room for doubt.  

Now let’s take it a step further. 

What, typically, are the strategies at the heart of inbound marketing? 

• First and foremost, the production of quality content (so called “content marketing”). 
• SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). 
• Social media marketing. 
• The more classic, but still very effective, email marketing. 

As you can guess, we’re talking about really broad fields of application and each of these deserve separate treatment. We want to keep our focus on inbound marketing video. So, in the next paragraph, we’ll start with a question: why is video perfect for inbound marketing? We have already talk about the benefits of using video for sales.

In our answer, we’ll show you through the four application areas we just isolated. 

Why is video perfect for inbound marketing? And in what ways? 

Let’s start with the first of the four areas we’ve isolated: quality content production. 

In the digital world, video is the king of content. In fact, it’s the most popular type: according to a Cisco report, videos will make up 82% of total internet traffic by the end of this year (cisco.com). And that’s not all. 

Let’s move on to the “demand” side of the audience: 54% of people want to see even more videos produced by the companies they follow (hubspot.com). And finally we come to a figure related to the actual understanding of the messages: when viewing a video, the average user retains 95% of the message it contains; if we talk about text, this percentage sinks to 10% (covideo.com). 

The second field we have isolated is the one related to SEO and SEM. However, we will report one very significant statistic her: on average, videos register an organic search engine ranking better than 50 times better than links that contain only text (seoinc.com).  

The third field of inbound marketing video concerns social networks. Another huge and articulated field. Again, without belaboring the point, here are just two facts about the power of video on social and its ability to generate leads and sales: 

• Overall, videos receive 48% more views on social networks than all other types of content (invideo.io). 
• 93% of brands say they have acquired new customers through videos posted on social networks (wyzowl.com). 

We’ve talked about the power of video marketing on social networks in this post, where we also provide some tips for developing the best strategies. Finally, here we are at the fourth and last field: email marketing. We’re talking about a strategy that’s older than the previous three; yet, even today, it’s still highly effective, due to its ability to target individual recipients more “closely”. 

Well, consider this data: 

• The presence of a video in an email sent by a company increases the open rate, on average, by 19%. It increases the click rate by 65%. And, conversely, it lowers the unsubscribe rate by 26% (campaignmonitor.com). 

Attract, make aware, convert, and retain – a 4-step path to inbound marketing video 

If we had to summarize the strength of inbound marketing video in a slogan, we would say that it’s about putting the customer at the center. That’s how you win the challenges of the present and the future. But what does all this mean on a more concrete and operational level? 

Above all, it means designing a path.  

A path that today is, above all, digital, and that we have chosen to summarize in 4 stages. 

1) Attract. 

This is a very complicated mission in our current digital ecosystem wherewe are all constantly bombarded by stimuli. 

In this scenario, video is a great weapon (for example, we’ve seen the data regarding views on social networks). 

The real turning point? Not shouting louder than others, but addressing the right words, with the right tone, to the right people (we’ll come back to this in the final, talking about personalization). 

2) Raise awareness. 

This is a crucial aspect. Before getting to conversions and sales, you need to create a path for individual customers to education and awareness. Make them understand the values of their brand and not just its products or services. Even further upstream: make them understand the economic and social context where the brand operates and how it wants to change it for the better. Finally, help the customer focus on his own desires and needs; and tell – without forcing – how the products or services offered by your company can be the perfect solution. 

Think, in this sense, how valuable educational videos or “how-to“ videos can be, for example. 

3) Convert. 

At a certain point, for companies it’s a matter of tightening the circle, and getting to turn a potential customer into an actual customer. The path must be gradual and proceed through calls to action and touchpoints that are designed with surgical attention. Many statistics tell us that video is the best ally for transforming dialog into a satisfying business relationship. This is the most significant one:  

– 87% of marketers said they were satisfied with the ROI related to their video campaigns (hubspot.com). 

4) Loyalty. 

We’ve already seen it: the loyalty aspect, in today’s hyper-competitive and fluid market, is almost more decisive than the sales aspect. Or, rather, the two sides are closely related. 

In short, it’s all about building a one-to-one relationship with your customers. And in this field there’s nothing more effective than personalized videos; an absolutely avant-garde tool, which we’ll tell you about below, at the end of the post. 

It’s all about personalization! 

We want to be very concrete and direct in our conclusion. So: what does personalization mean? 

It’s the ability to do something very old with cutting-edge tools, to know all the people who make up your target audience and address each of them in a differentiated way. This, of course, boosts both sales and loyalty. How is this possible when you’re talking about audiences of thousands or millions of people? 

It’s hanks to Big Data analytics. 

Starting with the digital footprints we all leave online, companies can get a very detailed picture of their customers. It’s all about setting the right metrics and relying on increasingly advanced Artificial Intelligence systems. And can personalization be combined with video? 

Yes.  

There are platforms that specialize in personalized videos, like Babelee. These are videos built based on the characteristics of the recipients and their browsing choices. The storytelling adapts in real time and the calls-to-action are perfectly tailored. There’s no doubt about it: this is the real breakthrough of inbound marketing video!