If a picture says a thousand words, it stands to reason that a moving picture says many times more. You can call it video, moving image, a podcast, film clip or a commercial, which ever you choose, people have a voracious appetite for it. Whether it is a funny clip of penguins, an artistic performance, or a demonstration of how to use a new product, the popularity of YouTube has certainly spread the word – or rather the video.
There has been a raft of studies and surveys published recently highlighting this trend. Experian Hitwise published a report stating that visits to online video websites in the UK has increased by 36% year on year. YouTube accounts for 70% of this traffic, with an average session lasting 20 minutes. Digital TV Research recently announced that the global online advertising marketing is set to reach £60.6 billion by 2016, almost double what it was in 2010. Figures recently published by the IAB state that ad spend online has increased by 13.5% for the first six months of 2011, overtaking TV as the UK’s largest media in terms of spend.
What was once seen as an expensive ‘nice to have’ is fast becoming a key element in any marketing campaign. As social networks become a critical route to market for many brands, so ad spend on video is increasing accordingly. It is such an easily digestible and accessible format that can be very versatile. Indeed, many brands are repurposing TV adverts to create successful multi-channel ad campaigns. This has the effect of generating awareness online and enables brands to reach new audiences.
Now that Google counts video as part of its ‘relevance’ metrics, as well as driving traffic to a website, video has become an important element of SEO.
When considering a campaign, video can play a pivotal role in the Zero Moment. This is the point at which the consumer first starts to look for that new purchase. If your brand is not relevant and engaging at this point, then you have missed a significant part of the opinion-forming process. Nine times out of ten, consumers buy one of the brands that they found when they first started looking. If a brand is not there at the beginning of the search, they are very unlikely to be selected after all the research, product reviews, customer comments and friends’ opinions have been digested – during the Last Ten Feet. This is where they make their decision, either in-store or online with credit card at the ready. Whatever the channel to market, the same sentiment applies, your product or service needs to be well presented. You need to be helpful, easy to understand and relevant right to the point of decision, and in many cases, video is hard to beat.
However, this isn’t only applicable to the consumer space, video has an important role to play in the B2B market as well. In just the same way as you are trying to attract consumers to buy your product, so with B2B you are looking to attract your audience, they are still people and they still respond in a similar way, even though they are at work. In many ways, this is an even more important channel for video, because not only are you selling to your customer, you are helping them to sell your products through to their customers. A promotional video explaining the key features and options of a new product range is invaluable to the retailer, and will help them to convert the sale at the Last Ten Feet – the climax of the process that started with the Zero Moment.
Last year alone the campaigns that we worked on at BrocklebankPenn that included a video element have at least doubled over the year before. While the consumption of on‑demand video has increased substantially among the public, usage of moving image within a marketing campaign is still only ‘in consideration’ by many brands. It is now such a key element in how consumers choose to receive promotional material that a clever campaign can be instrumental in grabbing significant market share for brands.
You never know, you might even win a BAFTA – it has been known!
For more information (and to find out how you might win a BAFTA) please contact: Craig Penn, Founder & Director of Strategy & Planning at BrocklebankPenn on 020 3178 7034 or [email protected]
