An Introduction to Video Marketing

The marketing world is witnessing a video marketing frenzy, particularly with the advent of Vine and, of course, Instagram’s development into the video sphere. It seems as though the whole world has gone video crazy! From businesses to consumers, it is important to understand the relevance of video as a marketing tool and here’s why.

Let’s begin by comparing video utilisation against standard text. Recent research has shown that video content is at least 1.5 times more engaging than text alone. It’s obvious when you think of it, people are more willing to watch a video on their chosen topic, rather than read a lengthy article on the same issue. In fact,  people are willing to spend an extra two seconds on a page that has video when compared to a plain text article. That means an extra two seconds of their attention to promote your product or business, ultimatelty an extra two seconds of engagement with your potential customer.

Let’s now have a look at how video can help improve your SEO. Since Google bought YouTube in 2006, video marketing entered a whole new arena as videos became a tool for SEO. Thus, one of video’s greatest assets is that they are part of the webs second biggest search engine – YouTube. This is great because it means you have another way to optimise your videos, through the captions that you add to describe your video. Google has also recently altered it’s searches to include videos, (think Googling ‘fix my TV’ and a video of how to fix your TV pops up), which means there’s an even bigger opportunity to improve your search engine visibility. It’s important to realise that improving your video’s SEO can also be done by adding a written transcript to your video, like subtitles, that Google is then able to read and quantify. Double points!


Not only this, but videos are easily shared and are extremely mobile. As social media has made the transition from our laptop screens onto our phones and tablets, so has video. Facebook and Twitter engage with a huge amount of video data being shared, tweeted and retweeted by people at any given moment throughout their day. This completely opens up your audience, as you have cross channel utilisation, which reaches a wider spectrum of people. It is therefore easy to use video marketing as part of an ongoing media strategy, where engagement is crucial.

Speaking of engagement, videos are a great tool to hone in on your customer base and their needs. For example, if your company produces a’ Frequently Asked Questions’ video, customers can have their problems answered in a clear and concise manner in an innovativ and engaging way. It’s true, people prefer being shown how to overcome their problems and seeing someone deal with their questions, rather than having to read about them. This works especially well for drawn out processes. For example, cooking videos are some of the most viewed videos on YouTube, as people want a step by step guide on how to do things. This is essentially educating your consumer  in a way that will entice them to buy your product or use your company in a much softer, human approach. It’s a great way to communicate with your target audience.

Cake videos

Videos are also a long term investment, particularly if you use them well. Very rarely will a video go ‘out of date’ and you could therefore have a potentially limitless audience outreach. This works well for educational videos, the types of videos that people will continually search for. This means that your video will have a longer shelf life if it’s helping people. There’s ultimately a growing audience out there just waiting to watch your video.

So is video the future of marketing? Not completely on it’s own, no, but it looks like it has a place to stay in a world that we’d rather watch spin, than read about spinning.

Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at how you can use video to promote your business.