According to the WYZOwl statistics, 86 percent of businesses use videos as a tool for marketing. The report also shows that 93% of marketers believe the video to be an effective tool. The most common types of videos are – explainer videos, social media videos, videos ads, and so on. The metrics are to give you a fair idea of why we should discuss something as essential as this, or add it to our content strategy.
Content is king and if you hack the right way to market it, long you may reign. Every brand can elevate itself with the help of the right delivery of content. Video marketing is one of the most interactive ways of branding. From Vine to Tiktok, and now Reels – all the platforms making it big offer interactions through video formats. 2021 has been instrumental in lending the world the taste of virality. Videos have been doing well because they are hyper-personalized and give you the real picture – a slice of life.
Let us look at the top ten marketing trends that you need to know in 2021
- Live Streaming: Talking about hyper-personalized content, live streaming tops the list. Live streaming is as good as meeting people in person and pitching your product to them. It is real-time and extremely engaging.
Live Streams are more engaging than other long-form video content. Viewers are known to spend up to 8.1 times longer with live streaming video than a video-on-demand. Live videos also give you a fair idea of what your audiences think about the product and help you answer their questions. Live streaming has also become a $70.5 billion industry through platforms like Twitch.
- LinkedIn Business Video Content: LinkedIn has become a hub of professional interactions for students, job seekers, recruiters and C-level executives. Content has always been something that is favored by the algorithm of Linkedin. Earlier this year, posting pictures in picture carousel format became really interactive. This helped content creators understand that audiences will engage more as we move forward.
Videos are highly interactive and engaging on LinkedIn. This is because the audiences appreciate business advice and they appreciate it, even more, when it is coming from a credible source. It also helps in increased traffic and higher scope of discoverability, hence helping you create a strong network.
- Interactive 360-degree video technology: 360-degree videos help you get the bigger picture and offer you an immersive experience. A number of institutions started using 360-degree videos as a medium to give potential students the experience of a university tour post-pandemic. The experience of visiting a university comes home to the students and might help them make a decision.
- Shoppable Videos: A shoppable video preserves the essence of visiting a store or a website. A shoppable video is chiefly a video embedded with links that enable the viewers to purchase the product without having to leave the video. Such videos are meant to drive high conversions and are extremely captivating.
Some platforms for shoppable videos are LiveScale, HapYak, Buywith, Spin and so on. These platforms help the brands create shoppable videos and track the performance with regard to consumer behaviour.
- Spark Ads: TikTok, as a platform, might be notorious for its privacy issues, but the application has one of the most intriguing interfaces ever. It is an extremely empowering app with respect to the brands and creators that use it. Recently, TikTok launched Spark Ads so that businesses can share organic content that resonates with their brand.
‘Spark Ads’ was created holistically from a marketing perspective – the unique traffic of the parties involved can be shared through this feature of collaboration. Creating unique organic content is a lot of money for any brand; however, through this feature, they are getting user-generated, organic content and scope to strengthen their brand image.
Lower costs, better scope of discoverability, higher traffic, more engagement – everything Spark Ads brings to the table looks like good business to me.
- Playable Ads: Another one of TikTok’s buzz-worthy features, playable ads are interactive videos showcasing a preview of an application before downloading it. It is available in Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Indonesia.
These ads are meant to insist users to interact with the ads on a full-screen experience and then, the users can interact by tapping or swiping – as asked in the video. These ads generate high levels of engagement than other platforms and optimize the cost per result.
- Transcriptions and Captions: This is a brand new world where the sky is the limit. When the cinema can be global, why would you limit your content to only a certain market? In order to have an enormous outreach, you can transcribe your videos and add audio descriptions in a number of languages. This not only helps to attract more traffic but also helps people with disabilities to discover your content. Netflix has been adding audio descriptions and subtitles in a few alternate languages, and it works really well for their diverse sets of audiences.
- Vlogging: Vlogging is such a personalized form of content delivery that it is liked by almost everyone. Vlogging is essentially a documentation of a person’s life activities in a video format. A number of vloggers are seen doing sponsored videos where they show their audiences how they use a certain brand’s product.
Now such content is highly liked by the audiences because it is such a genuine and personal way of showing the use of the product. This can either be a highly relatable way to use the product or an alternative to what people already know. Either way, it sets to add more value to what the market already knew about the product.
- Analytics: Analytics and metrics are an important part of marketing – especially to reevaluate your current strategies. Heatmaps are used to give information on how the audience has interacted with your content. A number of websites use heatmaps to understand which areas have the highest amount of customer attention. For media formats like video, heatmaps provide a color-coded representation of the summary of interactions of the audiences.
Wistia Heatmaps are a good platform to get some contextual information on the engagement of audiences. Ideally, most videos show the subject on the right-hand side of the frame as it is believed to be the more important side of the frame. Heatmaps do the same thing -only the information is factually more significant.
Videos are an expensive affair as a lot of time, money, and labour go into making it the closest version of perfect. Therefore, it is important that we ensure that the performance of the videos is being tracked and analysed at regular intervals.
Additionally, tracking audience demographics, engagement/conversion rates, insights on engagements, return on investments, and call-to-action usage can be a great way to monitor the growth through video content. This helps in understanding what works with the audiences and thereby taking corrective action.
- Storyboards: Storyboards represent a series of frames of animated content that is meant to convey a message or tell a story. The basic structure for a storyboard video consists of an opener, a problem statement, a solution, and a call to action, in that order. These are helpful in providing guidance or protection to people, and explain the various features of the product.
Dropbox’s introductory video in 2009, Salesforce demo video, and Facebook’s Tip Marketing series are some of the most viewed and appreciated storyboard videos. Storyboards are extremely popular for explainer videos. They can really help convey the story of a video as there are endless possibilities and lower expenses to be incurred.
Conclusion
These were the top ten video marketing trends that are a force to reckon with this year. As Artificial Intelligence takes over, we will witness that video marketing will be a highly intriguing and advanced format of content delivery as well as marketing. All these trends are not new, they have been around for some time now; however, their usage has started to create an enormous impact in the recent past – which is why it is important that we try to incorporate them in our marketing strategy for 2021.
There are so many different platforms and you might wonder where to start or which is the platform to invest the most into. The platform for marketing your business should be the one where your consumers are. When marketing to C-level executives, we go for LinkedIn but when we are seeking engagement through influencer marketing, Instagram is our place.
There are many types of marketing tips and tricks that you can try once your audience starts to resonate with you. This will only happen when your videos do what they are meant to – tell a story. It doesn’t matter whose story it is as long as it aligns with your brand and your customers want to listen to it.
Hope this article helped you out.
Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, ChatBot & Blockchain savvy, designer, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz Technologies. His 8+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and ChatBot.
