Content Marketing

Video as the Foundation of your Marketing Strategy

Maarten Verwaest
February 26, 2020

A third of the time people spend online is dedicated to watching videos, which is why it’s no surprise that 93% of marketers use online video as part of their marketing efforts.

So, whether you’re new to the world of (video) marketing or you just want reassurance that you’re doing the right thing; here are five good reasons why video should be part of your marketing strategy.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and video is vital in helping your website rank higher on Google. Let’s face it, we all want our site to make it to the first search engine results page (SERP), so finding ways to improve your website’s SEO is key to making it to the top.

How does video help your SEO efforts? First and foremost, youtube is the second most used search engine besides Google search, and it can recognise thousands of image elements within a video and is capable of cataloguing relevant keywords within a video, which could give you an SEO advantage. Secondly, high-quality, engaging video will also help drive traffic to your website. Site traffic as just one of the many elements used by search engines to determine where you rank, thus video indirectly amplifies your SEO.

💡 Pro tip: to optimise SEO on Youtube, use subtitles. Provided they are added in an external format (SRT, VTT) and not burned-in, these subtitles will send Google information to judge the keyword relevance of your content. More on subtitle file formats on our knowledge base.

Social Media as an Amplifier

There’s been an explosion of growth in video on social media in recent years. Views of branded video content have increased 99% on YouTube and 258% on Facebook between 2016 and 2017. On Twitter, a video Tweet is 6x more likely to be retweeted than a photo Tweet. If you haven’t taken a closer look at the power of social media and video together, you’re in for a surprise. The numbers are big. Really big.

Facebook has the largest audience of any social network, with more than 2.07 billion monthly active users. That’s more than one-third of the world’s population, and a whole lot of those people are watching video. Around 100 million hours of video are watched every day on Facebook. Like YouTube, Facebook has a massive and diverse audience, which makes it harder to characterise than the emoji-filled landscape of SnapChat.

Clearly, there are a lot of businesses that don’t fit into the viral Facebook mould, and yet still score major successes. Of the 79 percent of marketers who have published video content on Facebook, 85 percent say it has been a success.

Credibility

Building trust between your brand and it’s audience is vital to driving sales and revenue, and trust-building is an objective of its own. Video content helps you to build trust in different ways. One way of doing this is to use video to showcase your team’s expertise and personalities in a professional way. After all, people buy from people.

Video showcases your product or service to potential customers, so it’s extremely important that it reflects the quality of your brand, product or service. A poor quality video could do more harm than good, so working with a good video production team is important to ensure your video is high-quality and sends the right message to your target audience.

Increase Attention Span

The truth is, we are genetically programmed to quickly respond to the combination of images, sounds, and motion. About 90% of the information that our minds pick up is graphic and it has been shown that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

Infographic depicting marketing tools and highlighting the importance of video as part of the marketing strategy
The human brain is wired to process visual information faster

The result is that videos allow us to explain complex ideas simply, to any number of people anywhere in the world. For example, using an explainer video you can address your customer’s key pain points and tell them how your product or service can help them resolve their issue. An interesting video has the power to be in your customer’s shoes and help them feel identified with the characters and situations onscreen. This accounts for high engagement rates as well.

Maximise your Reach

Using video, you can more easily reach out on a global scale. The key is to localise video using subtitles or closed captions, and to translate those subtitles into as many target languages as appropriate.

Maximise reach using Localised Video

Creating and translating subtitles is an automated process. For example, Limecraft subtitling services automatically transcribe audio into timed text in over 100 languages, use the result to create subtitles, and use machine translation to subsequently translate those subtitles.

More info and free trial: https://www.limecraft.com/workflows/automated-subtitling/