Data suggests that digital video ad spending will increase from $9.9 billion, where it currently stands in 2016, to $28.08 billion by 2020. This means within advertising, video is the fastest growing category on mobile, on desktop and overall, as reported in a survey conducted by Cowen and Company.
Video is rapidly becoming the new standard in B2B and B2C marketing, and for good reason. It looks great, sounds great, catches and holds attention…we could go on. But if you’re still on the fence about adding video to your marketing strategy, consider these four things that video can do for you.
Why should you use video marketing?
1. Open the Door for Deeper Engagement
We’ve talked about the importance of establishing an emotional connection with your customers. You can read the long version here, but these are the two biggest takeaways:
- Humans don’t rely on rational thought to make decisions; they’re led by emotional responses.
- Humans are extremely visual creatures. 90% of information is taken in visually, and ideas learned through video communication are retained 68% more effectively than text.
So what does that tell us? Marketing campaigns achieve maximum impact when they engage customers with an emotional story conveyed in the most visual way possible. If you engage your customers with a video, they’re really going to remember what they watched. But more importantly, they’ll remember how it made them feel.
That’s where the true value of video marketing comes in. Think about brands like Hallmark, Volkswagen, Microsoft, and Red Bull who are masters at conveying emotion — whether it’s humor or sadness, surprise or nostalgia — through video marketing. Their audiovisual stories have helped define and reinforce the core values of each brand, the same values consumers feel like they’re aligning themselves with when they choose that brand.
2. Earn Your Customers’ Trust
While it’s easy making a new car look sexy, try making an insurance, telco or utilities provider entice in the same way. When people shop for these types of services, the level of emotional engagement is typically much lower.
This is when trust really comes in to play. Of course people want to trust the companies they’re buying products from, but it’s a different, deeper kind of trust that’s sought once you enter the services industry. Customers want to trust that they’re getting the best deal, that they’re being proactively looked after and that when they encounter an issue with their bill or service, a team is going to be there to get them back up and running quickly.
Video is an effective way of putting people at ease. Like we said above, the easy-to-understand nature of video communication opens the door for a deeper engagement. Because customers understand and remember the information they receive, they feel more in control of their brand experience.
When it comes to explaining policies, plans and contracts, video can be especially helpful. 52% of consumers report that they’re more confident in their purchase decisions after watching a video.
3. Raise The Bar
Let’s take a quick detour and talk about programmatic creative for a moment. It’s a huge buzz-phrase right now because suddenly advertisers are able to take customer data and develop creatively segmented advertising that can be shown to the most applicable people. If you are a woman from Town X shopping for new shoes, you’re shown an ad for a women’s shoe store with a location nearby. It’s an extremely efficient way of hyper-targeting marketing campaigns, and advertisers have been seeing 87% greater return through programmatic vs. non-programmatic ads.
Now that programmatic creative has had time to evolve, it’s expanded into video marketing with the arrival of Personalized Video. Instead of showing all of your customers the same video, you can now use any available customer data to deeply personalize each and every video that’s viewed. Speaking to each customer using her name is a great start to any conversation, but the video can be made far more relevant and engaging through the inclusion of specific bill details, location information or any other pertinent data…the possibilities are really only limited by your imagination.
Back to your marketing plan. How many times have you heard executives asking for ways to raise the bar, for ideas that innovate, for campaign proposals that are a cut above the rest? That’s where Personalized Video is going to be your best friend. It’s already an award-winning medium that increases View Through Rate, Click to Open Rate, Call To Action Conversion and overall brand awareness. It’s essentially the marketing expressway for creating wide-mouthed “wow moments” with your consumers and big smiles with your boss.
4. Don’t Break a Sweat
No one said personalization had to be difficult. In fact, it’s pretty darn easy. Some real-time rendering platforms give marketers the tools to build cinematic quality Personalized Videos at scale, using any type of creative. More recently, launching these Personalized Video campaigns has become far more seamless due to the inclusion of complete authoring, composing and distribution toolsuites that make launching and maintaining new campaigns a breeze.
What’s Next?
To find out more about Idomoo’s easy-to-use Personalized Video as a Service Platform (PVaaS™) and how we can help you reach your customers and drive action, contact us below.
