As videos are becoming more popular with individuals and brands, video marketing will be getting increased attention. This rising consumption of video content is why everyone is jumping on the video marketing bandwagon. It won’t be wrong to assume that if you shy away from video marketing, your brand might no longer be able to compete.

Take Video Marketing Out of the Toolbox and Put It to Work!

With the increased customer engagement, more and more brands are experimenting with different video formats to modify their marketing strategies, and tailor them in a way that will be most appealing to the audience.

8 Hot Video Marketing Trends

In recent years, we’ve seen some new emerging trends in the video marketing world. Here are a few things you should look out for if you’re planning to start your video marketing journey,

1. Live Video Streaming Is on the Rise

Live video is the new marketing tool for businesses. There’s no longer any need to make a video and put it on a video-specific platform. Just go live and give a sneak peek into your business – go behind the stage, flaunt your workplace, address customer queries – it can work wonders for you. With the launch of Facebook Live, this trend has gained more popularity, with multiple brands using it to showcase their awesome products and company culture.

Live video has more appeal: 80% would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts.

In fact, when it comes to live video other platforms haven’t fallen behind – Twitter also launched its Live video feature soon after Facebook Live rolled out.

More and more brands are turning towards live videos for advertising. Live videos are helping brands build better relationships with their customers.

2. Rise in the Popularity of Homepage Videos

With around 55% of users spending less than 15 seconds on a page, many conversion prophets have got a new trick up their sleeves to make users stay. Behold, the homepage videos.

If you’ve noticed, most websites today have an explainer video on their homepage. Explainer videos are like a sales pitch, showcasing your business idea and benefits in 60–90 seconds. Since people love watching videos, you can be sure that your website visitors will stay to watch the video. Plus, since these homepage videos are designed to impress and convert the viewer, a number of SaaS companies like Dropbox (got 10 million additional customers), CrazyEgg ($21,000 additional revenue each month) and RankWatch (27% higher account signups) have all revealed stunning conversion success reports.

3. The Emergence of 360-Degree Videos

The concept of 360-degree video is fun and engaging. Users have shown interest in watching content in 360-degree format. Magnifyre has shown that the same video gets 28.81% more viewers when published in 360-degree format.

Here’s a 360-degree video published by Microsoft that gives a 360-degree view of the quietest room on Earth.

While this format may not be suitable or economically viable for every brand, it can help boost your sales if used properly.

4. More Marketers Are Using Videos in Email Marketing

Combining email and video will help shift the focus from heavy text content, and will help businesses rely on videos to promote their brand. Just using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%. Plus, email with videos gets click-through rates of up to 65% more.

NotifyFox tested out the potential of video in their cold pitch emails and got 100+ new users from their campaign. Here’s the video they used.

Email marketing gives your video more exposure, which means that the power of email and video content is combined in one.

5. Disappearing Video Content – Watch It or Miss It

With Instagram’s video story feature and Snapchat’s temporary videos, we can expect the rise of “disappearing” video content in the future.

With billions of new content pieces created each day, know that your yesterday’s content will fade away into digital purgatory. No wonder – platforms like Instagram and Snapchat already offer temporary video content that disappears after a while. Various brands have made effective campaigns with this feature.

Such content should be actionable and create a sense of urgency in the user. You can use such video content for promoting ongoing offers (with deadlines) or something like WWF did for a good cause. Check out their #LastSelfie Campaign.

6. More Companies Are Spending on Pre-, Mid- and Post-Roll Video Ads

Despite being interruptive advertising elements, these video ads have helped many brands in reaching out to their audience and turning them into customers.

These ad formats deliver the message in a short time-frame, and can be very effective in helping you establish your online presence. We mostly see these pre-, mid- or post-roll video ads on YouTube. Remember the “skip in 5 seconds” ads that pop up at the start of the video? Well those are pre-roll video ads. If designed well, these video ad stories can get viral.

7. Multichannel Video Marketing

Video content is no longer restricted to YouTube. Social media platforms have offered exposure to video content, thereby offering more visibility.

Due to the diversity of platforms available, you can reach out to a wide variety of audiences. In fact, due to the different nature of these marketing channels, you get a plethora of options to choose from.

Multichannel marketing allows flexibility. With so many marketing channels available, it has become easier to target the right audience.

Also, consumers that see ads in multiple channels convert 24% more than those who see it on one.

8. Animated GIFs for Engagement and Sales

The recent outburst of this trend can easily be seen on Twitter. Animated GIFs are similar to videos but cost less time and effort to produce. These GIFs are great to convey an idea, to create humor, or to tell stories.

GIFs come with multiple advantages. Your audience can understand the message easily, plus it connects with them on an emotional level.

Also, considering the fact that there are various free tools that allow you to generate GIFs, they make for a cost-effective marketing strategy – whether you intend to use it on social media or in newsletters to your subscribers.

Create Good Content Using these Video Marketing Tips

These changing trends offer you various ways to engage your customers. Go live, and give a 360-degree glimpse to your audience. Use animated GIFs and incorporate some humor to tickle the funny bone. Above all, monetize these strategies by making use of multi-channel marketing.

Before we go, here are some tips for creating good video content:

Create multiple short videos instead of a long one.

Instead of stuffing all your content into just one video, it’s better to split it in multiple videos so it doesn’t become too heavy for the user. This especially holds true for tutorial videos. Split them up into small explainer videos.

Focus on the timing, because timing is everything!

User engagement is directly influenced by the length of the video. If you don’t want to lose your video content to digital purgatory, make sure the video doesn’t drag on too long.

Speak in the language of your target audience.

It isn’t necessary to stick with a formal tone all the time. You can make it informal, crack jokes – do anything that engages your audience and connects with them on a personal level.

Video Marketing Is Here to Stay

Again, feel free to be light-hearted and non-formal in your video when appropriate, but this new age in video marketing must absolutely be taken seriously. According to Cisco, videos will be eating about 82% of all internet traffic by 2021.

Look at it from your own point of view – you’re almost surely a consumer of video content yourself, so you have first-hand knowledge of the importance of this trend. Boost your video marketing today starting with the trends above and the tips for good content. And let us hear how it works out!

Visually Speaking – Use #Video #Marketing to Engage Your Audience by @crackitt_ #RocksDigital
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Have you noticed any new video marketing trends or techniques? Let us know in the comments.

The post Visually Speaking – Understand these Video Marketing Trends to Engage with Your Audience appeared first on Rocks Digital.

It turns out that video content is working well for the majority of businesses, but what about yours? Think you might need to optimize your video performance? Ask yourself if you are getting your share of these benefits:

• More Engagement: Posting a video on social platforms helps generate 1,200% more shares than text and images combined.
• More Traffic: Video helps attract two to three times as many monthly visitors. In fact, having a video on your landing page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of the SERPs according to Mist Media.
• More Backlinks: Blog posts incorporating video helps attract 3x as many inbound links as blog posts without video says Moz.
• More Conversion: Landing pages with explainer videos generated 20% extra conversion.
• More Revenue: Marketers who use video reported 49% faster revenue growth than non-video users.

Want to Optimize Your Video? First Understand the Metrics…

While a single video can help you generate all these big results, the best practice is to create one video for one purpose.

If you end up bagging extra results, kudos to you! But don’t mix up too many goals with one video. That would mess up the video content, leaving you with a video that doesn’t generate any ROI.

To understand how your video is performing, have a look at the video analytics. Looking at just “views” or “clicks” alone wouldn’t give you a clear picture of whether your video is driving the expected results. You need to dig deeper. Here’s some video metrics that will help you find out how well your video is doing. The insights will help you make the necessary edits to boost your video’s performance.

5 Key Insights to Optimize Your Video

1. Watch Time

YouTube changed the way it ranks video (back in 2012). While preference was given to views, a more clear metric of a video’s performance became its priority: watch time.

Watch time helps you know the actual portion of your video that has been watched. This metric allows you to monitor whether your audience is watching your video all the way through – or not.

How is that useful?

People are 97% more likely to buy your product when they find your video engaging, which means there is a higher probability of them buying something when they have watched your video for a longer time (or completed it).

How to optimize?

One good way to understand user behavior is to employ heatmaps to see what parts of the video engage the most users. Heatmaps will show you the interactions between the viewers and the video.

Through video heatmaps, you can gain insights on the strong and weak points in your video. With that knowledge, you have a better chance of keeping your audience around till the very end – a classic example of how knowledge can be your power.

And if viewers are tuned in till the end, there is a very good chance that they will make the purchase, too.

2. Drop-Off Point

Under the audience retention section on YouTube, you can find a drop-off point metric. As the name implies, this metric helps you monitor the points at which your viewers leave your video.

Sharp drop-off points indicate the most poorly performing regions of your video. They can be really beneficial in understanding what makes users leave. It is just as important to know why they leave as knowing what makes them stay, if not more so!

How to optimize?

Since drop-off points help you understand where users “drop” your video, this metric can help you find out if it’s just a “lengthy video versus engagement rate” problem, or if there is some issue with the content.

While it’s very difficult to expect an ideal straight line, what you need to avoid are sharp drop-offs.

3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Calls-to-action (CTAs) in your video compel your audience to complete an intended action. This is what CTR helps you measure.

This metric gains even more significance when it comes to video ads. Since video ads are mostly centered around “being salesy,” it is important to have clarity on whether your call-to-action navigated your viewer further or not.

How to optimize?

This metric can be more successfully optimized with the knowledge of drop-off points. Because maybe your audience dropped off way earlier, and never saw your CTA!

If that’s the case, try placing the call-to-action at a different point in your video (and also focus on preventing any sharp drop-offs).

In cases where CTA is the only problem, and not engagement, try making it more visually appealing or modify the CTA text. Also ensure that it’s relevant to the video content that you are serving to your viewers.

4. Views & Demographics

While view count is a vague measure of how your video is performing, it matters to know who’s watching your video, from which location, and from which devices.

Additionally, views become more important when you take social video into account.

Facebook and Nielsen research found that about 74% of the value of the video is delivered in the first 10 seconds.

Analyzing the views section (especially over a longer period of time) can help you determine whether or not your video campaign is getting the right eyeballs. It’s also a good way to track which content is evergreen, and which video is just a passing fad.

How to optimize?

Monitor this metric consistently to avoid “video pitfalls,” where users stop engaging with your content. Find the loopholes. See which devices your audience is playing your video from, and optimize for it.

Screenshot provided by contributor.

If you published your video on your website, see how video posting translates on the views graph. Change the video’s position. See if your audience engaged more with the video when it was on the top fold of the landing page or when it appeared as a popup window on click. Do A/B testing to understand which version performed better.

Finding answers to these optimization questions can help improve your ROI from the video.

5. Comments, Likes/Dislikes, Shares

People trust the recommendations of their friends and family members more than advertising content. Social shares by your audience can help you build that credibility for your product.

If they are commenting on your videos or sharing them, it’s clear that they are engaging with it. What’s more fruitful about these metrics is that they offer a bigger picture of “how they are engaging.”

For instance, likes/dislikes help you understand whether your audience actually feels connected to your content or not.

If you take the case of Facebook reactions (which go further than just likes), they help you understand what the exact emotions of your viewers are when they watch your video.

Comments go a step ahead by giving words to how they feel about your content.

How to optimize?

Encourage interactions at the end of the video. Ask your audience to put their ideas and/or questions under a particular hashtag. Or simply ask them to leave a comment.

Analyze Facebook reactions to see what makes users love your content, or what makes them feel angry. A more apt understanding of these metrics can allow you to design your content more carefully, and help to eliminate content that invites backlash.

Use the Right Recipe to Optimize Your Video

Creating video content is like cooking. A slight error in measuring can greatly alter the end results!

With the knowledge of the metrics mentioned above, you will be in a better position to know whether it’s time to celebrate your video – or to work harder. If you don’t know what success looks like, you might get fooled by the numbers.

Monitor your metrics and utilize them to bake the perfect video. And come back to us if reading this recipe helped you in your campaign!

Creating #Content is Like Cooking – Optimize Your #Video with Metrics! by @crackitt_ #RocksDigital
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Do these insights make optimizing more doable for you? Measure your metrics, and do share your thoughts in the comments!

The post Creating Content is Like Cooking – Optimize Your Video with 5 Tasty Metrics! appeared first on Rocks Digital.