This series of posts talks about how video marketing makes your marketing budget go further.
Video marketing isn’t a complete replacement for all the other ways you get your message across, but if you’re not doing it already you really should be including video in your marketing mix – for so many reasons.
And the third in this series looks at one of those reasons – perhaps the most important one: the bottom line.
Compared to running a series of print ads – or TV commercials – before establishing their effectiveness, video marketers have a wealth of available tools to provide an instant analysis of how well their campaign is performing … and if it’s not doing as well as expected those tools give an excellent indication why not, and what changes need to be made to bring that campaign up to speed.
And once the product has been purchased, there’s always the issue of how to use it. Many complex products these days (think smartphones) come with a single A4 sheet containing instructions in several different languages, all printed in quarter-point type.
So it’s not really much of a surprise that Google tells us post-sale “how to” video searches increased 70% between 2014 and 2015 … and during the first five months of that year 100 million hours of “how to” videos were watched in North America alone. 23
And those home-made how-to videos work well as independently-supplied (read extremely inexpensive) customer support – but they’re equally – if not more – effective when they’re created by the company once they’re aware of common problems, perhaps in the form of Q&A clips, ready and waiting to be picked up by search engines.
And of course customers have the technical know-how and equipment to post their own reviews online – which, like the United Airlines examples mentioned before now – can be a double-edged sword, unless they’re taken as a prompt to make improvements in the product or service.
So why not take advantage of customer know-how and do like many other companies, like, says, supplement company AddieUp? They offer some kind of incentive to customers to send in their (hopefully positive) testimonials … and if they’re uploaded onto the sales site there’s a little reward waiting for them in the form of some freebie products. 24
And as for the economics of video marketing, the shorter those videos are, the more effective they’re going to be. This means you’re not looking at creating a marketing version of War and Peace, so you’re also not looking at a huge final invoice for weeks and weeks of video production work.
In fact, you might not be looking at an invoice for audio production work at all: Digiday tells us that 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound anyway, leaving things wide open for subtitles to help push the message across – in as many languages as you want. 25
So perhaps that’s why Syndacast told us a couple of years back that 52% of marketing professionals around the world named video as the type of content with the best ROI … 26
… and why, around then, Tubular Insights’ research revealed 73% of B2B (not B2C) marketers said “video positively impacted marketing ROI” …27
… and when compared to today’s potential £20,000 cost of a single prime-time TV commercial 28 – let alone a series of them – if you haven’t considered video marketing yet purely because of how, we hope we’ve shown that compared to other methods the cost is negligible, the results are fantastic and now is the time to start.
If you haven’t started using video marketing yet – or even if you have – visit www.getanimated.uk.com where you’ll discover just how watchable, how memorable and how effective your marketing video could be when created by the Get Animated production team.
REFERENCES:
23 “How to” videos: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/i-want-to-do-micro-moments.html
24 Testimonial video incentives: https://addieup.com/testimonials
25 Subtitles: http://digiday.com/media/silent-world-facebook-video/
26 Video – best worldwide ROI: http://syndacast.com/video-marketing-statistics-trends-2015/
27 B2B video stats: http://tubularinsights.com/b2b-marketers-video-roi/
28 Primetime TV ad cost: http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-much-it-costs-to-buy-a-30-second-ad-on-uk-television-2017-2?r=US&IR=T/#itv-1
