Tim is a Forbes contributorTWEET THIS
Look around: How common is it to see someone deeply engrossed in a video on their mobile device? In just a few years, it will take an individual more than 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month. Every second, a million minutes, or almost 17,000 hours of video content will cross the network by 2021, according to Cisco.
Internet Video Traffic will be over 80% of all consumer internet traffic in 4 yrs.
Think about that – in just one second – more video will move across the internet than you could watch in almost two years of doing nothing else, including sleeping. Online video use is simply staggering from a consumer perspective. It is changing how businesses or brands communicate with customers and how we communicate with one another.
As a guy who sees and reads a lot of technology research and is barraged by statistics of every order, I find the data stream on online video, video marketing, and, in general, video in business to exceed nearly every other category that hits my wide tech-focused stream.
Here are just some of the video marketing trends I’m seeing:
- Video First. Consumers want to watch, but also produce video. Facebook coined this term last year when talking about making it easy for people to do both consume and produce – Facebook Live is one result of that overarching strategy. Businesses are shifting to using video to lead their marketing efforts.
- Live Video (or Live Streaming). Cisco states that Live Internet video will account for 13 percent of the total video traffic mentioned above.
- Square video grows in popularity. Square videos take up 78% more space in the Facebook News Feed, and get more engagement, than horizontal videos, according to Animoto.
- Video is driving purchase behavior (see the resources section at end of post)
- Video marketing creates stronger customer engagement
- Lower costs to shoot video and produce video; better tools. If you don’t do it yourself with software, you can hire it out – from the actual video shoot to the editing and final production of the video.
- Take a look at the Smartshoot pricing survey, a nationwide list of videographers and photographers. The average small business marketing video was under $1,000 in 2015. A medium-sized product demonstration video might be $2,000.
- Video as marketing method, but also as training tool (which one could argue is a bit of marketing, too, for employees and prospective employees)
- Marketers investing in paid/sponsored social video. Brands are paying to “socialize” or promote their videos – in essence, advertising.
- Social Video is Mobile Video
- Video Content Increases Trust (sort of related to #4 and #5), but video alone doesn’t increase the trust. Video that resonates is what matters.
- It is not YouTube OR Facebook for posting your business video – most brands are using both. See Tubular Insights blog post link below to find out which other social platforms are doing well.
