Get on Trend: Why You Need Video Content on Your Blog
Videos can do things words can never do: Show a smile lighting up a child’s face. Capture a snowboarder careening down a slope. Freeze a gymnast sticking a landing.
So why don’t more company blogs have video content? There are plenty of so-called reasons for avoiding video:
- It’s too expensive.
- Editing is a pain.
- Bad lighting spoils all your efforts.
- It’s so much cheaper and easier to post text.
Forget about these excuses. This quick summary of trends in video marketing, reasons for using video in your marketing, and tips for making videos more shareable will help show why you need more videos on your company blog to keep up with media trends.
Trends in video marketing
Cisco Systems, which builds networking gear that enables a substantial proportion of internet traffic, estimates that video will account for 80 percent of all online traffic by 2019. Indeed, every day more companies decide to use videos in their marketing. According to HubSpot:
- 65 percent of marketers plan to increase their mobile ad budgets so they can use more video.
- 96 percent of B2B companies use video in their marketing, and 73 percent say they’re getting positive ROI.
- 87 percent of online marketers use video content.
That’s a long way of saying everybody’s doing it. And it implies that growing numbers of your customers expect to see videos with your blog posts, and when they don’t they’ll wonder why. Lack of video might even send them toward your competition.
Using videos in marketing: Why companies need to do more
The abundance of silly cat videos and overnight sensations on platforms like YouTube give the impression that everybody’s on the prowl for “viral” content. Getting a million views on one of your videos is awesome, of course, but that’s hardly the only goal of video content. In fact, many viral videos have been a bust from a business perspective, attracting lots of eyeballs but doing little for company cash flow.
Video is worth doing well for the same reason you pull up a video to figure out how to assemble a new bookcase from Ikea: It helps you solve a problem and see things that are hard to convey in words, graphics, or still photography.
You don’t have to create video ads worthy of Super Bowl Sunday. Simple videos explaining how your products work are inexpensive and easy to produce. Video interviews with subject-matter experts can bolster your reputation as an industry expert. Posting videos from conventions and trade shows helps the folks back at the office see what they’re missing.
In short, video works. It makes your blog posts more engaging, strengthening the bonds between your company and blog visitors. If you do it right, you bring in more business and keep more customers coming back.
How to make your video content more shareable
No matter how great your video is, your efforts are wasted if nobody sees it. Social media provides a wealth of sharing opportunities that will get your video in front of lots of people who might never visit your blog otherwise,
What makes video more shareable? A few things:
- Strong positive emotions. Videos that fill people with admiration also trigger their urge to share. So if something happens in your business that is truly inspiring (staff volunteering to help out after a natural disaster, for instance), that could make your video more share-worthy.
- A well-targeted audience. Say you’re a musical instrument store and one of your employees is a keyboard maestro: Posting links to your video in online forums or social media groups where other local musicians hang out might encourage people to share.
- Optimization for a specific platform. Video works better on some social media platforms than others. And some target audiences hang out on specific platforms and ignore the rest. If you know your target audience uses Instagram, optimize your video for posting there. If they don’t really use Twitter, don’t worry too much about tweets.
- Asking people to share. Simply putting “share this video” at the end of it and adding links or buttons encouraging social sharing will go a long way toward improving the visibility of your video. (Neil Patel’s article at Content Marketing Institute has a bunch more excellent tips).
Video is a discipline you can learn
Tech Crunch, the popular technology blog, reports that people watch 1 billion minutes of video every day on YouTube. Those numbers have simply grown too large to ignore, and they should motivate you to find ways to get more video into your company blog.
Like everything valuable, video is difficult at first. You’ll make a lot of mistakes on the way to figuring it out. But you can learn enough to get started, or simply hire experts to do it for you.
Everything in your business is in a constant state of motion. All video does is capture a few essential movements and convey them to your customers. That can’t help but shine a light on the value you’re bringing to the marketplace.
