Using video to promote products or services in a unique perspective with brand identity is a robust marketing strategy.
Video is more effective content than any other form of digital communication. An evocative, memorable story tugging at heartstrings strengthens the bond between users and the brand. Video helps to achieve a high click-through rate and effectively builds brand awareness. Let's delve deeper into the benefits of video marketing and its strategic value.
1. Brand Voice
The modern world is so full of information noise that it's hard for a new brand to be heard. Even the most flashy titles and ad creatives risk being neglected and fusing with the rest of the advertising. But high-quality professional product videos on the brand, the company, and the culture are appreciated.
Big brands should be especially careful about what value they convey to the audience and how their voices should sound. Will it be the patronizing tone of an opinion leader or a softer, friendly manner for a younger audience? All this is ideally transmitted through marketing videos — they create an emotional connection, effectively capture attention, and as a result, boost conversions.
2. Trust and Authenticity
Trust is the foundation of conversions and sales. Nowadays, many consumers fear fraud and cheating when buying online. They realize that making branded videos is a costly process. It is not tricky to photoshop an image with a fake product, but it's much harder to shoot a 360° live tour in the company's hallways or hire a professional team to create explainer videos.
The majority of users seek authenticity they can trust. This is why original videos from preferred brands are no longer perceived as intrusive ads.
3. Attractive video content
A significant success factor for advertising is its attractiveness. Today's audiences have become desensitized to traditional ads and want to be amused. An engaging and emotional video story is a great tool to impact potential customers.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and a live video is worth a thousand pictures. Visuals are handled by the brain 60,000 times faster than text, so video content formats are rising. Video helps us to retain 95% of the information compared to only 10% of the information we retain from the text on landing pages.
Human perception of video
The benefits of video are immense. To understand how powerful video is and how video works let's look at psychophysiology. The human brain can process a visual picture in only 13 milliseconds. At that moment, it needs to figure out what it sees — identify the image.
The brain spends much more time processing the text because it deciphers it in a linear and sequential format. Consequently, in only 8 seconds of viewing, the video informs the user much more than the text.
Sound, visuals, and motion also have a multisensory influence. For instance, many people like to watch videos on the road or after a busy day, especially fun and relaxing promo clips. For many, this is much more attractive than texts.
4. Full Reach
Many statistics have proven that video marketing is a perfect way to capture and retain the attention of consumers around the world. Thus, nowadays, video is voted the preferred form of online content for all audiences, especially youth. But it's hard to imagine a better place for video content than social media platforms.
Social media marketing makes it easy to find new customers who haven't heard about your brand. This is an excellent opportunity for the company to capitalize on the growing trends. YouTube, TikTok, and now Instagram Reels are great places for adding videos to your new products and the emotional stories that come with them.
Key video marketing stats
Through video content marketing, you can find many new customers in new places who may never have heard of your product!
5. Multi-Dimensional Engagement
Video marketing creates a multi-dimensional experience with a brand. Live streams capture the hearts of people around the world. People of all ages enjoy watching the creators of their favorite brands interact with them.
For instance, with an explainer video, marketers create quick product demos and dispel customer doubts through chat discussions and live streams. Smart dialogues and interesting research — that's what people as decision-makers are interested in.
And this is one of the most substantial benefits of video marketing — a live connection with the audience.
6. Customer Touchpoints
The promotional videos often resonate with viewers and address universal issues. Each of the themes is more age-specific. Young people are looking for impressions and ease, middle-aged people are worried about self-fulfillment, and family values are the most important for many. You can get the emotional response you want and create a strong bond with your brand.
Product videos not only transmit to the potential buyer the information needed for purchasing but also convey the brand's mission. For this purpose, the emotions and feelings of people are actively involved.
Emotions build strong brand associations. The customer feels close to the brand and shares its values: kindness, care, friendships, love, and pride.
One of the unexpected benefits of video marketing is that consumers stay in their comfort zone while watching ads. They are not critical, and this is already very important. So, explanatory branded videos are an excellent substitute for communicating with live sellers, which is not to everyone's liking.
7. Brand awareness
According to the survey, 93% of marketers use a video marketing strategy specifically to build brand awareness:
Marketing efforts were always intended to ensure that the consumer, faced with a problem, immediately remembered the brand that solved it. In addition, marketers are always trying to make the brand recognizable. For this, the necessary associations are created. You hear "I'm lovin' it", which immediately prompts you to think about McDonald's. This is the brand association.
8. Increased Traffic
Video boosts conversions. Many brands have already started creating video versions of their blogs and getting new customer traffic to B2C and B2B segments.
Emotions conversion
The video content in ads usually focuses on facts or emotions. However, both factors strongly influence user behavior.
So, advertisers skilfully use the full spectrum of emotions to create a strong bond with the brand. And not just those that are positive, like love or pleasure, but also negative.
Positive emotions contribute to brand identity, while negative emotions encourage potential buyers to solve their problems by purchasing a service or product.
Dopamine level is also a factor. Music activates the area of the brain that produces dopamine. When music marries with visuals, it becomes even more powerful.
Emotions are a specific tool used by many marketers to increase conversions. Emotional rollercoasters hypnotize people and don't let them come off the screen.
Rational way
For a brand to get the right response from its target market, they don't always need to elicit an emotional response from customers. Sometimes it is enough to use the correct information about the product, especially in the B2B business segment.
B2B video marketing aims to increase brand trust and awareness. Here, the end of the user's journey is not a product purchase but a request for a consultation.
The rational attractiveness of advertising lies in using facts and logic to persuade consumers to buy. The largest brands skillfully steer between these two approaches in their digital marketing strategy.
9. Variety of Video Formats
The video format is also ideal for business. In a slightly modified form, it can be used in social networks, on your own website, in video games, in email marketing campaigns, and even on electronic billboards on the street. This is the most practical of the benefits of video marketing.
A 2022 market study found that 39% of respondents said short videos performed best, 16% had long videos, and 11% had videography. Marketers create short product videos to stimulate traffic and post longer stories on their sites to reveal the brand better.
So, short and appealing video formats provide enough room for extensive storytelling. Webinars and podcasts are posted on popular streaming services for active communication with their target audience.
Many advertising formats have already begun to go beyond the advertisement itself. These are video interviews with experts, entertaining immersion in the brand's corporate culture, explainer videos, and valuable educational webinars.
The unique approach of such advertising is that they first try to give the user something: emotions, impressions, a good mood, or valuable practical knowledge.
10. Tracking Results
Tracking results is one of the key benefits of video marketing that other digital formats do not possess.
Undoubtedly, traditional content marketing, organic traffic, and search results are still crucial to success. But tracking how many potential customers read the post or which point is more interesting is difficult. With video content, marketers can track when users watch a video, stop it, like it, or leave the page. Plus, they can track CTR and lead generation.
Use the right metrics
Special video metrics can provide such valuable information as the total number of views, distribution strategy, and how many viewers watched the video till the end. Based on this, you can get valuable analytics showing true consumer preference.
11. Boost SEO
Embedded video on a landing page can improve its SEO ranking 53 times. Users will likely stay on the page with video 2.6 times longer, unlike on the page without video. Google also indexes the page correctly if the video content is transcribed.
An upper rank allows more people to find your site. After all, it rises more and more in the search ranking, and the higher it is, the closer it is to the initial results.
Search engines are learning to interpret video content and the questions it is answering. SEO extracts key points and helps users quickly find the right video content.
In addition, video content on your site lets visitors spend more time on the page, and search engine bots believe your site has good content. You can also classify your branded video with keywords by typing them into the text.
12. Good ROI
According to a survey in 2022, 86% of entrepreneurs use video marketing as an essential strategy for growing their businesses.
But video marketing is not for quick results but is used strategically. Video content allows consumers to develop a personal relationship with your brand. Of course, emotions are not exactly ROI, but video encourages social shares and can significantly increase your site's traffic.
Marketers from all over the world today are actively learning how to create engaging video content for brand promotion. A small budget does not matter to create a viral video.
Of course, professional studios help brands create amazing video stories with beautiful effects, which pays off. But sometimes videos shot on a small budget but with a good message become viral. For example, a video of a motivated, energetic team.
Summing it up
Technology continues to evolve in today's fast-paced world, and video marketing highly depends on it. Video marketing appeared long ago, but video consumption will continue to be an integral part of any successful commercial marketing strategy in the future. Live video, live streaming, Youtube content, influencer marketing, Instagram stories, and email marketing —all of those deliver outstanding advertising opportunities these days.
You can explore the most viral videos of competitors and experiment with different formats and lengths to increase conversion rates. Video marketing has no complex rules, so companies usually try various formats and ad networks for their campaigns.
Expenditures on programmatic video ads are expected to grow, reaching $74.88 billion by the end of 2023. Are you using this powerful tool?