Mobile Marketing and Digital Marketing using social media are on an ever-increasing rise. This has revolutionized the marketing environment, making it imperative for SMBs (Small and Midsize Businesses) to jump into this lucrative potential of digitalization, especially video marketing.
Video is not just limited to entertainment; it has become a major source for businesses to advertise and market their brands, products, and services. This is expected to expand going forward, with marketers estimating that in 2019, approximately $ 7.77 billion was spent on virtual video advertising.
Video advertising spending has almost doubled in the past four years to $14.38 billion, with mobile-based marketing growing by an average of 65% each year. The trend is not only limited to smartphones or laptops but even applies to tablets, desktops, etc., which witness the growth of video ads on average 11.5 percent every year. This growth is spreading to advertisers of all sizes.
The Local Search Association (LSA) released a white paper titled “Online Video’s Next Frontier – Local”, which shows that SMBs have doubled the use of digital marketing through videos in just one year.
Last year, only 7% of local SMBs with an annual marketing budget of less than $10,000 used videos, but this year 12% used videos, an increase of 71%. Of the SMBs with marketing budgets over $ 10,000, 37% used videos this year, up by 131% from last year.
The Effectiveness of Video Marketing
The reason why so many businesses and enterprises are moving to video marketing is because it is smooth, popular, more accessible, more relatable, and of course, much more effective than any other source of advertising or marketing.
Images are popular and have a lot of value too, but video marketing surpasses them multifold and maintains its grip in the SMB world of advertising.
Forrester reveals that a minute of video is equivalent to 1.8 million words in a written message.
Consumers remember videos, even though the message is packed with a lot of information. According to the Online Publishers Association, 80% of users remember seeing video ads in the past month, and 46% of them either searched for more information or visited the advertiser’s website after.
Similar numbers can be found in the LSA white paper. The LSA surveyed 2,000 consumers and found that 44% of shoppers watched online videos while searching for local products and services. 53% percent of viewers contacted the company after watching the video, 51% visited the company’s website, and 33% visited the store. 71% of viewers made the final purchase.
These performance figures explain the high satisfaction of small businesses with online video. Furthermore, the LSA white paper reports that 70% of local businesses are happy with the way video marketing is helping them enhance their ROI, suggesting that this is a thriving area where businesses can enter and improve their customer reputation.
Barriers to Video Marketing
There are still some barriers to video marketing. According to the LSA white paper, 47% of participants said that video marketing can be expensive and that lack of budget was a barrier, and 45% said they lacked the in-house skill to create viable content.
However, technology makes videos easier to access, and there are ways to simplify video production to overcome these obstacles.
The technology needed to film, edit, and deliver online videos has dramatically reduced the price of online video production. You don’t need a six-digit budget to create a compelling video. All you need is the expertise of a professional agency or to install relevant software, using which you can make fantastic business videos and spread the word about your brand and business.
Here are some ways local businesses can keep video production simple and affordable:
- Animations are very popular and can be kept simple
- Photo montages create a motionless flow, and parallax effects create motion from still images.
- Keep the video short. According to a study released earlier this year by Microsoft, the human attention span is shorter than that of goldfish, which is 8 seconds.
- Cut out the script. The video itself provides so much visual communication that you may not need a script.
- Include your videos in other bundled services such as websites, social media marketing, landing pages, and extended lists to keep costs down.
6 Tips for Boosting Your SEO Efforts Using Video Marketing
Even the best videos are useless if viewers can’t find them. Here are some tips for creating and optimizing videos using excellent video maker software to improve your SEO rankings.
1. Leverage video integration
The presence of the video itself influences the content and enhances the quality of your reach, which is one of the most important SEO ranking factors.
Videos help notify search engines that a page or website contains rich media related to a search query as part of the website’s media mix.
Search engines are expected to continue to increase the ranking factor to include videos as consumers demand videos in their search results. Therefore, having videos on your site will increase your page rankings.
To minimize your efforts creating a video it is highly recommended to use the best video maker tool. These tools ensure you produce pro level video content with ease with their user friendly interface and great features.
2. Use video transcripts
Include a transcript of the audio part of the video to improve the discoverability of your video and further amplify its importance in the search engine result pages.
3. Create keyword-enriched content
Similar to labeling images and graphics, using keywords provides search engines with more information to identify videos related to search queries.
Include the keywords used for text SEO in the fields (title, filename, description, tags) for describing your video to clarify the relevance of your video to search engines.
4. Optimize the video site map
The information on the video site map may overlap with some of the keywords used to identify the video, but this is a separate process.
Video sitemaps are an extension of the overall sitemap for web properties. Customizable metadata includes playtime, ratings, views, age suitability, whether videos can be embedded, and other useful information.
5. Backlink your Videos
Shares and links to YouTube videos do not count as links to your site, but creating your own official YouTube channel and adding your website to your channel profile can hugely enhance your SEO reach.
Also, please include links in the video description.
6. Optimize your video for loading time
Google takes page performance into account in its algorithms. Page load time affects the user experience and impacts SEO.
In addition, users are looking away from slow websites. According to Radware, 57% of mobile users abandon a website after waiting no longer than 3 seconds.
Conclusion
Video marketing is growing at a fast pace and is becoming more accessible and popular, making it a thriving marketing strategy.
Moreover, this strategy is cost-effective and brings more marketing power in terms of conversions and customer reach while effectively boosting your site’s SEO rankings.
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