What is Video Marketing?

Regardless of the size or shape of your business, you likely are looking for new ways to introduce your product or service to others. You certainly are not alone. 

According to one survey by Blue Corona, 66 percent of small business owners say that finding new customers is a top concern. Yet while we all recognize that new customers are extremely critical to the future success of our business, actually finding those customers is an entirely different story. Often, it is easy to rely on a collection of radio, television, or internet ads and simply hope for the best. 

Sometimes you will find success with this method. Other times you won’t. It often depends on the quality of your marketing content, your business’s sector, and your audience’s presence in those channels.

Instead of relying on these traditional approaches to finding new customers, I encourage you to embrace an alternative path. By leveraging video marketing, you and your business can find a consistent influx of new, warm leads that hopefully become long-term customers. 

But having said this, you may be asking yourself: what is video marketing? Along with this, what is special about video marketing that can help me find new customers?

At Dubb, we are video marketing specialists. My team and I obsess over this topic. By leveraging the lessons and insights from this blog, you and your organization will be able to use video marketing to find new customers, sell more of your product or service, and increase your bottom line.

But first things first. What is video marketing?

Laying the Foundation

Video marketing is less complicated than it sounds. Essentially, it is a marketing strategy where you and your organization use video to help increase your brand awareness and brand recognition. In other words, you are taking advantage of the growing power of video to build a positive reputation on the internet.

Both in our business and personal lives, video is only becoming more important. The statistics are staggering. Users watch more than one billion hours of video per day on YouTube, which is the second-most-trafficked site on the Internet after Google. 78 percent of people watch online videos every week and 55 percent view online videos every day. 

The news is even better for those businesses who include video marketing in their marketing strategy. According to MarketingSherpa, video attracts a whopping 300 percent more traffic while helping you to nurture leads. Including a video on a landing page can increase your conversion rate by up to 80 percent. On average, users spend 2.6 times more time on pages with video than on pages without video. Video can increase organic search traffic on a website by a stunning 157 percent. The list goes on and on.

By taking advantage of video marketing, you can tap into a rapidly growing medium. Video is not going away anytime soon; in fact, it is going to get even more popular. One Facebook executive even predicted that the Facebook platform would be all video and no text by 2021. 

Yes, this prediction may be slightly aggressive. But by embracing video marketing, you are choosing to leverage some serious tailwinds for the foreseeable future. It is in your best interest to catch the wave, rather than ignore it. 

Different Types of Video Marketing

In this discussion of what is video marketing, it is also important to highlight the different types of video marketing. 

You and your business have a wide range of choices. You can decide to take advantage of one theme or several. It all depends on your budget, your expertise, and your willingness to spend time on video marketing.  

For example, you can shoot a simple webcam video of you and your team explaining how your most popular product works. Once you are finished shooting and editing, you can share the video on your company website or even on YouTube. 

As another example, you and your team can work with a third-party production company to develop a sleek, sexy video for a new product launch. The video could include interviews with you and your team or even customer testimonials. From there, you can upload and distribute your video on your website and all of your social media platforms in order to build maximum hype for your launch.

Whatever the case may be, video provides you with significant freedom to experiment. The beauty is that there are no hard and fast rules. You can tinker and experiment, and if you find something that works, you have the freedom to double down.

But at this point, we have to back up. There are two critical concepts in video marketing that you should not ignore. These concepts can be summarized in two words.

Those words are empathy and story.

Empathizing With Your Audience 

Ultimately, to succeed at video marketing, you must have empathy for your audience. You must understand their wants, needs, and then serve those needs in your video. 

Yes, some great video marketing videos solve tangible problems of their audience. If you sell workout apparel on an e-commerce site and have discovered on Twitter that some of your customers don’t know whether your clothing runs large or small, you can create a video that addresses that question. This video is not only solving an actual problem that your audience faces, but it shows that you care about your audience’s experience with your product or service. 

To be clear, however, these needs do not absolutely need to be functional needs. Through video marketing, you can address some of your audience’s social and emotional needs. 

What does this mean in practice? 

It means that you don’t need to take your videos extremely seriously. They can be humorous and fun. You can make a video showing off your product in a weird or unusual way. You can profile the co-founders of your business and explain the backstory on why they started a company. You can even offer your take on a funny item in the news and somehow connect it to your product or service.

Whatever the case may be, you shouldn’t think that you can’t create a video because “you don’t have anything important to say.” This is where it is a massive advantage to have a deep, intuitive understanding of your audience. By knowing what your audience wants, you can focus on creating videos that solve their problems.

The Power of Story

Empathy is clearly a critical part of succeeding in your video marketing strategy. However, there is one more word that is critical in each and every video.

That word is story.

Humans are wired for stories. We want to hear them, whether it is you and your company describing its founding or the genesis of a particular product or service. This same principle absolutely applies to video marketing. In fact, storytelling in video marketing is even more effective due to the visual nature of video.

Therefore, when you are sitting down and thinking about your video marketing strategy, it is critical to decide on a story that you want to tell. Again, this does not need to be elaborate or complicated. It can be as simple as interviewing a customer and using their comments to craft a story about your product or service. You can craft a story about a new philanthropic initiative that your organization is spearheading with others in your sector. And yes, if you’re up for it, you have the freedom to shoot a well-produced video about the future vision of your company.

The world is your oyster here. When you are planning your video, however, don’t forget that it needs to include some story—whatever it is. With an increasing amount of video content being uploaded to the internet, it is critical that you embrace storytelling in your content. By doing so, you will increase the odds that your videos will be viewed by your target audience. 

An Effective Way to Reach Your Audience

While it is difficult to predict the future, the odds are good that video marketing is here to stay. It is an extremely effective way to reach your current customers or potential customers. 

And best of all? Your audience—in all likelihood—already loves videos. They are spending significant amounts of time on video sharing sites like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Along with this, you can leverage video marketing on landing pages or your own business website. Check out this video to know more:

 Ultimately, it takes some time and some patience. Very rarely does a video marketing campaign go viral overnight. It is an investment.

But having said this, video marketing will likely become a critical part of your marketing portfolio. It can connect with an audience in a personal, more visceral way. If you do it correctly, it can be a hidden competitive advantage over your competitors. What’s not to like? 

If you are looking for an all-in-one video marketing solution, consider getting a free trial on Dubb.