In the age of the internet, where increasingly more business and sales is conducted online, it is crucial that we are able to make content engaging and ultimately be able to drive more conversions from our websites. With this in mind, more and more businesses have introduced videos into their marketing activity.

Whereas in the past, the medium of videos for marketing and advertising constituted primarily for distribution on television, today we are able to reach our audience through videos via computers, tablets and smartphones. Critically, with the boom in use of portable devices such as smartphones, this has revolutionised how we can distribute videos, as now they can be watched on the go.

The increase in popularity in using videos has coincided with how it has become easier to create them. A professional video production or animation production company can help you storyboard and create a video and advise you on the direction to take to get the highest impact out of your video. And in general, never has it been easier to create, upload and distribute videos with people now having good quality cameras on phones and with video content sites such as Youtube.

Youtube is an example of a remarkable platform that has allowed us to reach a global audience at the click of a button. Youtube has over a billion users a day which is nearly a third of all users on the internet. With this massive audience available to us, more significant is that it allows for us to use it for very granular segmentation of the audience you wish for the video to be seen by, whether that be gender, age, location, and even interests. This provides greater reassurances for a return on investment on marketing activity because you will be reaching out only to your target demographic and thus increase the likelihood of getting conversions. With this targeted approach, additional benefits is the increase in awareness the video will provide for you for this market for your brand, product or service.

As well as having the ability to target your market, one crucial element of video marketing from using sites such as YouTube will be the data that it will provide you. To be able to see how your video is performing, in terms of the measurables such as how many views it has received and how click throughs it has achieved will allow you to see what is and what is not working and truly hone in on details to continually improve for an effective marketing campaign using video.

As well as Youtube, another significant development the internet has provided for how videos can be seen is the phenomenon of social media. Due to them being a community based platform, social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, have added another dimension to video marketing with the capability for videos to gain a substantial amount of views quickly because of users sharing a video to their friends which then sees the shares cascade to other friends, which creates the potential for a video to go “viral”. Like Youtube, the potential reach for your video is astonishing, with Facebook in March 2017 having 1.94 billion users in a month and it also provides the functionality to reach out to a very targeted demographic for your advertising.

In this current era of instant connectivity and portable devices, it also provides new challenges for the strategy and direction in the creation on video. For example with an infinite amount of content now available to users online, attention spans have decreased and therefore videos need to be developed that instantly grab attention and are memorable for users. And in this short but potentially lucrative window of time, does the video conclusively achieve the aim of getting an action from the user such as a click through to your website? Video can have an advantage over written content however in regards to it being able to invoke more emotions and provide information quicker to connect with the viewer.

Also with statistics such as the following, according to MarTech’s 10 benefits of video marketing, videos have shown to increase click through rates by 96% and 30 second mobile video ads have an 88.3% completion rate, it is clear evidence for why more businesses are initiating video marketing into their strategy.