Video marketing is on the rise – as it has been, now, for a good few years. Once upon a time in the not too distant past, bloggers were the big dogs on the block. We all said “Content is king!” – but it wasn’t a catchall phrase. What we really meant – and perhaps in our self-championing arrogance failed to qualify – was that written content was the ultimate ruler of the kingdom of online content marketing.
Today, content is still king. It’s the king of SEO, and it’s the king of every great website, blog and social media account out there. Great content is what drives traffic to your site, raises brand awareness, converts visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into evangelists.
However, when we talk about “content” and “content marketing” in 2017, we’d be fools if we still thought all that mattered was the written word.
It has been 38 years since The Buggles declared that the radio star had fallen beneath the sword of video. Ironically enough (though no doubt intentionally), when MTV launched on August 1st, 1981, bringing a 24-hour music video channel to television sets for the first time, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ was the first song that was aired.
But did MTV and the swathes of other music video channels that came after it really kill the radio star? Let’s put it another way – did music TV kill off music radio?
No. Of course it didn’t.
But music videos did bring a new, important perspective to how music would be marketed to the masses from then on. And it’s a similar story with blogging.
Back in the early 2000s, blogs were the next big thing. They were everywhere, everyone was doing it, and everyone was reading them. 2008 was the moment, perhaps, when they “officially” went mainstream, with 41% of internet users – that’s 14.5 million people in the UK – reading blogs regularly. That’s according to a comScore press release at the time.
“Blogs have become part of the essential fabric of the Internet today,” said Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director, comScore Europe. “They live and breathe in real-time, helping quench media consumers’ thirst for the most up-to-date breaking news, information, and analysis. It should not, therefore, be particularly surprising that they’re increasingly displacing traditional media usage and carving out an ever-increasing slice of the online advertising pie.”
Written content, was the undisputed king.
Then YouTube came along. It actually launched in 2005 – but it took a few years to really take off. Momentum began to pick up between 2009 and 2013 when the amount of people posting video online doubled over this time, according to the Pew Research Center, and nearly eight in ten adult internet users were watching or downloading online videos. Here’s a 2013 video from Pew – ‘The Rise of Online Video’.
Today, YouTube alone has over 1 billion active, monthly, logged-in users – that’s over one third of the entire internet – and they’re streaming 1 billion hours’ worth of content every day, equating to 46,000 years’ worth annually.
(Image source: socialmediasun.com)
This figure is growing – and it’s not just YouTube. According to Cisco, Globally, IP video traffic will be 82% of all consumer Internet traffic by 2021. This means that global IP video traffic will grow threefold from 2016 to 2021, a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 26%.
It's only natural, therefore, that 87% of digital marketers have latched onto video marketing as a way to generate and maintain interest in their brands, with 52% of content marketing professionals awarding video the accolade of the content type with the greatest ROI.
The question, however, is why?
Well, first, watching videos is easier for consumers than reading blogs (or any other written content, for that matter). Information contained in images – including moving images – is processed by the brain at a much faster rate than information communicated via text, as the following infographic from Social Media Sun illustrates.
(Image source: socialmediasun.com)
What’s also important to note is that in the age of information-overload, people’s attention spans have dropped dramatically, and, as such, content marketing professionals only have mere seconds to grab the attention of their targets. Video marketing is proving to be a great way to do this – for indeed, 80% of people are able to remember a promotional video they’ve viewed online.
What’s more, 96% of internet users say that videos are helpful when making purchase decisions, and 75% of executives watch work-related videos at least once a week.
(Image source: socialmediasun.com)
More – 88% of users spend more time on web pages that have videos than on those that don’t, and those pages that contain videos are 50 times more likely to rank number one in search.
(Image source: socialmediasun.com)
The importance of video marketing in 2017 and beyond cannot be understated – that’s 100% clear. But does it really mean that video marketing has effectively killed off the humble blogger?
No.
Content is king – but content comes in many, many forms, and both blogging and videos are each just one of those forms. A good content marketing strategy needs blogs and videos. Just as it also needs many other forms of content – eBooks, white papers, case studies, tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn articles, infographics, competitions, polls, landing pages and emails.
In short, just because a business is blogging, doesn’t mean that it is doing content marketing – and indeed, the same is true if all it’s doing is video marketing.
Videos are great because, as the research shows, they capture busy people’s attention (and hold it) in a chaotic online world.
But grabbing a prospect’s attention is just the start. Along the buyer’s journey, there are many phases when a prospect needs more than a 90-second video to really get to grips with the ins and outs of the solution they are researching. This especially true in the B2B world, where sales cycles often last months and months. Regular blogging enables businesses to provide the wealth of in-depth education B2B prospects need as they come to make a purchase decision. B2B video marketing certainly helps in this process – but sometimes there really is no substitute for the written word.
What’s more, a blogging strategy is still the best way to keyword optimise a website. And, until the day comes (which it one day will, we’re sure – but it’s not here yet) when search engines are able to understand the precise content of a video like they are able to with blogs, then it will still be the keywords contained in blogs that a website will rank for. True, writing out video transcriptions is one way to combat this issue – but again, it is still the written word that’s the main ranking factor over the video itself.
The long and the short of it is that neither blogging nor video marketing will suffice in isolation. A good content marketing strategy needs both – and more besides. Videos will generate big traffic, and, due to their easily-consumed nature and great shareability, will give you great brand lift. However, it will be your blogs that contain the real gems, that will help separate random traffic from potential leads, and indeed enter those leads into your sales funnel. Video marketing has repositioned the blogger in the content marketing landscape, but it hasn’t seen us off yet – and perhaps never will.
If you need help with your video marketing or your content marketing strategy in general, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the experts here at Incisive Edge today.