Online video is emerging as the one of the biggest marketing tools for brands worldwide. Mobile and tablets achieved record growth Q4, making up 34 percent of all online video views, according to Ooyala’s global video index. A recent report from Cisco confirms the popularity of mobile video, which is predicted to account for a remarkable 72% of total mobile data traffic by the end of 2019.

Increasingly, social media channels are offering more options for distributing videos to large audiences. Marketers now have a huge challenge ahead of them: differentiating themselves and grabbing the attention of their target audiences. Those who are successful at mastering it, however, will be able to reap the rewards of reaching, and making an impact on, vast audiences across the globe.

The impact of video

Of course, it is easy to see why video is becoming an important part of the marketing toolkit. Quite simply it helps you engage with your audience and capture their interest in an almost experiential way that is simply not possible through written text.

Furthermore, the more brands use innovative videos to engage with their customers, the more accustomed these customers become to this style of marketing. In fact, today, consumers virtually expect this type of interaction with brands, making video all the more important for businesses.

Over the next year, we will witness the beginnings of the predicted breakthrough in viral video marketing, with a significant rise in companies tapping into the potential of video. However, as the use of video grows, it will become ever harder to make videos stand out. This starts with their sheer ‘discoverability’ within the burgeoning mass of online content.

The social landscape

Social media is undoubtedly the holy grail of video delivery, giving brands a ready-made global audience for their content. Social media channels are themselves also very much aware of the power using video in their channels. As a result we can already see this ‘teaming up’ becoming more attractive for brands.

Until recently, the dominant way of publishing your video would be through either YouTube or Vimeo. However, as other social platforms have started to wake up to the power of video, YouTube is no longer necessarily the preferred platform for video marketing anymore.

Facebook has made huge changes to its video tooling, for instance by enabling users to play videos directly from their newsfeeds. This means that these videos can now get instant viewings without people needing to click away from the feed. Indeed, in less than two and a half years, the views of small video clips uploaded directly into Facebook has grown from zero to three billion!

Twitter is following suit, and in February this year it launched the option of sharing video directly on the platform, rather than via an external link. Of course there is also the Twitter-owned video platform, Vine, which Twitter insists will complement this new service.

For marketers, all this means that rather than posting the video once and linking to it, there are now at least four or five platforms they need to upload their videos to. It is key that marketers adapt to and embrace this new landscape as an opportunity to reach existing and new audiences.

Being an expert

Recent advances in video technology have led to a wide availability of relatively low cost, yet high quality and easy to use cameras. Of course this means that it is now easier than ever to create high quality video content and share it through social media. You no longer need to have a huge budget or be a video content expert.

That said, in order to target your required audiences successfully, you need to be an expert of a completely new kind – one who can navigate the complicated online marketing environment.

Gaining control

Negotiating this complex marketplace can seem daunting, but in actual fact it is just a question of gaining control. The other side of this problem is the internal review, editing, and approval process which has to take place before the video can even reach the web.

But where the Internet creates a problem, it also provides the answers: tools are available – some free - to tackle the management of those video assets and help with the perennial issue of improving video SEO, too.

Subtitles, manual tags, speech, logos, and even faces, are turned automatically into time-based web video text tracks, which can then be searched easily in the same way you would a text file. This ensures that, once published, the videos can be more easily discovered.

With the increase in social media platforms offering video publishing, it is also critical to put in place the right tools to help marketers manage all the content being created by them and other parts of their organisation, and automating its distribution. The ideal case scenario is to create and publish once, and for your content to be distributed to all the right channels simultaneously.

 

By Erik Åhlin, CEO of Vidispine. 

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