Digital marketing company Regalix released its 2014 Video Marketing and Advertising: Trends and Tactics Report, which had some surprising finds. The survey found that 83% marketers prioritized creating brand awareness and 77% thought triggering customer engagement more important than other goals.
In less than a decade, video marketing has become one of the most essential online marketing tactics. Online analytics experts comScore Inc. released a report in December that reported more online videos were watched last year than ever before. The report showed that 188.2 million American watched 52.4 billion online content videos in December, while the number of video ad views came to a total of 35.2 billion–a huge leap from the 11 billion that were watched in the December of 2012.
The meteoric rise of video marketing isn’t slowing down, either. A whopping 60% of marketers are using video production as part of their email marketing campaigns. What’s more, network equipment manufacturer Cisco forecasts that video traffic will reach 69% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2017, up from 57% in 2012. To put that statistic in perspective, Cisco says it’d take a person 5 million years to watch that amount of video.
Keeping in mind Regalix’s findings that marketers prioritize brand awareness and customer engagement as their video marketing goals, it’s easy to see why Dove’s three-minute Real Beauty Sketches film was the stand-out winner of 2013’s race to create the most viral piece of video marketing. The Guardian reports that this was found by Visible Measures, a “company that tracks the online performance of branded videos and collects metrics on how audiences engage with them and share them with others.”
With this findings in mind, is it possible to extrapolate what secret formula it takes for a video marketing campaign to go viral?
Social media director at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising London James Whatley, who helped create Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches, says that there’s really no easy answer. “You may as well read an instruction manual on how to win the lottery,” he says. “Yes, you might pick up a few tips, but any major success will be purely accidental.”
While there may be no obvious success formula, it’s obvious that in order to increase brand awareness and trigger user engagement, the video content has to be well crafted. According to video marketing resource ReelSEO, there are some simple things a marketer can do to make high quality video. The video should be simple, hook the viewer, address the audience, compel the viewer, and have a clear call to action amongst other things.
While these studies and reports provide no definitive answers about video marketing’s success, they do make one thing clear: that it’s outrageously successful. Keeping that in mind, it’s possible to see the bigger picture more clearly–that to make a campaign successful, it’s got to include video content.
